Vermintide 2 will soon let its ragtag group of heroes deck themselves out with cosmetic items without making sacrifices to the petty gods of RNG. Instead of praying their random loot drops will give them what they want, players will be able to hit up a new in-game store, and for the most part they won't have to dip into their wallets. 

Whenever a game adds a store after launch, there's some grumbling in the community. It recently happened with Rocket League, which ditched loot boxes for an item shop and blueprints system, upending the player economy. In Vermintide 2's case, however, the scope of the store is smaller and simpler. Fatshark CEO Martin Wahlund says the goal is to let players get their hands on more cosmetics. 

"From the get-go, we've had a lot of cosmetics in the game, but it's hard to get them," he says. "They're rare and sometimes people haven't been able to target the ones that they want. We thought we should have a system where people can have long-term goals to work towards certain cosmetics for the classes they play or the ones that they like." 

You won't need to juggle lots of different currencies or craft items like you would in Rocket League or Warframe. You just pick the item you want and purchase it with your earnings from quests.

"You earn currencies through daily and weekly quests," Wahlund says. "These quests have been in the game for a while and we're going to add more over time. If you do them, you earn a certain amount of coins and purchase stuff in the store. I can see it going through lots of iterations in the future, but it's very simple."

The three main things you'll be able to grab are hero skins, hats and weapon illusions, but more items could be added in the future. The vast majority of the items will be available effectively for free, costing only in-game currency. You'll just be spending your time, not your cash. Premium items will be available, however, and this is how Fatshark hopes to fund new DLC.

While Vermintide 2 features a few expansions, it's also given maps away for free and allows anyone to play the premium stuff by joining a game with someone who already owns it. Wahlund wants to be able to offer more DLC like that and will be watching how the store performs to see if it's possible. 

"We're patient," Wahlund says. "We're not in a hurry to do anything. We want to make sure people have a good time playing the game for a long time."

The premium items won't require you to purchase bundles of currency, either. One of the most egregious microtransaction tricks is selling bundles in increments that encourage players to buy more than they need. If an axe costs 1,000 Bullshit Bucks, chances are the closest bundle will be 1,100 BBs. In Vermintide, it will be done through Steam using regular currency and you'll be able to purchase the item directly. 

With Chinese publisher Tencent owning 29 percent of the company, the news of the store has made some players question if this was a change inspired by the company rather than Funcom. According to Wahlund, however, plans for the store predate Tencent's purchase of those shares. Originally it was going to launch not long after Tencent arrived on the scene, but Fatshark was worried about the perception among players and thus held off. 

"This is something we wanted to do," he says. "Tencent is very passive. They don't tell us what to do or change business models; it's 100 percent up to us. We're the majority shareholders, so we control the company. They got one board seat out of five, so they don't have the mandate to tell us what to do."

Tencent does have a lot of experience with this kind of business model, however, so the publisher has been able to provide feedback. Wahlund emphasises, however, that it's all Fatshark's creation. 

I wasn't really on-board before, but as someone who is sick of being a victim of RNG, I'm coming around to it, especially with the focus being on letting players buy cosmetics with in-game currency instead of real cash. Fatshark has been running a beta to get player feedback, and the store will be added to the live game later this week.  

If you've always been jealous of people who get to spend their weekends prowling the streets with an axe, chopping up giant evil rats, then I've got some excellent news: Vermintide 2 is free for the weekend on Steam, and like all Steam free weekends, it has a very loose interpretation of the weekend and begins today. 

From later today, interested rat catchers will be able to hack and slash their way throw hordes of rodents and chaos warriors and even some beastmen. While only the base game is free, Vermintide 2 lets players with DLC invite people to play, regardless of whether or not they've also got the DLC. 

That means, if you can find another player to invite you, you'll be able to check out the Winds of Magic, which added the aforementioned beastmen and some new challenges, and take a trip back to Ubersreik and play the first game's remastered maps. 

During the free weekend, Vermintide 2 will also be discounted by 75 percent. You can take it for a spin or grab it on the cheap starting today and ending on November 24. It's been ages since I last cleared out the skaven, but I'm tempted to pop back in myself. 

Facing the grotesque, disturbing world of Apsulov: End of Gods—Tom Senior

I suppose I should move at some point, but the dark basement is full of furry naked men with stag heads. This has put me right off the idea of going around another corner. I’ve found a large backlit fan—every sci-fi corridor has one—and I’m going to bask in its meagre light until the universe ends, or my eyeballs recharge. Whatever comes first. 

