As the last steamtank noises echoes over the Reikland we wave goodbye to ‘A Quiet Drink’ for this Anniversary. We truly hope you have enjoyed your hunt for the Bugman’s XXXXXX.

Peace and quiet is now settling over Taal’s Horn Keep… Who are we kidding, there are plenty of vermin left to take care of.

Before you set out for your next mission we wanted to take a moment to remind you to look after each other, take care and stay safe. At the moment all Sharks have been recommended to work from home. This extra measure does not affect produtction or future releases, and we will keep you informed if anything changes.

The final chapter of the Curse of Drachenfels update is coming to PC on March 24. This update is part of Season 2 and is free for all owners of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and consists of 3 new missions in total; Old Haunts, Blood in Darkness and Enchanter’s Lair.

"Something is lurking in the Castle, and it is not Drachenfels himself."

We're going to pass the mic to Lohner right now, who can tell us about this mysterious inhabitant of Castle Drachenfels -Nurgloth the Eternal.

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

So, what I’m hearing is that Nurgloth the Eternal is the Rotbloods’ chief soothsayer and Burblespue Halescourge’s chief rival. Seems that while Halescourge keeps his squalid little throne because of those rotten little sorceries of his, Nurgloth can see the future … or bits of it, at least. Yeah, because that’s never gone wrong for anyone. My contacts reckon he’s even caught glimpses of the Realm of Chaos, so it’s safe to say that the poor bugger’s mad as a goblin doomdiver, on top of everything else.

Problem is, a seer’s only as good as his last prediction. While Halescourge is busy turning the Reikland’s finest into seeping goo, Nurgloth looks to be losing his status. Which’d explain why he’s looking for a way to get back into his chieftain’s good graces – or possibly his recently-emptied throne. You know what these northlanders are like.

‘Course, Nurgloth could just challenge his rivals and have done, but he’s cannier than that. He’s heard about our old mate Constant Drachenfels’ fascination with daemons. Let’s face it, if you’re a maniacal daemon-cavorting northlander, Old Drachenfels can likely teach you a useful trick or two – probably not in person, mind, but he’s bound to have left some notes about the place. Maybe even the odd captive daemon or two.

Now, much as I’m all for folk bettering themselves, I don’t think we can let this proceed. True, if Nurgloth gets what he wants out of Castle Drachenfels, he’s gonna settle a few scores in the tribe first. But when that’s done? Well, that ain’t gonna end well for the Reikland, now is it? Seems we’d better give him a lesson of our own before that happens.

Thanks for stopping by! This week, Vermintide turns two, and to celebrate we enabled the event special map ‘A Quiet Drink’ so the heroes can get some reprieve! Maybe. Probably not.

With Queen Kerillian out on the town alongside Steam Tank driver wannabe Victor, there’s some notable downtime for Lohner back in the keep. He’s been looking at some of your submitted artworks and creations, and we thought we would share a bunch of those this week!

This anniversary celebration is not so much about us, or Vermintide, as it is a celebration of everyone who’s been a part of this special journey with us. We might make the game, but it would be nothing without all of you lot joining the fray! So we want to take a moment to celebrate all of you and your wonderful creations.

/Fatshark

Due to limitations in Steam embedding, take a look at the new post linked below to view the gallery of cool stuff you lot have made

https://www.vermintide.com/news/developer-update-march-6

It is time to celebrate once more! Another year has passed by and Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is celebrating its 2-Year Anniversary on PC. Between March 5 and March 12 you can enjoy the anniversary in game. The mission ‘A Quiet Drink’ makes a return and of course, the Fatshark Stream on March 6th!

FOLLOW THE HEROES OUT ON THE TOWN
The Ubersreik 5 are heading out to try relax in peace and quiet… Hopefully.


CASQUE-AID
Earn the Anniversary exclusive portrait frame by following the Ubersreik 5 out on town!


