[2019] Winds Of Magic Community Blogpost

Hello Vermintide Community

Wanted to broadcast a few of the many things going on inside the studio, in the lead up to the release of the Winds of Magic!

There have been many passionate discussions about what people love, hate, and why they play Vermintide. There have also been many questions sent our way and so we wanted to take some time to address as much as we could. Thank you again to those who took the time to send us your thoughts in whatever forum you found most suitable, it has been great to read through and discuss back here at the office. To that end, we also wanted to take some time to try and address the feedback, and provide some insight into what we are thinking and shed some light into what we have been working on these past few months.

We were able to push out a few iterations of the Winds of Magic during this extended Beta period. We wanted to run this beta early enough to make adjustments to the game, not push out a beta as a marketing beat on the road to a release, unable to change much of anything or be too afraid to test new ideas or make big changes. We put this one far enough ahead of release to be able to see what people feel about the content we’ve created, and have time to make changes based on the data and all of your feedback.

We are looking for ways to keep this game feeling fresh, fun and give you more of what you love as well as new ways to experience the game. Part of what we wanted to see was players playing new characters and/or loadouts in ways they haven’t before. We wanted you to experiment and play around with what you bring into a level. We did see this happening, which is great, what is not so great is some players felt we did it in a way that went against what they love about playing the game. In the first Beta we were heavy-handed with a few things (stagger and dodge - we are looking at you) by running this in a beta we were able to tweak this a few times. Beta 2 seems to have confirmed that we are on the right track with this, but still have plenty more to do, and we have been working like mad to get this into a good state.

We ran the Beta 2 to make sure everyone could play the latest changes and test the things that didn’t make it into the first beta. We ran the same survey questions for the Beta 2 to help us compare and contrast the survey feedback, to see if what we were able to act on made a big enough difference. Between Beta 1 and Beta 2 we had a little over a week to get enough info and read through enough feedback to get a sense of what we should act on, verify we are seeing it in the data, and then implement a solution… it was a bit of a madhouse here. Originally, we didn’t plan on running a second beta. We added it late to make sure we at least gave our players a chance to experience the things we have been working on. We tried some new ways of working with the community, and we absolutely get that there were things we could have done differently, especially when it comes to communication. This will be something we will be looking to improve going forward. Overall we are happy with what we were able to learn, happy that we were able to use this time to make things better, and involve the community to do so.

We use many different methods to gather feedback. We see the forums as a place for the community to gather and discuss things in a friendly manner. When it comes to how we asses all feedback and then push design changes forward, we don’t serve people based on what they want, we serve people based on what they need. We do not and will not cater to any specific group, we do our best to listen to everyone and take their thoughts into consideration when looking at what the game needs most. We spent a lot of time leading up to this beta period making better views, dashboards and getting the right telemetry to visualize the player experience; visualizing the data to get the clearest picture into how everyone played the game. It has been invaluable in confirming issues, seeing if our designs are working as intended and if our iterations are making a difference in the way that we predicted.

To be more transparent we decided to open up on the design intentions on a few of the bigger additions to the Winds of Magic expansion.

Beastmen

You wanted more enemy variation to face and overcome, we give you these beastie boys, featuring:

• Ungors: small, skirmishing, some with spears, some with bows.
• Gors: big and burly warriors
• Bestigors: charging elites that interrupt and displace the flow of combat.
• Standard bearers: buffing totem placing specials that require you to reposition.
• Minotaur: coming soon.

Designed to be an aggressive, overrunning force the Beastmen feature a couple of new concepts and game mechanics that build on established enemy behaviours. Introduction of aura based buffs through the Beastmen Standard Bearer, in combination with skirmishing Ungors and their archers, provides a challenge where players are asked to push against the tide. Since standards need to be cut down we force player movement and dispersal. Combined with the weight of the Gors and the interrupting charges of the Bestigors we hope to create a gamespace where the team has to work together, some holding the line to allow others to deal with the new threats.

During the beta, one main concern of ours was how we make the standard noticable and understandable. Using quite invasive techniques of catapulting the players around was very successful but a smidge too disruptive. All Beastmen will be tweaked and tuned for the release.