Apsulov: End of Gods is a grim time. You wake up on a stone operating table being sliced up by a crab-like machine with a face, gurgling as your character tries to speak through the mess of their own throat. For a second I get a powerful visualisation of what that must feel like, and then realise that on some deep, fundamental level I can’t enjoy horror games the way I used to. 

Once I would admire the grotesque imagery and enjoy the sense of shock—oh wow, that’s so twisted. To nick a phrase Phil might use, I’d love a game, film, or book that truly freaked my bean. But wandering around Apsulov’s nightmare makes me realise that the way I empathise with imagery has changed somehow, without me even realising. I have gained an unsuppressable empathy for depictions of bodies and people. When a naked stag dude runs up and throttles me while screaming in torment, his fear and the vivid choking experience crowds my brain. And now I’m stuck in this corridor. 

This is quite irritating, but probably how horror games are actually supposed to be experienced. Once my eyeballs have powered up again I activate The Sight, which scans the darkness and outlines objects and enemies in a glittering sheen. There are a few stag guys, but they are busy clutching their heads and moaning. Nobody is having fun in this world, but I press on, because I’m curious to see how Apsulov interprets Norse canon with a twist. 

Thanks to an audio diary I learn that the facility is being invaded by mysterious roots. The gods are responsible, it seems. The bad machine I met at the start of the game continues to talk to me through statues, and I wonder if one of the gods is tormenting me. I’m used to seeing Norse mythology in Scandinavian oral traditions and, more recently, Marvel superhero films. This is different, and I like the idea that Thor may be a terrifying unknowable entity rather than a jolly Australian muscle man.

But in the end it’s the monotony that gets me. Dark corridors give way to winding vents, and then more corridors. The idea that the game might be about cyber-Ragnarok in the far future is almost enough to keep my interest, but in the end it’s too unpleasant and my eyeballs keep running out of batteries. I feel as though I need a palette cleanser. I Alt-F4 out and check PCGamer.com. What’s this—Fight Crab, out now? I may have soured on the horror genre, but I know I’ll still find crustacean- on-crustacean violence hilarious.

Becoming a monster in My Lovely Daughter—Robin Valentine

If there’s one thing almost all videogames are good at, it’s making you think like a sociopath. Whether you’re giggling as you mow down guards by the hundreds, callously calling entire nations into all-out war, or making someone love you by working out exactly the correct things to say to maximise your romance, your morality almost always takes second place to objectives, rewards, and progression systems. 

I’m not sure any game, though, has turned me into quite as much of a creep as My Lovely Daughter. Cast as an amnesiac alchemist desperate to raise his daughter from the dead, I’m charged with creating life-like simulacrums of her, raising them to maturity, and then murdering them for resources and their ‘soul essence’. 

It’s embarrassing how quickly I find myself shrugging off this grotesque premise and settling into an easy rhythm of exploitation. My daughters perform hard labour at the nearest village to earn me cash. Once they’re dead, I sell their parts for a final windfall and invest their humanity into my ‘real’ daughter’s soul, before crafting a new homunculus to take their place.

As I refine the process and gain upgrades, the cycle speeds up. Soon, each daughter is lucky to survive more than a week before being... processed. I stop remembering their names, then I stop spending time with them, then I stop reading their pleading letters. As my operation reaches peak efficiency, their well-being becomes nearly irrelevant to the equation. 

The realisation that an indie I picked up on a whim in a Steam sale has trained me to battery farm children is not an especially pleasant one. After a lifetime of gaming all I see are the numbers, and apparently developers thus have the power to make me, in the virtual world at least, do almost anything. 

“This game is intended to make people sad and uneasy but there is a deeper meaning behind the horror,” reads a warning message whenever I start the game. Mission accomplished, I suppose, though I’m not sure I’ve really gained any insight into “child labour, abusive parenting, and ignorant societies”, the themes the game purports to explore. I already knew those things were bad, I just didn’t know I was willing to partake in them in order to level up.

The joy of colonising planets in Endless Space 2—Andy Kelly

Half the appeal of Amplitude strategy games for me is how they feel. They really are astonishingly pretty, and nowhere is this more evident than in the process of colonising a planet in Endless Space 2. But it’s more than just aesthetics, it’s everything from the music and sound effects to the UI animation and typefaces. 

When you discover a fresh, uninhabited system the camera sweeps down into it, over each world, and it’s wonderfully cinematic. In one system I find a giant volcanic planet, an arid desert world, and a tiny jungle planet battered by storms. 

