Welcome to our first in a series of status updates from the Shark Tank. Last week, the first installment of the ‘Curse of Drachenfels’ hit the live servers along side the kick off for Season 2 and patch 2.1!

What would Vermintide 2 be without rats? Well, actually it would still be quite cool since you’d still get to fight the Norscans and Beastmen, but that aside, we would not be here without our furry friends. They put the vermin in the Vermintide. With the Year of the Rat upon us, Vermintide 2 will pay its rat-spects from Wednesday the 5th of February until 13th of February on PC. You can read more on what this is en-tails on our website next week.



This week we’ve been working to fix up some crash fixes on all platforms, these will be coming the moment they’re tested and ready. There is also been some weirdness with DLC entitlements, with classic Vermintide skins disappearing in Vermintide 2 for those who own Vermintide 1. Tom (of Fatshark Stream fame!) has been ironing out some of those kinks, and looking in to fixing up other issues pertaining to challenge accreditation for purchased Bogenhafen items and similar issues. Some of these issues can and will be fixed without the need for a patch. Stability fixes are on target for the Rat Infestation event coming early next week, and further fixes will be coming with Patch 2.2 and the release of Chapter Two of the Curse of Drachenfels.



We sat down with Game Designer Kasper this week to talk a little bit about Sienna. There has been a fair bit of discussion this week surrounding our favorite wizard, with one of her infamous talent combos being brought down a peg (or two) in patch 2.1.

Sienna is fairly unique. Being a wizard of one particular school lends herself to being a particularly ranged focused, and in a game where melee should be the focus it can be difficult to design natural feeling abilities and synergies that allow for various interesting builds. Finding those flavors is hard, especially with two careers (BW/Pyro) being particularly ranged focused.

Can we talk a bit about why we made the changes we did, and is this where Battle Wizard will be now for Season 2?

"The bond between ‘Lingering Flames and Famished Flames’ + ‘Kaboom!’ was undeniably strong throughout Season 1, and the picks became almost mandatory on some of the toughest challenges in the game right now. For Season 2, Battle Wizard has seen that brought down to more reasonable levels. There’s multiple angles we look to balance from, examples being ‘is something overperforming, or is other stuff underperforming?’ and in this case we’re certain that this talent pairing was the former. We noticed commentary trending that she was super strong, and oftentimes super boring to be in a lobby with as watching your BW simply pressing “F” to win isn’t much fun for everyone else.

We still feel she has her core tenets met - the Battle Wizard represents Sienna trying to balance her addiction to Aqshy, but there’s still a fair bit of recklessness in there. It has a large AoE, explosion and dot heavy kit at her disposal still, but just without the one-button-to-win build. There may be additional adjustments made throughout this season, so do continue to share your feedback with us!"

Nice one, cheers! On to Unchained - there is a bit of talk about town that Unchained feels in a bit of an awkward spot at the moment. What are your thoughts on that?

"Unchained is a career with a pretty high skill ceiling I think, but when mastered can be very rewarding to play. It’s obviously the most melee-centric pick of the career choices for Sienna, and as mentioned before can be tricky to integrate nicely into a ranged archetype.

There is a murmuring amongst the community that Unchained has just only one viable build at the moment. I think that’s what you’re getting at right? I can see the possibility of some stuff to add more varied options to her kit in the future for sure. There is a discrepancy between her ability where it feels like you are giving up your power (overcharge) when you use it. Maybe we could scale with overcharge? More damage/radius when near max level overcharge? Or yield a cool buff when used at high overcharge. Something could be done there. I do think it’s going to take more than just sliding numbers up the scale, though, so it will need some more thought. Ideas of course welcome!"

Cool. Looking forward to seeing where we go with that. Lastly (for now) -- Sienna’s Mace. What role is this envisaged to play, and any chance of some love soon?

“Siennas mace is a bashy/tanky weapon which transitioned from 1-handed weapon in Vermintide 1 to a 1.5-handed weapon in Vermintide 2 (a Bastard Mace? Can we call it that?). It should have good output versus armoured enemies as well as being a decent crowd control weapon, less on the damaging side and more on the tanky side. Maybe the issue is that it’s quite complex to use, what with alternating moveset for the charged attacks. I’d wager the mace could use some tuning as well in a future update. Since from the perspective of a 1h weapon it’s a bit slow, from the perspective of a 2h weapon it has a bit of a low output.