During the 2-year anniversary of Vermintide 2’s release on PC it is not only us here at Fatshark that will be streaming. Click the link to find out more about the different Content Creators and when they will be live to celebrate, and we have made sure they are armed with giveaways.

https://www.vermintide.com/news/2-year-anniversary

Thanks for stopping by this brief update! This week saw the experimental PC Beastman-taming-beta come offline and the changes, along with some additional fixes, put out to the live version of the game. Hopefully, you’re finding a better balance of bad guys in your adventures. Thanks to those of you who tested the beta and provided feedback! You rock!

With March 8th approaching, we’re looking forward to celebrating the two year anniversary since Vermintide 2 was released on Steam! We’ve only have you all to thank for the success of Vermintide 2, of course having joined us on the journey so far, or part of it perhaps, yet here reading this post all the same. So again, thank you for being here and we hope you enjoy what we have in store for you for 2020 and Year 3, or ~ 2524 IC!

To celebrate the anniversary we’ll be letting the heroes loose on the streets of Helmgart to have A Quiet Drink (hopefully) and relax a little. They’ve earned it! The special adventure map will be available between the 5th and 12th of March and will be partnered with a limited time Quest reward to mark the occasion.

We’ll also be hosting a Fatshark Stream on the 6th of March where we’ll grab some devs, do some Show & Tells, check out some mods and play some games with you all.

We’ve also partnered with a bunch of Streamers you’ll no doubt know, they’ll be celebrating along with us and all of you over on Twitch where we’ve armed them with some Swag to distribute as they see fit! We’ll get a schedule up and announced next week, but in the meantime chuck them a follow and you’ll be informed when they come online!

FUPLAAYZ
https://www.twitch.tv/fuplaayz

WARWITCH TV
https://twitch.tv/warwitchtv

GOOFGUY https://www.twitch.tv/goofguy

HELLOFLOWER
https://twitch.tv/helloflower

ISHKA TV
https://www.twitch.tv/ishkatv

MOOPSHARK
https://www.twitch.tv/moopshark

WALKERTRIPS
https://www.twitch.tv/walkertrips


Yesterday we pushed out a bunch of fixes for the console versions of Vermintide 2. With a bunch of crashes fixed, players should also experience much better connection stability with other players and be dropped far less frequently from matches where the host as unfortunately crashed out. Thanks for reporting these issues to us and bearing with us as we get these things patched up!

The process on consoles is much more complex than the relative freedoms we have on Steam to push updates more frequently, so we genuinely feel for you during times of instability. It’s never our goal for you to feel alienated or left behind and we do appreciate it can feel that way. We just want you to know it’s neither malice or lack of care, just things (processes mostly), are very different on these platforms.

Thanks for checking out the experimental beta this past weekend and giving us your thoughts and feedback on the changes.

Overall the changes were received well and as such we're putting those changes live, including the reintroduction of the unintended mechanic which allows for some customisation of Heroic Deeds. The full patch notes for this release are below.

• Changed how enemy faction populations are determined in the missions. Skaven and Chaos now have a higher chance of appearing in a mission compared to Beastmen. Should mean less Beastmentide across the board.
  
• Beastmen can no longer spawn in Blood in the Darkness. They don't like being inside spooky castles.
  
• Polished Ungor and Gor attack damage triggers. Should now feel more fair with the attack animation.
  
• Added an exploit that allows players to customise their Deed difficulties and map choices.
  
• Fixed a crash in the dialogue system when a client joins an on-going game.

Added since Experimental Beta closed

• Added VFX to the end event fight in Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed some broken ledges before the end event on Blood in the Darkness where bots with weak knees kept faling off from.
  
• Fixed an issue with being able to lock out teammates in the first event on Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed enemies not being able to path to players through the door during the end event on Blood in the Darkness.
  
• Fixed an issue with not being able to join or matchmake in to a Weave lobby queued for ranked play.
  
• Fixed a crash that could happen during Lord fights.

Hope you've had a groovy week. We've not got it all right have we. But hats off to you for letting us know where we misstep. We genuinely appreciate it.

Today we're putting an Experimental Beta out to Steam, available for all owners of Vermintide 2, but with particular emphasis on the Beastmen available for Winds of Magic enabled lobbies.