Stagger/Dodge

• When looking at adding greater challenges and new difficulty tiers onto Vermintide 2 the initial question was HOW can we do this in a way that does not simply up spawn rates and HP values of enemies. Damage dealt from enemies are a tricky thing since we quite quickly enter into everything-one-shots-you territory. So we set out to look at timings for player action, reaction and general tuning the leeway we give in order to be successful. We have gone over all enemies in the game and made sure we can vastly decrease the time spent recovering from staggers, blocks and attacks - effectively diminishing the time window we afford for you to react. We then tune this per difficulty and at the Cataclysm level you should have very little space for mistakes. The same goes for dodges where we tuned down the rather generous timing for dodging attacks. The main goal here is to in part remove any gratuitous dodging (i.e. attacks that start to signal after you started to dodge should not automatically fail) and make kiting a bit more challenging (since a dodge would previously stop any enemy forward movement immediately).
• The stagger-damage thing is a simple extension of already existing dynamics within the stagger state. From day one, enemies have had a hit mass reduction and all attacks get a stagger strength bonus against staggered enemies to support team play and bullying. When we testing internally with increased HP on enemies we found that the game becomes too spongy and take too long to kill, thus the idea came: What if we make a thing where if the players are winning an encounter, they win it faster, all while maintaining the challenge presented and remove the ability to one-shot everything while kiting? It also creates a risk-reward challenge of sacrificing control of other enemies to focus on some. There were also other side effects like helping certain underperforming weapon types out and add more value to shouts and knockbacks in general while the basic implementation of everything was already in place.
• So how does stagger work: Any hit will/can cause a stagger. There are different animations, categories, and durations depending on enemy, weapon, and attack but every hit that causes the enemy to abort their actions is a stagger. Pushes are good for staggering, but a dagger to the face will do just fine as well (headshots have an easier time staggering things). So to utilize the stagger bonus, hitting something multiple times is the way to go. Light attacks will give short staggers but are generally fast enough to reap the benefits, so combos become more valuable. Push-staggers are solid but costs stamina and otherwise teamwork with close positioning is solid.
• During the Beta, a lot of changes were included and tested. From a gameplay and balance point of view, the meta was forcefully changed with quite heavy-handed nerfs to existing meta-builds and playstyle that we know work. We have no intention of removing beloved play styles from the game but rather see if we can expand the ways we can play the game. So the work until release is heavily focused on tuning and tweaking breakpoints and weapons to mesh the new with the old. Single target weapons, specifically low-stagger ones, suffered during the beta and will be brought up to par. Shields thrived during beta and will be tuned along with everything else.
• The end result and learnings from the Beta is what we suspected, there are clear limits to how much we can push enemy HP and resilience without changing the feel of the game. We will adjust accordingly.
• We also added stagger-damage-specific talents. We saw a need to allow for some customization and wanted to provide a choice of either delving deeper into the mechanic or bypass it to some degree while finetuning your playstyle. Hence the options to support either skill-play through headshotting or heavy hitting single target attacks. We are aiming at keeping that talent tier but it’s being tweaked and tuned to make the choices interesting and relevant.

Weaves

• People have been asking for more ways to play the game, we wanted to bring a new game mode to life. We believe that Weaves, with difficulty scaling, a shorter in play time mode will push you to try new weapons, careers and tune your gear differently, and then keep tweaking your kit depending on the weave you are trying to beat.
• Each weave is curated, meaning all elements within them that would normally be random in the base game are no longer. This causes the weave game mode to feel like more of a puzzle the higher difficulty you reach, making you question “what should we do and how should we do it in order to solve this?”.
• Weaves are unlocked sequentially, completing a weave unlocks the tier above it. The intention then is to make each Weave progressively more difficult to a point where even our most stalwart players can not complete them. The endless challenge provided by the weaves comes from this scaling difficulty. Towards the top end of the leaderboard we fully expect players to be learning every detail of a weave to be able to complete it, and in doing so move onto the next challenge presented to them.
• The decision to make weaves as handcrafted challenges opposed to making them randomized, like Diablo 3 rifts, for example, is very deliberate. While the truly randomized Weaves would work up to a point, there are a few reasons we decided to go down a different path. The combinations are limited, and if you play long enough you start identifying good and bad Weaves when you step foot in them. This leads to so-called “Weave fishing”, where you load into Weave after Weave, ditching any that are less than the perfect randomized value. We wanted to avoid a player experience where you matchmake into a level and everyone leaves or you burn hours rerolling levels until it’s the combination you were hoping for. Which is at best tedious, and at worst is the reason you stop playing for the rest of the season.
• We wanted to move away from this and instead try and see if we could build interesting and challenging handcrafted versions of Weaves which would cater more to the fact that Vermintide 2 is a much more mastery based game. We think you could play Weaves much like you play a From Software game, where you enter blindly into a new challenge, you have no idea what’s coming at you and initially struggling at being able to respond to what the game throws at you. After you fail a couple of times you start identifying critical moments in the Weave; “I will get attacked by berserkers at this point, then a gutter runner will spawn that I have to deal with”, then the mastery aspect kicks in where you learn to deal with these different challenges one at a time until you have a 100% clear rate against this specific scenario.
• Why no random mode outside the leaderboards? It is an interesting idea we have also been talking about, we wanted to start with the static weaves see how that impacted the matchmaking experience at scale and then iterate on that design based on that information.

