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'Twas the night before Vermintide
When all through the town,
Not a creature was stirring…
Wait, was that a Skaven? After that rat!

Heroes!

As 2021 winds down, we—the community team—wanted to take some time to highlight where we’ve been and where we’re going.

WHERE WE’VE BEEN

First off, we wanted to thank you all for the incredible three years, swimming through the current whirlpool of COVID bumps and hiccups. The studio has grown a great deal these past couple of years, and with growth comes some teething pains. We’re still finding our voice and figuring out how best to be the studio we want to be and the studio you wish us to be.

Throughout this year, though, we’ve achieved many great things together, including:

• Introducing a new game mode to bring rouge-lite/like mechanics into Vermintide with the free Chaos Wastes expansion.
• Adding Hedge into the game and letting Kerillian get in touch with the Queen of Athel Loren by releasing her newest career: Sister of the Thorn.
• Creating a new event for October’s Geheimnisnacht and beefing up the Chaos Wastes game mode by adding Grudge Marks.
• Letting Saltzpyre extol the virtues of Sigmar even more with his new career: Warrior Priest of Sigmar on PC and Xbox (with Playstation to come in January!).

WHERE WE’RE GOING

We’ve been rigorously reading your feedback, and while we cannot fully share what is in our content pipeline just quite yet until we get closer to some internal mile markers, we can share some things you can expect from us going forward as a community:

• More communication! The community team has grown in 2021, which gives us more opportunities to communicate with you and listen to your feedback. We’ll be aiming to provide you with honest, clear, and transparent communication within our limitations on our various platforms (Steam Forums/Fatshark Forums/Reddit/Discord). This is a strategy we are still growing into and finding our voice in as a studio and may take some time, but our end goal is to cultivate a relationship with you all that fosters trust, respect, and open feedback.
• Community surveys! We want to make sure you all have ample opportunity to speak to us and reach out to us on concentrated topics directly. So, starting in 2022, you will see surveys on different aspects of the game, content you all want to see, and more. We want to better understand where you all come from, what you expect from us, and how you play; which will help us create a better game for you!
• More streams! Streams on the FatsharkGames Twitch will return fortnightly every other Friday starting January 7, where we will host games with the community, fireside chats, community highlight reels, and more. This will be your place to talk to us in real-time, get to know other community members, kick back, and discuss all things Vermintide!
• The return of the newsletter! If you signed up for our email newsletter, you’ll see those returning in 2022 as well, which will be your digest to community-created content, in-game events, gameplay tips and tricks, lore tidbits, and much more!

THE YEAR AHEAD

We’re looking forward to the exciting things we have in store for you for Vermintide—and hope you are too! So from all of us at the community team, thank you so much for playing our game, sharing your feedback, and continuing to be so passionate and excited about Vermintide! We’re excited to go along our journey in 2022 together with you, and hope you’re just as ready to see what the future holds!

NOW GO OUT THERE AND FIGHT THE PACTSWORN!

Nice to see that Community Surveys are coming back to get a broader image of the community. I suppose they will be linked through the new launcher?

Launcher/Discord most likely; but we’re still exploring where we can get a representative cross-section of our playerbase to get the most accurate data.

Any word on more Community Contests? I have basically worked out the concept behind one and finally decided on sensible categories but so far I haven’t received feedback on that from “someone”.

Contests run by the community you all can do free rein, but contact us if you’d like some promotional support! Whether it be art/lore contests, tourneys, learning events, or similar, we want to help support you! For official ones, I believe we would like to engage with you all more, but are still developing what that looks like + frequency cadence.

Any hint for the “exciting things we have in store for you for Vermintide” in the year ahead?

I can’t say much more than, “it’s cool stuff!”, some of what’s been asked for, and some that will come as really pleasant surprises! That’s all I can reasonably say for now! As mentioned in our message, we’ll have more info once we hit those internal mile markers!

I think there’s some thought in the community that “there will be a Sienna career and then that’s it”. Can we expect more than that, in terms of “hefty” content? And by hefty I mean DLC as we’ve come to know it; map packs or weapons - things of that nature. Not asking for specifics.

As I replied to @Adelion:

While I wish I could say more, we’d like some time to fully find our voice as a studio with our new communication goals before we really ramp up sharing our content pipeline. This may take some time, and maybe a bit later than you all would like us to, but I want to assure you we’re working on strategies to share more with you and that Stuff™ is coming, and hopefully you’ll like it!

Also, this may be something that has already changed, but a lot of times news comes to Reddit before this official forum. Sometimes it doesn’t really get officially posted here at all! Will that change going forward? I imagine the Reddit is bigger and busier, but still . . .

So right now, the forums are less frequented that Reddit/Steam/Discord. Hedge and I try to hit as many platforms as we can within our working hours, but sometimes questions asked elsewhere aren’t asked in other places, so the information shared isn’t always 1:1. Which I get can be improved! This is also something we’ve put on the punch list for our communication plans in 2022; so the information you all need makes it to all our channels. If you have suggestions for this as well, I’m happy to listen!