On the immediate horizon this won’t see change, but certainly is on my list of things to mess about with in a future update!”

Cheers, Kasper!

Aside from the Rat Infestation coming to the Keep next week, we also look forward to bringing you the next mission later in February in the Curse of Drachenfels update - Blood in the Darkness. Here is a small sneak-peak quote from Lohner’s thoughts about Blood in the Darkness:

"Well, you've opened up a path to Castle Drachenfels, so it's time to get in there and find out what's going on - and, if at all possible, rescue as many luckless villagers as you can. The Pactsworn are definitely up to something. Whether they're trying to resurrect Drachenfels himself or something else, put an end to it."

Welcome to Season 2 and 2.1.0 on PC! This update brings new exciting things to Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and we are thrilled for you to delve into the first chapter of the Curse of Drachenfels, and explore what Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders can offer. This update is free for all owners of Vermintide 2.

The full patch notes for 2.1.0 can be found at the end of this page, and if you are curious about the changes from the Season 2 Beta to 2.1.0 you can find it described with patch notes and comments from a Game Designer further down.

Folk from the villages in the Grey Mountain have gone missing, and Lohner sends our heroes back into the shadows of Castle Drachenfels to have a closer look.

Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders is the in-game shop where you will be able to purchase cosmetics. The idea is to allow players to do daily and weekly quests and collect in-game currency to target the cosmetics they want. The store will at launch contain hats and hero skins, but we aim to add more content over time. There will also be a few Premium Cosmetics available for purchase for real-world money as DLCs through Steam.

The new in-game currency is known as Shillings and they can be earned by completing Daily and Weekly Quests. Anyone in possession of one of the existing Vermintide 2 DLC’s will get a one time bag of Shillings for each DLC as well as additional Quests.

DAILY & WEEKLY QUESTS
Cousin Okri is very generous and has decided to put some extra coins as a reward for the Ubersreik 5 for completing his quests. All his Dwarfen wealth has to go somewhere, as Okri himself has no need of it.

WHY DID YOU ADD PREMIUM ITEMS?
The reasons behind this are that we want to try to release content that involves gameplay for free while charging for a few premium cosmetics instead. By adding a few select cosmetics that you can purchase for real money you can support the studio and we can create more free content updates, such as the Curse of Drachenfels levels.

And do not worry, there are far more cosmetics available to purchase with Shillings than what is available on the Downloadable Content tab!

Ultimately the purchasable content will function as small DLCs and if you wish you can also purchase them through Steam as with the DLCs Shadows over Bögenhafen and Back to Ubersreik.

A new and swifter way to play weaves. With separate queues divided in 5 difficulties you can now join at any difficulty you would like. The Weaves have also been reshuffled.

Quick-Play Weaves will now also be playable with bots!

With each new Curse of Drachenfels mission there will be new challenges provided by Cousin Okri.

We have increased the amount of essence received at completion of Weaves, as well as added a larger essence bonus for completing a Quick-play Weave.

Thank you for participating in the Beta of Season 2, and we are grateful for all of your feedback. For patch 2.1.0 we have taken a closer look at feedback received regarding the weekly/daily quests as they were reported feeling too grindy, and we agree with you.

Balance was also one of the major feedback points, specifically Battle Wizard Kaboom! builds have been investigated, as well as cooldown reduction from attacks across the board.

LEVELS

• Against the Grain
  • Fixed an issue where a player who dies during the escape sequence respawns in an illogical location.
• Convocation of Decay
  • Fixed a patrol path to stop a particular patrol spawn from getting stuck.
    
  • Fixed a location where enemies would do a long leap to players at a specific location instead of just pathing as expected.
    
  • Players should now be able to complete "Feed Me Sinner!" on Cataclysm difficulty.
• Fortunes of War
  • Fixed a spot where players could mitigate enemy attacks entirely.
• Old Haunts
  • Fix for lamp oil and explosive barrels (and general pickup tweaks).
    