If you have the proper technology to colonise a planet, and a colonisation ship, you can establish the first outpost. Start the procedure and you’ll see a probe fly out of your ship and slam into the planet. 

At first your empire will be like a sci-fi Wild West, with small, disconnected, and isolated communities scattered around your corner of the galaxy. But as each colony grows and you develop tech such as interplanetary transport, there’s a palpable feeling of your humble society developing into a massive, sprawling galactic superpower. It’s supremely satisfying watching your empire grow. 

What kind of planets you’ll find in a system is completely random. The more dangerous and inhospitable a planet is, the more difficult it will be to colonise. So if you find a lush, verdant planet you can easily found an outpost, but if it’s a raging, ash-covered volcano world you’ll need to research advanced technology to battle the elements. 

Sometimes you’ll find anomalies on planets, each of which have their own interesting flavour text and evocative artwork. On one rainy world I find the Fallen Gardens, a “space graveyard for vast structures of unknown provenance”, the ruins of some technologically advanced, but now long dead, civilisation. As a sci-fi fan I absolutely love this stuff and it gives the game so much colour and personality.

Of course, a colony doesn’t have to be permanent. If, for whatever reason, a planet isn’t working out, you can evacuate the colonists. Or, if you prefer, you can migrate them to another planet. Endless Space 2 is simpler and more streamlined than a lot of 4X games, but there’s still an enormous amount of depth to discover, and the colonisation system is just one part of a complex, but incredibly enjoyable, whole. 

I’m a casual strategy player, even finding games such as Civilization and Amplitude’s own Endless Legend too much for my brain to take sometimes. But there’s something about Endless Space 2 that just clicks for me. The sci-fi setting is a big part of it, but it’s also how it captures the excitement of exploring a strange, fantastic galaxy, uncovering its secrets, and making your own mark on its many glittering worlds.

Accepting mediocrity in Vermintide 2: Winds of Magic—Phil Savage

I always knew I wasn’t a good Vermintide 2 player, but the Winds of Magic expansion has now given me the hard data to prove my mediocrity. The expansion introduces the concept of Weaves—short levels with modifiers that get increasingly difficult the more you complete. According to the new leaderboards, the top team as of writing has completed 124 Weaves. My team of ragtag misfits have finished one. 

Sure, we could get good. We could put in the hours to get better, to overcome the challenges and earn the best rewards. My counterargument is this: we don’t really want to. 

For us, Vermintide 2 has never really been about the friction of failure. We’re just not interested in walking the tightrope between success and death. We’re not here to make things harder for ourselves. 

We’re here to kick back. We’re here to chat. And we’re here to punch rats. Punching rats is its own reward. Before the expansion we had at least moved up from recruit to veteran difficulty—simply because we’d finally finished all of the levels at the easiest difficulty and were looking for reasons to play some more. We’d gathered enough good weapons from the Commendation Chests the game is constantly awarding that it didn’t even feel like a major increase in difficulty. 

Hence why it was such a shock when we attempted the Weaves. Winds of Magic uses a separate progression system based around gathering Essence, which you put in a glowing purple cauldron for... Warhammer reasons. Within minutes we’d redubbed it ‘rat juice’. 

You use the rat juice to change and upgrade your weapons. A consequence of this is that, however good your weapons are in the main campaign, you start Winds of Magic from the beginning of the progression curve. Suddenly our decent arsenal was replaced with mostly basic gear.

It was rough. We struggled, we failed, we persisted. Our mantra of ‘kill rats, get juice’ pulled us through. We needed the juice to swap to better weapons. We’d only get the juice if we could complete a Weave. We fought through the opening gauntlet and eventually made our way to a portal that transported us to the Weave’s final boss arena. It was scrappy but, by tactically holding the boss’s attention, we were able to revive each downed player efficiently enough to keep us all in the fight. Finally, we chewed through the boss’s health bar. The juice was ours. 

In most stories this rousing moment of triumph would be the moment our ragtag group endeavoured to improve our game. But it won’t. We’ll keep playing, but at our own pace, with our own objectives—having fun, killing rats and getting juice. Mastery has its place, but not here. Not for us.

It all started—as tales of woe so often do—with a Hookrat. We were at the very end of a particularly arduous run through Engines of War, which to my mind is the toughest single mission in Vermintide 2. With the Bridge of Shadows practically within sight, one of those bone-clattering bastards dragged me off into some dank corner of the map where I expired. Fully expecting a res from one of my team-mates, I sat and watched in astonishment and then white-hot anger as they all ran for the bridge like Charlie with his golden ticket.