[BETA ACCESS DETAILS ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST]

You've fed back to us that there seems to be a disproportionate amount of Beastmen in your Vermintide. For some time now we've been fettling with Beastman presence throughout the game on an internal version, and are ready to bring those changes in to a beta for your feedback. There's also changes to Ungor and Gor attacks damage triggers, we're hoping these are more in line with their animations so there's less chance of them getting off cheap shots.

We also heard that we really shouldn't be fixing the Heroic Deed exploit that some folks used to spice up their Deeds before we have improved the Deed system for players. And yep, we agree that removing that was tone deaf (feel free to blame Hedge!). In the meantime, we've reintroduced that to the game.

• Changed how enemy faction populations are determined in the missions. Skaven and Chaos now have a higher chance of appearing in a mission compared to Beastmen. Should mean less Beastmentide across the board.
  
• Beastmen can no longer spawn in Blood in the Darkness. They don't like being inside spooky castles.
  
• Polished Ungor and Gor attack damage triggers. Should now feel more fair with the attack animation.
  
• Added an exploit that allows players to customise their Deed difficulties and map choices.
  
• Fixed a crash in the dialogue system when a client joins an on-going game.

To install the 2.2.1 Experimental beta, please:

• Right-click Vermintide 2 in your Steam library sidebar 
  
• Select 'Properties' 
  
• Select the 'Betas' tab
  
• Expand the dropdown and select:
  2.2.1_experimental

A 12mb download for the patch Experimental branch should then start downloading. If the download does not start automatically, please restart the Steam client. It's also around 12mb to switch back to the LIVE version.

PROGRESS WILL BE PERSISTENT BETWEEN THE TEST AND LIVE GAME

If you're playing the experimental beta and wish to provide feedback or report a bug, please do submit those to the dedicated categories on our official forums:

https://forums.fatsharkgames.com/c/V2-Exp/EXP-feedback/60
https://forums.fatsharkgames.com/c/V2-Exp/EXP-Bugs/61


Join Tim, Tom and Tuva over on Twitch today at 13:30 UTC where they’ll be talking about the Experimental Beta.

https://www.twitch.tv/fatsharkgames

From today you can play the second chapter of The Curse of Drachenfels update, Blood in Darkness, on PC. This update is part of Season 2 and is free for all owners of Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and consists of 3 new missions in total. The final chapter is aimed to be released in March. You can find more information about Season 2 here.

Lohner has received a new shipment and you can now find an increased stock in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders purchasable with shillings.

With the release of Chapter 2 the Year of the Rat event ‘Rat infestation’ has come to an end, and we hope that you enjoyed it.

• Blood in the Darkness - the second mission in the Curse of Drachenfels adventure.
  
• More cosmetics added to Lohner's Emporium

Levels

• Old Haunts - Increased difficulty on events (Champion and above).
  
• Old Haunts - Fixed some stuck locations.
  
• Old Haunts - Fixed some respawn issues.
  
• Skippergate - Fixed another one.
  
• Weaves - Fixed crashes for clients when joining a session.

General

• It's no longer possible to switch map whilst a vote is in progress.
  
• Fixed a crash caused by interacting with chat/friend list buttons whilst purchasing a store item.
  
• Fixed crash caused when player gets healed while leaving the game (mainly death mutator in Weaves but was possible outside of that, albeit rare).
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur on metal mutators when you finish the arena with buff still applied from the mutator as the host
  
• Fixed quest timer in Okri's Challenges being drawn under the quest descriptions.
  
• Fixed an issue where Kerillian's Spear and Shield illusion "Princess's Glamour-Shield" awarded from the Point Well-Made challenge displayed a placeholder name.
  
• Fixed the Quick Play bonus not being awarded when joining into a keep.
  
• Bogenhafen cosmetic counts should now tally appropriately when considering items purchased from the Emporium.

2.2.0.1 Hotfix.
- Removed deprecated Dark Omens challenges from Okri's book

Thanks for stopping by to check out the latest dev update from the Shark Tank here in unusually unwintery Stockholm.