  • Fixed a situation where a player who died could respawn behind a closed door in the Gargoyle area.
    
  • Fixed a few sticky spots where players could get stuck.
    
  • Enemies can no longer phase through the closed tavern door in the village area.
    
  • There was a particular place where bots loved to suicide. We gave them some jump assist in this area.
• Skittergate
  • Fixed a spot where the AI navmesh was floating ever so slightly above the terrain.
    
  • Fixed a few hang-ledges so players don't just drop off an edge to immediate death where intended.
• Weaves
  • Changed how bar is filled to complete the Weaves, now objectives are always 80% of the bar and the rest of the 20% is collected by killing at least 80% enemies spawned by terror events (roamers are worth very little).
    
  • Enabled Bots for use in Quickplay Weaves.

GENERAL TWEAKS / FIXES

• Various Kerillian and Kruber weapon illusions displayed the wrong illusions, most notable in first person - this has been corrected.
  
• Added a bit more constraint on random item drop locations on player death so they would be far less likely to clip into the floor and disappear.
  
• The painting selection UI now shows which paintings are in use throughout your Keep.
  
• Changed the Kill Critters quest so that critter kills are recorded for all players in the group not just the critter-killer.
  
• Complete 3 daily quests and "Complete the weekly event" will always be available each week.
  
• Changed weekly challenge requirements to always have the same requirement values, eg. if you get the painting scraps weekly event it should always be 10.
  
• Reduced the number of painting scraps required to complete the associated weekly quest to 10 from 10, 20, 30.
  
• Fix for darkness Weekly Event so that it doesn't crash when closing the game or ending a mission.
  
• We fixed a crash caused by the game having a level selected that doesn't exist in the build a player is playing on (such as when switching from beta to live after having played a beta mission).
  
• Fixed cases where completing a host migrated game would reload the level even after pressing "Back to Keep".

COMBAT TWEAKS / FIXES

• Reduced the range of Ungors normal attacks and running attacks.
  
• Smiter stagger damage talent no longer prevents stagger damage on targets after the first. Damage will be calculated as normally.
  
• Witch-Hunt and similar effects (Blade Barrier, Hunter etc) now lasts up to 15 seconds (the full duration of the tag). Durations refresh should the target be tagged again. A tagged target can be tagged again to re-apply the debuff.
  
• Fixed an issue where bleeding effects would not stacks properly (Witch Hunter Captain Flense, Waystalker Serrated Arrows).
  
• Cooldown reduction on attacking rebalanced - All non-melee attacks now only grant Career Skill cooldown on the first target hit. This has been problematic with the Battle Wizard and Shade careers primarily where they could use area damage ranged weapons (Conflagration/Fireball Staff and Hagbane Shortbow) to gain an extreme rate of career skill cooldown recovery. This change should tone down the outliers without significantly affecting other careers.
  
• We've looked to smooth out the reliability of the system which weighs enemy damage with enemy density.
  
• Heleborgs' Tutelage (Mercenary) and Smite (Zealot) will no longer have their critical strikes consumed by pushing.
  
• Fixed huntsman longbow not triggering reload when the player gets interrupted during firing action, but before the reload event gets triggered

WEAPONS

• Two-Handed Hammers - Light attack 1 weapon switch window start increased from 0.5 to 0.75 seconds.
  
• Two-Handed Hammers - Light attack 1 chain to Light attack 2 reduced from 0.85 to 0.7.

“A Slayer build utilizing two 2h hammers together with the technique known as QQ-canceling was outperforming almost every other career in the game when it came to armored enemy DPS. To compensate for this without reducing the power of two-handed hammers, which otherwise is in a favorable spot right now, the time where you can start your weapon switch with the weapon has been slightly increased for the first light attack, and the chain time into the second light attack has been decreased. This should reduce the power of the QQ-canceling technique slightly for 2h hammers while increasing the output of the weapon when using it without the technique.” - Kasper, Game Designer

• Greataxe - Light attack 1 to light attack 2 chain window has been reduced from 0.7 to 0.65.
  
• Greataxe - Light attack 2 to light attack 3 chain window has been reduced from 0.65 to 0.6.