Except they didn't make it. They were overrun by Stormvermin and, in quick succession, downed.

As they bled out and the screen faded to deepest failure-black, I typed a passive aggressive barb into team chat: 

"Could have done with an extra person in that last few yards, eh?"

To which the reply came:

"Not if that person was you."

If we're being real, that stung. Because I knew they were right. I wouldn't have saved the day if I'd been alive and upright when they were downed. I'd have run right in, been hit by some unseen rodent force majeure, and lolloped down on top of one of them for the long goodnight. I'd been playing Vermintide for months. I'd nearly maxed my Witch Hunter build. Why was I still so bloody useless at this stupid game about punching bloody rats?

The next match, in a bit of a sulk, I decided on a personal and private objective: I’d go through the whole level without killing an enemy. I'd ride the other players' coat-tails to victory, and XP bounty. That'd show them. Somehow? 

And when I did, I realised why I'd been so ineffective at Vermintide 2: prior to this pouty match, killing enemies was all I did. 

Blocking and parrying was something other people did while I cleaved away at walls of fantasy mammalian flesh. Character abilities were just a showy distraction from the real task at hand: The wall. The flesh. I'd pop a health potion after an appropriate number of easily avoidable hits shrank my bar right down into the danger zone, but that was as tactical as it got. In short: you did not want me on your team.

But now in this admittedly petulant non-violent mode, it was like I'd taken the red pill. Time seemed to slow down, and as I pranced about in block stance when the hordes descended I could see things I'd never noticed before. Things like the way a good Kerillian times their arrows for maximum crowd control efficiency rather than spraying them off on stragglers in the distance. Or the frenzied movement patterns of expert Bardin players, always at the coal face of the slaughter, but timing their blocks and parries masterfully to stay intact in the danger zone. 

I had no other way of repelling enemies, so I started blocking. Finally, I learned to watch my stamina points each time I absorbed a blow and gradually adjusted to a cadence of ducking in and out of enemies' line of fire to give myself that crucial breather and let the stamina shields replenish. 

And because I had literally nothing else to do, I became super attuned to the needs of my team-mates. As a Victor Saltzpyre main I could stagger enemies and give my buddies a 25% critical hit chance boost using my career skill without crossing that sacred threshold and actively taking a life. Better still, I could tag enemies and ensure they took an additional 20% damage. When you're not using any brainpower to kill things, you can become prodigiously good at tagging the right enemies at the right time, and rolling out that Animosity skill when the most opportune moment presents itself. 

So when the first game that I played in this manner ended—with victory—and I left a sheepish comment like "Doing a vegan playthrough, thanks all" to prepare my comrades for the astounding 0 in my kills column, nobody minded. Quite the contrary. I'd just played what was probably my most effective, co-operative Vermintide 2 match to date. And everyone else padded their kill stats in the process. With their egos stroked, their enemies tagged, and their health dutifully topped up by a benevolent Bounty Hunter every few battles, they had little to complain about. 

I have started killing those accursed rats again since then, but I didn't go right back to it. I spent quite a while on that pacifism streak, noseying on the subtleties of other players' approaches in lieu of slashing off tails. And when I finally did let myself back into the action, I was a completely different player. If you've hit the wall with Vermintide 2, or hand on heart never took the time to study its hidden subtleties, I couldn't recommend a 0 kills run more highly.

Vermintide 2's first expansion, Winds of Magic, is set to unleash the stampeding beastmen into Fatshark's first-person mix of magic and melee. It's becoming a veritable menagerie. It's due out this month, so take a look at the first gameplay trailer above. 

Expect gors, ungors and, of course, minotaurs. The battlefield is going to smell atrocious. I didn't notice any in the trailer, but given the title of the DLC, I'd be surprised if we didn't have to fight any of the nasty beastmen shamans, too.

Winds of Magic doesn't just introduce this hirsute new set of enemies—the main course is really the new mode. Vermintide's levels have been transformed by the titular Winds, which also add a mutator, like regenerating health that also causes players to lose health when they hit an enemy. These level remixes will also feature different objectives, from simply killing loads of enemies to capturing objectives. 

You'll need to progress through a never-ending series of stages with your adventurer pals, with the difficulty increasing as you go. The difficulty will apparently keep scaling and goes beyond the highest difficulty in the game. Fatshark doesn't want players to ever reach a hard cap, instead it will just become too hard for them to finish. 

