Chaaarge! cries the Empire. Waaagh! cries the Greenskins. Saaale! cry both in unison. From now through Monday, June 4, Steam hosts the Skulls for the Skull Throne sale—a roundup of discounted Games Workshop games, including Total War: Warhammer 2, Blood Bowl 2 and Vermintide 2.
I reckon those three are the pick of the bunch—going for £29.99/$44.99 (-25%) £5.09/$6.79 (-66%) £17.84/$22.49 (-25%) respectively—but there's plenty more to sink your teeth into.
Sanctus Reach and Man O' War Corsair, for example, are both on sale for £11.49/$14.99 each with 50% savings, while Space Hulk: Deathwing—Enhanced Edition comes in at £27.99/$31.99, 20% less its recommended retail price.
A host of DLC packs and preorder discounts are in there too—the sum of which can be perused here.
"It’s back! Fantastic new Skulls themed content and updates for many of your favourite Warhammer games," reads the sale's Steam news post. "The Bone Giant comes to Total War: WARHAMMER 2, earn a Skull portrait UI in Warhammer: Vermintide 2, unleash the Legion of the Damned in Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf and deploy new successor chapters in Space Hulk: Deathwing—all to name just a few.
"There is also a new game with Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus, plus new DLC and pre-orders to look out for. In celebration of this festival of Warhammer gaming, there’s up to 90% off selected Games Workshop and Warhammer universe titles during this time."
Check out Steam's Skulls for the Skull Throne sale, the second of its kind, in full over here.
A new update to Warhammer 2: Vermintide, the co-op FPS about a rodent infestation that's gotten really out of hand, adds new daily quests and challenges to the game, more hats, skins, and potrait frames, and—this is the big part—support for mods via the Steam Workshop. Accessible from the Vermintide 2 community hub, the Vermintide 2 workshop already has mods including a weapon kill counter, a collection of UI improvements, and one that enables the Fatshark intro screen (with all due respect to the studio's work) to be skipped.
Mod use will be enabled in a separate "Modded Realm" that can be selected from the Vermintide 2 launcher. It's "no holds barred" for mods and custom content, Fatshark said, but it will not award new item drops, enable challenge or quest completion, or grant experience. The studio does have plans for 'sanctioned mods,' however, which will be allowed on the Official Realm. That's expected to happen sometime in the summer.
"Since Warhammer: Vermintide 2 contains progression systems, we cannot allow mods that 'cheat' or make the game easier in ways that go against our design philosophy," Fatshark explained in a mod creation guide.
"The type of mods we will allow (sanctioned mods) are quality of life mods, certain UI mods and similar. We will look at these on a case by case basis and give them sanctioned status where applicable. This means that they will be whitelisted in our anti-cheat software and anyone can use them in the official realm. Mods that do not meet the criteria can still be used, however, progression will not be saved server side and they can only be used on the Modded Realm."
Also in the update: Okri's Challenges, a set of daily quests and challenges that provide loot chests, skins, hats, and portrait frames as rewards, and an increase in the number and drop rates of hats and other cosmetics. "We feel like there is a good amount of cosmetic and unique looking items right now—and we're happy with the current rate at which they drop," Fatshark wrote. "So to those of you who have been hoarding chests—you're free to open them now. We're not planning on changing the drop rates for these chests further."
And finally, there some some tweaks and bug fixes, details of which are available on Steam.
First-person ratbasher Warhammer: Vermintide 2 today blasted its first content update, following a string of patches with fixes and tweaks. Along with officially launching mod support, the update adds new challenges and daily quests to complete for loot, and boshes in loads of hats, skin recolours, and other cosmetic bits. The mod SDK doesn’t include a map editor, sadly, but it does let modders fiddle with game logic, graphics effects, the user interface, textures, and other bits of gameguts, so it’ll be interesting to see what people make. (more…)
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they ve taken to make their games. This time, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 [official site].
In designing Vermintide II s melee combat, Mats Andersson ran through the same preset level 50 times a day for two years. This hodgepodge of the game s most distinctive areas, enemies and swarms makes no sense and it looks terrible, but playing it about 100,000 times was what it took to ensure face-to-face brawling would be rich in heft and detail.
Andersson knew how fast he could clear that level, how much damage he should take, how many kills he should be getting; yardsticks by which he could measure each run, and it s how clicking to swing your hammer feels like it s caving a skull in, and why your sword feels like it can split a rat s stringy carcass in two. It s very much home to me, he says. (more…)