“Greataxe has a similar function as Two-Handed Hammer and has been tweaked in a similar fashion. It already had a slightly slower equip window so it has been unchanged, only the attack timings have been buffed in this case.” - Kasper, Game Designer

• Beamstaff - Stopped resetting beam staff hit counter if player hits environment, still resets if player hits an enemy (dead or alive)
  
• Tuskgor Spear - Reduced the push power from a heavy (think shield weapons) to a medium push (think 2h hammers).
  
• Huntsman Longbow - was not triggering reload when the player gets interrupted during firing action, but before the reload event gets triggered. Fixeeeddd.

TALENTS

• Sienna
  • Battle Wizard
    • Fires From Ash - Now has a 0.5 second internal cooldown.
      
    • Kaboom! - No longer triggers the improved explosion at Siennas starting position.
      
    • Kaboom! - Reduced the radius of the improved explosion from 8 to 5.

“Utilizing Fires From Ash together with the talent Kaboom! allowed close to 100% uptime of Fire Walk when playing Battle Wizard. With the other changes to cooldown reduction this had to be targeted to stay in line with other similar talents.Kaboom! could in some cases apply double the powerful burning effects to enemies with a recent change. This proved too powerful in practice and has been reverted to the previous state.” - Kasper, Game Designer

-----------------------------------

For a refresher on the Beta patch notes which precede the above, please check this earlier announcement with the notation:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/552500/announcements/detail/3998565024868225991

https://youtu.be/wG1mAnHmAQ0

Welcome to the latest update for Vermintide 2.

Today we bring you two deliveries. With the first, we're updating the live game to patch 2.0.15.2 - this includes improvements to the rerolling of traits and properties to be more deterministic and less true RNG, and includes changes to Weekly Quests.

MAIN GAME PATCH 2.0.15.2

Weekly Quests:
Will now be granted to all players, not just those who own the Bogenhafen DLC. You will receive 4 quests as a base and then one additional for each DLC you own ( Bogenhafen, Back to Ubersreik, Winds of Magic ) at the beginning of the week (Mondays 00:00 CET).

Weekly quests will now reward Shillings which can be spent in Lohner's Emporium of Wonders. Lohner's Emporium of Wonders will be available in a limited form on the Beta.

For those still collecting Bogenhafen cosmetics; the full release of Lohner's Emporium of Wonders will make all of them available for those of you who own the DLC.

Crafting
Optimised salvaging items resulting in quicker salvage times and less frequent backend errors.

Rerolling traits and properties is now more deterministic; you are guaranteed to see each trait and property configuration within a certain amount of rerolls. It is also no longer possible to roll a trait or property configuration twice in a row.

We also have as mentioned in our letter to the community last week the latest on Season 2 in the form of a BETA. Patch 2.1.0 is available for test! The notes of which can be found below.

To install the Vermintide 2 - Season 2 Beta:

• Right-click Vermintide 2 in your Steam library sidebar
  
• Select 'Properties'
  
• Select the 'Betas' tab
  
• Expand the 'Select the beta you would like to opt into' dropdown and select:
  
• season2_beta_8.6gb_download
  
• An 8.6GB download for the Season 2 Beta should then start downloading. If the download does not start automatically, please restart the Steam client.

PROGRESS FROM THE BETA IS PLANNED TO PERSIST TO THE FULL RELEASE.

Exceptions may be made in regards to in-game currencies. Should issues be found with the economy during beta, there is a potential for currency to be adjusted.

We have compiled a bunch of answers to potential questions over on our Support Site FAQ so be sure to check those out if you have any queries! The notes are as follows:


HOTFIX #1

• Fixed a crash that could occur on the map Dark Omens
  
• Fixed Bardin Slayer’s talent Grimnirs Focus not working for clients

FEATURES

• Revisions to the Weaves (including unranked Quick Play) (for Winds of Magic owners).
  
• The first of the Curse of Drachenfels maps, 'Old Haunts' (for Everyone).
  
• Lohner’s Emporium. Lohner’s Emporium will be a limited experience for the time being as we test out how you interact with currency and look for edge cases in the machinations that bring it all together.