It's a shame the maps themselves aren't new, but remixes, mutators and beastmen will hopefully have almost the same impact. Winds of Magic doesn't have a specific release date yet, but it's due out this month. 

With so many cruel tricks up their sleeve, Vermintide 2's Skaven and Rotblood enemies are easy to hate. But now you don't have to just hate them, you can play as them. During the PC Gaming Show, developer Fatshark revealed Vermintide 2's new Versus mode that pits two teams of four against each other: One team plays as the Ubersreik 5 heroes from the main game while the other takes up arms as the specialist Skaven and Chaos enemies and even their ultra-powerful bosses. "Each game includes one round playing as the enemies, and one playing as the heroes. In the end the winner is the hero team that progressed the furthest through the mission," Fatshark CEO Martin Wahlund told me.

The trailer, which you can watch above, hints at a few of the Skaven and Rotblood specialist enemies you can control. Wahlund told me that Versus is still early in development and the team is still figuring out which specialists will be available and how they'll balance the mode so that you and your three friends don't, say, all play as Lifeleeches and don't immediately win by ambushing the other team and sucking their souls out of their bodies. It's also unclear whether you can take up arms as the Skaven or Chaos frontline soldiers (but that's probably not the case considering how weak and disposable they are).

The Ratling Gunner, Poison Wind Globadier, Packmaster and Gutter Runner are all shown from a player's perspective in the trailer. But rest assured the Chaos Rotblood special units will also be available too.

How this will factor into Vermintide 2's RPG progression system is also in the works, says Wahlund. Fortunately, you probably won't have to wait too long to find out. You can sign up for Vermintide 2's Versus mode beta today and soon experience the pleasure of ruining someone else's day as these dastardly enemies.

Versus isn't the only thing Vermintide 2 fans can look forward too, either. The Winds of Magic, Vermintide 2's first expansion pack, is out in August. It adds a whole new race, the Beastmen, as well as a new level cap, more weapons, and a lot more.

You can sign up for Vermintide 2's Versus mode here.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 will be adding its endgame DLC, Winds of Magic, this August. The expansion adds new enemies and challenges, and it will become available after an open beta, which you can sign up for now.

Winds of Magic stars the brutal Beastmen, who appear in the Reikland seeking to secure a meteor and claim it as a Herdstone, which the Beastmen in Warhammer use in order to make themselves even angrier and fightier. That would be bad news, and so our heroes have to reach the meteor first and prevent it from falling into enemies hands… er, hooves.

Winds of Magic will raise Vermintide 2’s current level cap, and each hero will get a brand-new weapon: Sienna is getting a flaming flail, for example, while Kruber will be able to wield a heavy spear.

The new mode, Winds of Magic, is a series of challenges that increase in difficulty as time goes on, set in the “weaves” of the Winds of Magic.

You can sign up for the beta over on the official site.

Thanks, VG 24/7.

This feature was originally published in PC Gamer UK 329 back in early March, so you'll find a couple of forward-looking references to past events in this piece. Subscribe here to get our magazine sent to your door or digital device every month. 

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 was so successful that it took its small Swedish developer by surprise. After the strong sales and critical acclaim came bug reports and complaints, missteps and demands. Its community is hungry for more, and—after a year of making adjustments and laying infrastructure—Fatshark is ready to deliver. With Vermintide 2: Winds of Magic, the endgame has arrived.

"It's easy to get carried away," says CEO Martin Wahlund. "You're proud of the game, you're proud of the reviews, and then suddenly you get scared as well. People are playing it!" After Vermintide 2's release, Wahlund found himself reacting to every bug report and complaint. At one point he messaged the team late at night because of an error report that, upon investigation, was down to the player's own internet connection being down.

Some of the game's early patches didn't receive enough testing, causing them to break other parts of the game. "It's such a bad experience for the player," says Wahlund. "If you're playing, and starting a career and using a certain weapon, and we break that weapon or break that career, it's like we ruined it."

"We had some bad experiences in the beginning where we were a bit too eager and released [an update] a bit too early," says Mårten Stormdal, executive producer of Vermintide 2. "We didn't have time to test properly, and we got some bad publicity for it. It was right, because we didn't do our work properly, but that has made us a bit more cautious."

"More professional," says Wahlund.