Leaderboards

• When we added weaves we wanted it to be a more competitive mode, we wanted to give players a ladder to climb on that got more challenging as you go. We felt that the design would feel lacking without a leaderboard, a way to see how far you have come and compare your progress with others, or see how far you have come.
• The Weaves game mode we are adding in the ​Winds of Magic ​expansion​ ​seeks to add another way to challenge yourself in-game; whether it’s competing for the top of the public leaderboard, aspiring to be the best within your group of friends, or simply attempting to beat your personal record. Having a way to see that progress, we felt like adding a leaderboard was a good way to represent this in-game.

Difficulties

• We want Recruit through to Legend to feel basically untouched, keeping the gameplay and choice of challenge that you’ve come to know and love. These difficulties should be supported by the progression, and rewards gained, helping you beat the challenges you will face in higher difficulties.
• With that said, we will be and have been adding new mechanics and changes to the overall gameplay both with the introduction of new enemies/weapons, system changes and tweaks. We hope these are as engaging to play as they have been interesting to build in our effort to keep improving.
• Cataclysm is something we wanted to add for those who like pain, this is not part of the progression and this is not something we think most should play. We had this in Vermintide and we wanted to pull it forward into Vermintide 2. To quote FS-Ratherdone “Cataclysm should be for people to play beyond the progression (as in, progression will help you reach and beat legend, but not Cata). Cata should require a well-functioning team. Cata should not be something you qp into and randomly clear. Cata should be HARD but since our mastery scale is what it is it’ll probably be too easy for the ultimate top tier of players. Cata should be something a freshly progressed and legend competent player sees, tries and dies horribly in, then grinds their skill and mastery of the game until they and clear it and has that Matrix-moment when they wake up and goes “I know kung-fu”. Yes, my analogies are on point! Basically, Cata should not be the most insane challenge ever concocted in the Vermintide experience (modded or not) but a peak challenge that requires you to master the game, co-play, clutching and all”.

Athanor, Essence and Magic Weapon Crafting

• When it comes to progressing through challenges in the weaves we wanted to make a system to match, one that allows you to tinker, and fine-tune your loadout to be better equipped to survive.

Separating Progression

• We are committed to making Vermintide 2 a game that lasts for a long time, and to help us keep it alive we wanted to have a clear entry point for players to jump back in.
• We looked at our options when it came to supporting a seasonal structure for weaves, and part of the seasonal experience is being able to start out fresh together with your friends. We landed on having separate progression between weaves and the adventure mode as we want to change weaves from season to season, respond to how people are playing and push people to try new builds, mix up what and how they play
• It will also allow us to change the balance without making it impossible to beat old records.

New Talents

• We wanted talents to go back to their roots and be in better sync with the fantasy of the career you are playing. Taking a deeper look at what players who choose those careers like to do and how we should lay out the talents to better support that journey.
• We have made a ton of tweaks and changes to talents based on your feedback and data collected during the beta period. Jump in, try it out and let us know what you think!

Seasons

• We wanted to do more consistent and measured larger updates to the Vermintide 2 experience. We want to be able to set and communicate with everyone what is up and coming, and what you can expect from us. We felt like a switch to a seasonal model made sense for us to plan against and create fun interesting content for. Going forward we are looking to communicate Season start dates earlier and also let you know what content they will contain further ahead of time.
• With each season we aim to drop new content, do bigger balance updates and evolve the game together

A New Level

• Dark Omens is a new level we have added to the adventure mode for this expansion. It is the level that introduces you to the Beastmen and asks you to save the Reikland from devastation. Without spoiling more, we are looking forward to having you jump in and take part in this new part of story content we have handcrafted for you to enjoy.

This is not the end. This is a continuation of our commitment to bringing you more of the content you love and pushing you to try new things and play in new ways. With all this said we would also like to know what information you would like to know more about? We would like to do more of this kind of communication with you going forward. This is a pretty beefy post, we had a lot to cover from this expansion, hopefully we have answered some of your more burning questions.

We look forward to saving the Reikland with you. Now time to get back to work

Sincerely,

Vermintide Team

Yea, is Geneviève Dieudonné coming in the next expansion then?

Thanks for this post, clearing up a lot of things. As for more information,

• Will there be another beta leading up to release?
• If not, what are the chances of getting a balance patch directly after release?

Now, I hear about seasonal weaves, and I’m kinda worried that these are going to pull staff away from the base game to work on them. As someone who is not interested in weaves at all, can you let us know what exactly “new seasons” will entail? Is this just switching up spawns and mutators? Or are we talking about new weave maps and so on? Or are you saying that seasons will bring additional content for the entire game and not just weaves?

Finally, what are the chances of getting the new crafting system for the base game? Is Lhoners cosmetic shop still in the works? Deed rework? Night maps from October event?