This week is what’s known as a ‘Hack Week’ here in the office. What does that mean you might ask? Well, think of Hack Week as an opportunity to do something different - so long as there’s some theoretical or actual value in what you’re doing, and have a pitch for it. Some will end up hacking alone, whilst others will form a team and get cracking on something bigger, or requiring multiple disciplines. They might work on something totally new, or continue something they worked on in an earlier Hack Week. It’s an opportunity to learn and grow and maybe even result in something new for Vermintide 2, or even spawn a new project altogether!

You might see a 2D artist taking a crash course in Blender, or you could see QA have a go at building a level [[i]did you know about - Trial of the Foolhardy in Vermintide 1 and Screaming Bell in Vermintide 2 were QA babies![/i]].

Other features of Vermintide (and the tools that build it) have been the result of hackweeks, such as:

• The ‘Social Wheel’.
  
• ‘Weekly Event’ mutators.
  
• Hearing-impaired accessibility.
  
• A bunch of internal tools:
  • Monitoring our build-system.
    
  • Optimized generation of reflection probes for rendering.
• Twitch Mode 2.0

We will avoid saying what’s being worked on at present, as we don’t want to set up false expectations that something will get into the game. There’s some cool stuff though, so hopefully, you can see the fruits of more hack weeks in the future!

This week the Year of the Rat event went live, where pesky critters roam the keep and a new limited availability portrait frame is up for grabs. A patch has shipped today to fix a few issues that arose with this update, mostly crashes as well as some fixes to leaderboard progression in the Weaves.

You’d think that enabling critters in the keep was as simple as a toggle box but really it’s much more complex than that, and some crazy issues arose upon toggling that hypothetical box. They need somewhere to spawn, a navigational mesh so they know where they can and cannot go and places to try and escape to. Other issues arose from enabling keep critters as well, which happened to have a knock on effect on spawning behaviours in the various game modes.

Our QA team had to build and test 10 different candidates for this fairly simple sounding update due to some of the unique complexities the changes presented - this is more than some much larger updates will see!

A cute and seemingly simple idea can really cause problems if it’s not something considered during the much earlier production phase. But solving those issues now does open the door to more potential Keep shenanigans in the future.

Last week we revealed the name of the map coming in Chapter 2 of the Curse of Drachenfels updates. Blood in the Darkness is due to come out in mid-February. It is currently undergoing testing and we will announce the date when it is in a good state.. We are, however, now able to show you a couple of screenshots from the upcoming adventure map right here!





The release of Chapter 2 will see more cosmetics being added to Lohner’s Emporium as well, including some hats you’ve seen before and some you haven’t. These will all be available for various amounts of Shillings.

edit 2: We just hotfixed a few more crashes.

edit: We just hotfixed a few crashes and an issue with Weave leaderboard states.

At first, it was simply a couple of rats that got into the keep with the crates for Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders, nothing to worry about. However, a couple of days ago Olesya grew tired of their little clattering feet and decided to root them out with one of her spells… it turned out to be an entire rat infestation! The rats are everywhere, and although Sienna does not seem to mind the extra company Saltzpyre is greatly dismayed that they are trying to get to his test specimen downstairs…



With the Year of the Rat upon us, we for some rat-tastic reason felt the urge to honor our furry friends. For what would Vermintide 2 be without rats?

Between February 5 and February 13 something ratty appears to be in the works as an entire league of rats have taken a liking to Taal’s Horn Keep, and to celebrate the arrival of these critters Cousin Okri has from the 6th of February a new quest for you, and of course you will be rewarded for your efforts.

• 3 Event quests starting on February 6th.
  • Rewards 2 paintings and new Portrait Frame.
• Taal’s Horn Keep is overrun by rats! Victor will not be happy.
  
• Fixed a bunch of crashes caused by mod interactions with tooltips.
  
• Fixed a crash in the benchmark tool.
  
• Fixed a crash for joining players which was triggered when user in the joining session had some throwing axes on the ground and then switched ranged weapon to something else!
  
• Fixed a bunch of painting related crashes.
  
• Fixed the weave 95 crash.
  
• Fixed an issue where the painting reward for completing Old Haunts did not show up in the list of available paintings.

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."