Fatshark slowed down and took stock of where they were and where they wanted to go. "We worked on the infrastructure," says Wahlund. "We needed to think about where we want to be in five years, because we want to build a game that people can play for a long time. We needed to do some organisational change internally and figure out how we handle a game that will live for many years."

In all, Vermintide 2's first year has been a learning experience for the studio. And while Fatshark made the internal changes needed to secure the game's long term future, its existing playerbase grew impatient for both new content—just five new levels, across two paid-for DLC packs, were released in the game's first year—and the arrival of systems promised before the game's launch.

Now, though, Fatshark is in a place where it feels ready to cater to that demand. The first stage of this new phase of Vermintide 2's life was the introduction of weekly challenges—added in an update earlier this year. The system is based on the concept of mutators—special rulesets that change the way you play, and sometimes even new versions of existing levels. On March 8, the date of the game's anniversary, players will be treated to a special challenge that sees Vermintide's heroes embark on a tour of nearby inns, looking for ale.

As they drink and have slurred conversations—Kerillian has decided that everyone should call her queen—they gain a buff to their attack. But if they go too long without a swig of ale, they become hungover. Drink too much, and they fall over. It's a fun celebration of everything Vermintide 2 does well: the combat, the banter, and even the lore, with Games Workshop stepping in to name the inns you visit.

Weekly challenges aren't just there to add variety, but also to give players something to work towards. While not available yet, the ultimate aim is for challenges to award a new in-game currency that players can use to buy specific cosmetic items for their characters. "It's something people have been poking us for since launch," says Wahlund.

Both the cosmetic shop and the collectable paintings—also added with the weekly challenge update—are ways for players to work towards a specific goal. But if your ambitions go beyond some fancy hats and nice pictures, Fatshark has a plan for you too. This year's biggest addition will take place this summer, with the release of Vermintide 2's first expansion, Winds of Magic.

The expansion will add a new enemy race, new difficulty and new weapons. At its heart, though, Winds of Magic is designed around one big idea: to give players an endless gauntlet of progressively more difficult challenges. "The basics of the expansion is to provide an endgame," says Wahlund.

Winds of Magic will likely offer an introductory story mission, but new adventure maps aren't the focus. Rather, the main progression path for the expansion is a new mode. "I think the most similar game mode would be the Greater Rifts that Diablo III has," says Wahlund, "where you go in and they scale in difficulty. We're not doing the same thing, though. We're doing it in our own way."

It's magic

Each stage of Winds of Magic's new mode is called a Weave, although that term—as with many things in the expansion, which only recently entered full production—is subject to change. Each Weave will take place on a chunk of an existing level marked by one of the eight Winds—the currents of magical energy that flow across the Warhammer universe.

"The idea behind the Winds is they're going to change the look and overall feel of the level completely," says programmer Tom Batsford. "Each Wind should look very different from each other, even on the same level, and also give a mutator." Fatshark is still figuring out which mutators should be tied to each Wind, but the prototypes I'm shown seem designed to offer both positive and negative modifiers. The Life Wind, for instance, currently grants constant health regeneration, but causes players to lose health whenever they hit an enemy.

To aid variety, Fatshark plans to remix each level chunk. As an example, I'm shown a Weave that takes place on a section of Against the Grain, but played in reverse. To finish a Weave, players will be required to complete an objective, for example killing enough enemies to fill a progress bar, slaying a certain number of a specific enemy, or capturing objectives placed around the map. "The objectives we have, we want them to be different," says Batsford. "We want them to be a different way to play the game rather than just going from A to B and killing stuff ... just different ways to play each time."

Once the objective is completed, a portal will open that will take players to an arena where they'll need to complete a final event. "Right now we have one that is like survive waves [of enemies]," says Batsford. "Another one we have is where two bosses spawn and you have to defeat both of them. And the Wind mutator is in effect."

As players progress to higher Weaves, the difficulty will continue to increase. "We have continually scaling difficulty that goes way beyond the highest difficulty that we have in the game," says Batsford. "We don't want people to ever reach a cap on this. The cap will rather be when it gets just too hard for them to do it." While the first few Weaves will be fun, easy introductions to the modifiers, later ones will be harsher—providing less regen on Life Wind levels, for instance.

Weaving a spell

One of the key ways Winds of Magic's new mode will differ from Diablo III's Greater Rifts is that Weaves won't be randomised. Everyone will be playing the same set of Weaves, meaning that players can work to find solutions to specific problems. More than just a combat challenge, Fatshark wants Weaves to feel like puzzles—challenging players to experiment with different weapon sets and career compositions. "People can then share that on forums, Reddit, whatever," says Batsford. "I think if we can nail that it's going to work out really nicely."