UI / UX

• Items now stay in the Recipe slot when rerolling for properties and traits.
  
• The crafting interface now removes the item from the Recipe slot after applying a weapon illusion.
  
• Quest and challenges in Okri’s Challenges now display in the following cadence: Claimable < Avialable < Completed
  
• The UI now presents rarity on reward items in Okri’s Challenges
  
• Weapon illusion rewards are now presented correctly in Okri’s Challenges
  
• Fixed bug with item reward popup showing item rewards without a frame.
  
• [ALT + ENTER] to toggle fullscreen no longer triggers the chat.
  
• Fixed a problem where by the Font Size didn’t take effect in the settings.
  
• Added support to scroll chat text with mouse wheel.
  
• Polished the visual look of the chat.
  
• Added new font rendering to the chat to make it more sharp and now supports multiple colors.
  
• Changed size of chat window (From 600x200 to 500x250).
  
• Private/public checkbox in tab-menu now only says “Private” to make it clear if game is set to private or not.
  
• Loading screen subtitles do now continue after loading screen is complete as long as the VO is still playing.
  
• Tweaked font sizes and text color of matchmaking status UI.
  
• Added sound events for weave game mode menu.
  
• Adding missing variations of the potions for Razer Chroma.

LEVELS

• Against the Grain - Fixed some illogical respawn points.
  
• Blightreaper - Added and adjusted collisions to prevent Out of Bounds.
  
• Dark Omens - Fixed various spots where heroes would just fall to their death instead of hanging off the ledge.
  
• Dark Omens - Adjusted pickups that were outside of the play area.
  
• Dark Omens - Moved a grenade spawn spot that was obstructed by a rock.
  
• Dark Omens - Fixed a location near the 2nd Grimoire where bots behaved frustratingly.
  
• Empire in Flames - Added and adjusted collisions to prevent Out of Bounds.
  
• Fort Brachsenbrucke - Fixed a respawn point that could send players back beyond a point of no return.
  
• Fort Brownbrogues - Fixed spot where cannonball could go out of bounds and become unobtainable.
  
• Fort Brandybutter - Fixed a spot where heroes would just fall to their death instead of hanging off the ledge.
  
• Garden of Morr - Dying near the first Tome should no longer spawn you near the third Tome.
  
• Garden of Morr - Fixed various sticky spots.
  
• Horn of Magnus - Fixed some illogical respawn points and sticky spots.
  
• Horn of Magnus - Stopped Beastmen spawning behind the portcullis during the barrel event.
  
• Hunger in the Dark - Fixed various sticky spots and hang-ledges.
  
• Into the Nest - Fixed various sticky spots and Out of Bounds locations.
  
• The Pit - Added and adjusted collisions to prevent Out of Bounds.
  
• Skittergate - Fixed an Out of Bounds that could lead to a soft lock.
  
• Skittergate - Fixed a location where bots could get stuck.
  
• Skittergate - Fixed a spot where enemies could not path to the player during the final encounter.
  
• War Camp - Fixed some sticky spots.
  
• War Camp - Fixed a crash that could occur during the Bodvarr encounter.
  
• War Camp - Adusted 'Nav Mesh' (AI Pathing) to avoid enemies spawning beneath the water.
  
• Weaves - 'Death' Wind: Now only damages permanent (green) health, and gives you temp health equivalent to the health lost. Temp health degenerates at an increased rate.
  
• Weaves - 'Life' Wind: The Thorn Bushes now deal more damage and last longer, but no longer slows and despawns after a single proc.
  
• Weaves - Fixed various sticky locations, exploitable spots, hang-ledges, collisions and deathzones.
  
• Weaves - Fixed reported scenarios where there was not enough Essence to fulfil an objective. We've tweaked how we calculate how much each enemy killed contributes to the overall bar in a weave to be more consistent and reliable.
  
• Weaves - Reduced the severity of damage scaling when reaching beyond Weave 60.
  
• Weaves - We've revisited the spawning / end events on certain levels.

ENEMIES

• Fixed cases where the Packmaster would not hoist a grabbed player when it had been re-directed by another player.
  
