[2023] Dev Blog: Sienna the Necromancer - Design

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

My name is Joakim and I'm the design director on Warhammer: Vermintide 2. I've been a part of Fatshark even longer than Lohner and for 15 years I've been working mainly with level creation and design in pretty much all of our games. Earlier this spring I took on the role of leading the design vision and direction of Vermintide 2 - like being the resident mission giver.

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Hello darlings,
Now that the long-awaited career for Sienna - the Necromancer - is just around the proverbial Ranaldstrasse corner, I want to look back at the journey leading up to this point and show you some behind the scenes production footage in this dev blog.

But first, if you haven’t read the narrative lore post then go here to get the story.
When the team started exploring what Siennas new career could be, they started with our three general career goals in mind:

• To create a career that was fun and cool, and that had its own gameplay space in the lineup.
  
• To explore something new that helped us innovate a technical aspect.
  
• To delight you with something unexpected yet plausible for the Hero.

The idea of a Necromancer has been kicking around for a long time - it was already in the back of our skulls when starting work on the Grail Knight. The team knew from the onset that we had to explore something that wasn’t a fire wizard simply because it would be challenging to carve out a gameplay role that didn’t cannibalize on her regular careers. From a tech perspective we also dreamt of something akin to a pet class with a summon & control type of gameplay. Together with the End Times storyline a Necromancer ticked all of those boxes.

Creating the Concept We started out creating a concept for the Necromancer. We do similar concepts for all things that we create, highlighting details and material references so that our outsourcing partners have a clear idea of the direction we want.



Looking at the career designs it was clear that the Necromancer would be the most complex class of the bunch, and that it made most sense for it to go out last. That would give us confidence in figuring out good practices for careers in general and it gave us time to plan and lay the groundwork for the technical side of things. Most work was put into the career highlight: the skeleton minions.



Creating Sienna’s Minions We call them minions rather than bots because even though they feel similar they don’t share the same code or design space. Sienna’s skeletons are actually rather like a friendly faction of their own, sharing behavior and movement with Vermintide’s enemies. That meant a lot of work, both from a pure visual and combat behavior perspective but also balancing their presence and relative player positioning so that they didn’t end up being too noisy or obtrusive. It also meant a lot of bug fixing.







So having done the groundwork we now have a bit of tech in place for enemies fighting enemies. We’re pretty excited toying around with that for the future. :)

After a lot of prototyping the skeleton behavior was getting to a good spot, enabling us to focus on presentation and tweaking.

Bringing the Necromancer to (Un)Life Career production started in earnest earlier this year with creating the Necromancer's basic building blocks - her weapons, the character model and the minions. The initial idea was of Sienna using ranged attacks to soften up enemies but having a heavy hitting toolkit to finish them off. In the beginning it might have been a bit too heavy hitting.



This combat style saw several iterations in both functionality and appearance, and the way she played was changed and tweaked over several months - a special shoutout to our alpha testers who provided invaluable feedback and insight on direction.

The team worked hard to ensure we fulfilled what players would expect from a Warhammer Fantasy Necromancer. The career not only had to play well, we also had to make sure she looked the part, and stayed in keeping with the miniatures and Warhammer Fantasy lore. Extra care was put into nailing down how she could summon skeletons, which saw us going back and forth with it being an active or passive ability (and trying out different alternatives for visual presentation).



Of course, having figured out a design doesn’t mean the work ends then and there - it’s all about finding that sweet spot between gameplay balance, performance targets and sheer fun. Some ideas didn’t make it, but the team sure had fun exploring them. :)



We’re super happy to soon release the Necromancer and the recently deceased upon Helmgart and surroundings, and we hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes blog. A big thank you to all our players and our fantastic community. And rest assured, we’ll be back soon enough with more cool things to reveal in the next dev blog showing you what actually made it into the career.

Come along Darlings, let's go save the world.

— Joakim, on behalf of the Vermintide 2 team.