Another benefit of having predetermined Weaves is it lets Fatshark add leaderboards to the game. "You're going to get a score while you play these," explains Batsford, "and your score is going to be based on how long it took you to complete it, and then also how much damage you took. So you might have [a Weave] where the best way to get score is to do it slowly but make sure you don't take much damage, or you might have one where you speedrun it and it doesn't matter how much damage you take."

Beyond the individual Weaves, Fatshark is also planning a leaderboard that tracks how many Weaves you've completed in total. Thanks to the difficulty scaling, the gauntlet can be essentially infinite. 

"Each of these Weaves is going to be hand tailored because we're removing the randomness from them," says Batsford. "We're going to need to set spawns for these and make sure they work for each one. But we're obviously not going to be able to do that endlessly. So we need to do that for a set amount, and then we'll probably repeat them with a higher difficulty."

I'm intrigued by the idea, and—even at this early stage—Fatshark is doing some cool things with the look of the Weaves. Metal stages are a bathed in rusty yellow. Veins of ore grow out of the ground like tree roots, and fields of giant swords appear off in the background. "The one I'm looking forward to the most is Fire," says Batsford, "because the idea right now is to get it so you can feel like you're walking through a forest fire. So it's like everything is burning, the sky is on fire, ash everywhere. It's the perfect excuse to get some Sienna voice lines going. She's loving it."

The key for Fatshark, I feel, will be nailing the mutators for each Wind—ensuring that each is fun to tackle and scales clearly—and offering a wide enough variety of objectives and scenarios. Something that may help, and that the team is currently considering as a possibility, is making the Weaves seasonal. That could potentially lead to new mutators being added each season, as well as a reshuffling of the order so that players get to experience Weaves they couldn't previously reach.

In addition to the new mode, Fatshark aims to shake up the base game as well. As you'll have noticed from our cover art, Winds of Magic is bringing Beastmen to the game. "We have this duality in the game," says Mats Andersson, head of Vermintide 2's action team. "We have a lot of players who are into it because of the feeling and the lore and the immersion, so the Beastmen are a huge part of that, because they're cool and scary and it's cool to play against them. And then we have that other set of challenge-based players, who really go in-depth to master the combat loop. We really want the Beastmen to target both of those types—similar to what we're doing with the Winds of Magic mode."

The bulk of the Beastman force will be made up of Gors—the grunts analogous to the Skaven's Clanrats or Rotblood's Raiders. But it's the secondary units that make the Beastmen such interesting enemies. Smaller Ungors will rush players in great numbers—similar to the Skavenslaves—but will also fight in conjunction with Gors. "The thing we're experimenting with now is adding Ungors that use spears," says Andersson, "so we get enemies with a bit more distance … you can have that thing where you're swinging the weapon and it's kind of nice, and all of a sudden I have guys that keep a bit more distance. I'm swinging my weapon and I'm not hitting it."

Fatshark is also experimenting with giving Ungors bows—potentially in large groups, making them difficult to take out at range. "One of the things these guys are supposed to be doing is giving one of your team members a problem to solve while fighting," says Andersson. "Because, for the higher difficulties, I want more problems to be able to throw at the players, and have them clearly and distinctly provide different gameplay. This is not something that will disable you, but it is something that will require you clear a path to get at them."

Know what's best

Creating more problems to throw at the players is something of a mantra for the Beastmen design. The Bestigor—the elite unit of the Beastmen—is a large, armoured brute that charges headlong into players. "What you have is a 250 kilo, huge-ass armoured goat with a halberd running at you and throwing your ass to the ground," enthuses Andersson. "And that really helps to create a separate combat loop for the Beastmen." Pleasingly, the Bestigor will also flatten any other enemy units that are standing between him and his target—something players can potentially use as a tactic. Bestigors have no chill.

Those are the standard units—what Fatshark calls the roaming set—but, as with Skaven and the Rotblood Tribe, the Beastmen are also bringing new specials and monster units. Take the beefcake on our cover, the Minotaur. "He's going to be the berserker version of a boss," says Andersson. "We have the Rat Ogre and Chaos Spawn and Bile Troll and Stormfiend, and they all have roles. What we don't have is a huge dual-wielding maniac that basically goes ham on you, so we're going to create that."