• Fixed headbutt and shove attacks of the Minotaur having 2 overlapping and continuous hitboxes resulting in potential double hits.
  
• Blood explosion particles from Rasknitt and Gutter Runner death animations are now removed if blood and gore setting is is set to 'Off'.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Chaos Spawn's 'life leech' grab did not scale properly on Cataclysm. Now restores 400 health when the Spawns eats a player, up from 60.
  
• Updated Berserker and Plague Monk combo attack face rotation to be "flat", so if player is at different elevation the attacker wouldn't tilt.
  
• Updated Berserker and Plague Monk combo attack behavior to keep both move target and attack target until the combo is over, so they should no longer switch to closest target for neither attack nor the movement until the combo attack is over.
  
• Ungor Archer's arrows can now be blocked by all melee weapons within block angle. (Same as shield weapons functions currently).

MISC. BUG FIXES

• Fixed situations where players could get stuck in the Bridge of Shadows if a connecting player failed to properly connect to the lobby.
  
• Fixed an issue where the torch could spawn on downed bots if Darkness was triggered in Twitch Mode.
  
• Fixed the Twitch Darkness Mutator, so that the torches that are spawned are also despawned when the mutator ends.
  
• Fixed damage statistics not being tracked for remote clients when hitting Trolls.
  
• Fixed 'Slay all Lords with specific weapons' achievements not working on Cataclysm.
  
• Decanter' Trait - Fixed an issue that caused the concentration potion to reduce cooldown at a 50% increased rate when using Decanter. Now restores cooldown at the same rate as without the trait.
  
• Fixed various crashes.

HEROES

• Tweaked secondary weapon actions (block/aim/charge). Minimum action time has been reduced from average 0.3 seconds to 0.2 seconds. Weapon switch start for defensive actions has been reduced from average 0.4 to 0.2 seconds for blocking and 0.0 second for aiming/charging (instantly cancelable). This should make weapon switching while performing defensive actions more responsive without making offensive canceling notably stronger.
  
• Decay speed of temp hp increased by 100%.
  
• Temp Health on Cleave - Increased from 0.75 health for each target damaged to 1 health for each target damaged. 50% first target penalty removed.
  
• The talents that increased range of the leaping/teleporting Career Skills caused a lot of problems with out of bounds and mission skips so they have been replaced. (see Bardin and Sienna notes below)
  
• Kruber
  • Kruber's spear now hits units closer to him. Previously he could miss attacks on enemies in very close proximity with sweeps and stabs. Overall attack range remains the same but should now land more consistently up close.
    
  • 1h Mace - Fixed an issue where the third attack in the light chain had inconsistent chaining into heavy attacks.
    
  • Mace and Sword - Tweaked chain windows after push slightly to counteract a situation where a light attack could be inadvertedly chained into.
    
  • Empire Longbow - Fixed an issue where it could still get pushed out of the zoomed shot if you had bonuses to attack speed active.
    
  • Foot Knight - Counterpunch - Reduced the duration of free pushes after blocking from 2 seconds to 1.
• Saltzpyre
  • Repeating Crossbow - Fixed the triple shot having a gap where actions couldn't be chained.
    
  • Zealot - Heart of Iron passive ability is now active from start instead of on cooldown.
• Bardin
  • Drakegun - Fixed an issue where the light shot of the weapon could sometime prioritize the wrong targets, resulting in them not being hit. Should now always hit targets, even if they are very close to the player.
    
  • 1h Hammer - Fixed an issue where the third attack in the light chain had inconsistent chaining into heavy attacks.
    
  • Slayer - Increased base health from 100 to 125
    
  • Slayer - Grimnir's Focus - Changed, now grants a 40% damage reduction for 5 seconds after landing a charged attack. The old mechanic of taking reduced damage while charging attacks worked poorly in practice and has been replaced with a more clear one. The damage reduction has been tweaked to compensate for the more reliable uptime and the Slayers increased healthpool.
    
  • Slayer - Bounding Leap has been replaced with 'Crunch!' - Increases the stagger strength of the impact of Leap by 100%.
• Kerillian
  • Shade - Fixed an issue that caused Kerillian to gain guaranteed crits for 1 second after unstealthing while using Cloak of Pain.
    