For the Beastmen special, Fatshark realised that a lone operative—similar to the Skaven's Packmaster or Gutter Runner—doesn't fit the personality of the faction. Instead, the team are trying something new: Standard Bearers, who place totems that buff nearby units. "The most straightforward thing we have now as a prototype is that he makes things invulnerable," says Andersson. "Because that's simple. We have many permutations, but that's what works best because it makes things super clear. You can control the guys, but you need someone to get at that thing and bring it down in order to succeed."

It's an interesting set of enemies. I fight against some in Fatshark's internal combat level—a stitched together Frankenstein's monster of different chunks of Vermintide's maps. I can immediately tell the difference in the pace of combat. The spear Ungors are positioned at just the right distance to cause a problem, forcing you to deal with the immediate threat of the supporting Gors, before dodging forwards to get in a hit. And watching the bodies of smaller, frailer Beastmen get ragdolled by a Bestigor is as entertaining as advertised.

"We're making a co-op game, so we consciously try to minimise the complexity of enemies because you always have that co-op layer on top of it," says Andersson, summarising the overall design of the faction. "We could be doing way more complicated combos and more complicated solo gameplay, but in favour of making sure that you have enough time and space in your consciousness to keep tabs on your friends as well, we want to keep things super clear and super focused as well. So each enemy has one thing that it clearly brings to the table."

Fatshark is rounding out Winds of Magic with new difficulty levels—and an overall rebalancing of difficulty to greater incentivise co-op play—and new weapons that are designed to round out the combat abilities of each character. Saltzpyre's new billhook, for instance, fills out his melee options and lets him push a pack of enemies and then pull a single target back in. "That fits Saltzpyre as well because he's kind of a menacing, evil horrible person," explains Andersson.

Throwing down

Kerillian's new shield and spear combo is designed with the Handmaiden career in mind, and swaps out her traditional glass cannon play style in favour of a more robust frontline role. Sienna is being given a flaming flail, because, in Andersson's words, "it's awesome". The most interesting new weapon, however, belongs to Bardin. "Basically Bardin needs ranged weapons and I want to experiment with throwing weapons," says Andersson. "So this is going to be the base blueprint for throwing stuff."

To an extent, it feels like Fatshark is taking a risk with Winds of Magic. The one thing they're not planning is a big library of new maps. Rather, this is an expansion designed to flesh out the Vermintide 2 experience in new directions—adding new ways to play with a potentially endless challenge. And it's just the beginning, too. During my visit, I'm shown the early workings of something that Fatshark isn't yet ready to announce. Winds of Magic may bring an endgame, but it's just the beginning. 

This month, we're sending Legendary tier members of the PC Gamer Club a Steam key for Shadow Over Bogenhafen, the first DLC pack for our best co-op game of 2018, Warhammer: Vermintide 2. This is to celebrate the announcement of Vermintide 2's first paid expansion, Winds of Magic. The best part is, if you're a member of the Club, you can read our exclusive cover feature in the digital magazine—one of the other perks of joining up at the $5 tier. 

As well as adding two maps to the game that you and three other pals can battle through, it throws in a bunch of new quests to tick off. Obviously, you'll need to own the base game of Vermintide 2 to be able to redeem this, but then you're good to go.   Get more out of a great game, and receive a slew of other benefits in joining up.

Find out more about the PC Gamer Club here. You can join up from anywhere in the world.

It’s Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s first birthday, and to mark the occasion, there’s a special Event Level that has the Ubersreik Five (or Four? Doesn’t matter) head out on the town on good, old fashioned bender. 

The new Event Level, called A Quiet Drink, is available now in the Keep. It begins with our rat-smashing heroes on the prowl for some ale. There’s plenty of that scattered throughout the streets, but this being the End Times, there are also plenty of clanrats, zombies, and Chaos Warriors catching the evening air as well. As these things so often do, it culminates with an all-out tavern brawl at a charming little pub called the Obese Megalodon, followed by a mad dash out through some subterranean tunnels.

Fatshark has also produced a spiffy new One Year Anniversary trailer for Vermintide 2, and it’s worth a watch for any Warhammer fan. The whole thing is a gorgeous still-life shot through Vermintide’s rat-infested world depicted in lovingly-painted miniatures and dioramas, as you can see below.

 It’s as good a time as any to get into Vermintide 2, which incidentally was PC Gamer’s Co-op Game of the Year in 2018. A new expansion, which is called The Winds of Magic and adds the fearsome Beastmen, is due out this summer.  Vermintide 2 is also free to play this weekend, and you can pick it up for 60 percent off the usual price.