  • Dual Daggers, Sword and Dagger - Bleed effect no longer stacks.
• Sienna
  • Battle Wizard - Switched tiers of Famished Flames and Immersive Immolation. The combination of the talents Famished Flames and Lingering Flames made Battle Wizard a close to 100% must pick for higher difficulty content. Rather than gutting two interesting talents we'd like to experiment with them being independent build styles for Battle Wizard.
    
  • Battle Wizard - Whoosh! - Replaced with 'Volans' Quickening' - Reduces the cooldown of Fire Walk by 30%.

Hey everyone,

The year is rapidly coming to an end, and we have some news on our progress towards launching with Season 2 for Vermintide 2 on PC.

We'd also like to invite you to a Stream on Wednesday December 11th where myself and others will be on board to talk with you about Season 2! This is scheduled for 14:30 UTC over on https://www.twitch.tv/fatsharkgames.

Season 1 ended over five weeks ago, and it has been a fair while since we first spoke about our plans for Season 2 in our blog post and reddit AMA.

Since the launch of Winds of Magic, the Vermintide 2 team has been hard at work focusing on game health with smaller - less substantial updates and a larger experimental branch which went live in patch 2.0.15 after positive feedback to the changes from a lot of you folks. Thank you for testing that out and giving us all your feedback, warts and all, and helping us get closer to what we can all agree is a more stable and fair experience. Is it perfect? It’s not, but thanks to all your reports and commentary, we’re working towards it and hope that with your input, we can give you an experience you can rely on, and have a blast bashing the bad guys to bits.

Season 2 was intended to start fully in December, alongside the first of three free maps to all Vermintide 2 players as part of the ‘Curse of Drachenfels’ update. This update would also feature the long-awaited ‘Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders’ for everyone, Quick Play enabled Weaves for WoM owners, alongside other considerations as noted in the Season 2 blog post.

These plans have, given our focus on ‘game health’, been adjusted slightly. Given the success of the latest experimental test and our ongoing commitment to improving our releases, we are instead bringing the changes intended for Season 2 into a Beta Test. This test will be available - all going well - from December the 16th and runs through the festive period. This will include revisions to the Weaves (including unranked Quick Play) for Winds of Magic owners, the first of the Drachenfels maps, Lohner’s Emporium, and more. Lohner’s Emporium will be a limited experience for the time being as we test out how you interact with currency and look for edge cases in the machinations that bring it all together.

As for those playing on Xbox One and Playstation 4, we owe you an update regarding Winds of Magic and the launch of the expansion on those platforms. The cascade of events above has had an impact on our plans for Console releases, but not too dramatically. We are currently going through platform certification for the console versions, and if all goes well with that, we hope to have it with you before the year is out. We’ve been going through extensive testing for this, using both in-house and external QA teams, and we still plan to have Winds of Magic released this month on both platforms as always intended. Winds of Magic for consoles will be equivalent to patch 2.0.15 on PC, with the addition of Quick Play weaves.

Should all go well with the certification process, the above will still be true; however, the best-laid plans can trip up, and in such an event, we’d have no choice but to delay Winds of Magic on console until January 2020. While we don’t expect that to happen, there is always a chance, and so we want to be as open as possible with you now so that there are no surprises going forward. Season 2 is planned for next year including the full release of the Emporium and free Curse of Drachenfels adventure maps.

There will be cool stuff going on in 2020, from the upcoming Vermintide: Versus and much more beyond.

We hope you enjoy the beta and we look forward to reading your feedback.

Seasons greetings,

Martin / The Vermintide 2 Team

From now until Sunday 18:00 UTC you can enjoy the critically acclaimed Warhammer: Vermintide 2 for free!

During the free weekend, you can download and play the Vermintide 2 with no purchase needed.

If you’ve played Vermintide 2 during an earlier free weekend, you can continue your adventures from where you left off last time!

If you wish to continue playing past the free weekend, for a limited time you can add Vermintide 2 to your library permanently with a 75% price cut, and available DLCs at a discounted price.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/552500/Warhammer_Vermintide_2/