Vermintide 2

We talk to Fat Shark about adding Chaos to the mix, and go hands on with its latest co-op sequel.

Shark’s Warhammer: The End Times - Vermintide was in some ways a very confusing game. Well, no, let me rephrase: combined with an oddly triple-barreled name, the game was set in the Old World of Games Workshop’s venerable Warhammer setting just as that game was being phased out (see: The End Times) in an apocalyptic meta-event that saw the release of a whole new setting and rules-system, Age of Sigmar. Combined with Creative’s Total War Warhammer titles, video games are now the only place you’ll find that gothic, grim, Germanic take on a typical fantasy setting.

The game itself, though, was a true sleeper hit. Not huge, but critically well-received, and a tonne of fun to play; as an old-hand of Warhammer myself, Vermintide ticked all the boxes. It borrowed heavily from Left 4 Dead, pitting four players against onrushing hordes of Skaven - mysterious, chittering rat-men (see: tide, vermin) with a diabolical love of arcane machinery and, well, the apocalypse. Across a range of linked scenarios you had to blow up stuff, rescue stuff, discover stuff, and kill stuff, all while face off challenging combinations of Skaven of various types; you could be swamped by an near-endless horde of easy to kill slaves, have to handle slightly harder to kill clanrats, often run away from heavily armed patrols of elites, and get terrified by giant rat-ogres, all orchestrated by a clever AI that paced things for maximum drama.

Vermintide also added much more involved melee play into the mix, as well as a loot system, some basic crafting and upgrades, and lots more bodies on spikes.

It’s a hard game to improve upon, mainly because the simple premise - Left 4 Dead, but with rats and swords! - was so elegantly executed that you could almost just let the base game run and add lots of DLC. But no, Fat Shark’s bringing us a whole new Vermintide, and not only do the Skaven return, they’ve brought along some buddies in the shape of the forces of Chaos.

So, just how many End Times can one party of brave adventurers face? VERMINTIDE 2: ECLECTIC BOOGALOO

Ultimately, Vermintide 2 follows that same elevator pitch as its prequel: plucky heroes, hordes of things to kill, loot, repeat. And the End Times are continuing, even if that bit’s been dropped from the name (my keyboard is very happy about this) - this is one looong apocalypse. However, this time around Fat Shark’s added new elements to pretty much every established aspect of the game, and that’s particularly apparent when you look at how the new Career system works.

Let’s take a look at the little guy, Bardin Goreksson. Like in the first game, he can played as a Dwarven Ranger, and get a good mix of ranged and close-in fighty abilities, or he can be played as either an Ironbreaker or a Slayer. The Ironbreaker is a heavily armed tank, basically, capable of taking damage and remaining the focus of combat, with some ranged versatility. The Slayer, on the other hand, is a total melee machine, halfnaked and crazed, but without any ranged ability, because that’s too much like those pointy-eared elves and yuck. Each of the five characters has three careers, making for a much wider range of combinations within with the four player party.

Each career gives players an always-on passive ability, and an active ability. Looking at the human warrior Markus Kruber, in his Foot Knight career he gets a passive ability called Sigmar’s Blessing which gives the chance for the damage he takes to be converted instead into health, while his active ability is Valiant Charge, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, allowing Sir Markus to rush forward and bash some bad guys. Kerillian’s Shade career, on the other hand, can become effectively invisible and even pass through enemies, while her passive is a damage increase while she’s attacking from behind.

“The Career system really boosts player’s hero fantasies a lot more than what the different Heroes did in Vermintide 1,” Game Designer Victor Magnuson told us when we asked him about the way these new careers could combine. “Let’s say a player wants to be the tanky character in the team, standing at the frontline and really taking the brunt of the attackers on protecting their allies, both the career skill and the career trait of Bardin’s Ironbreaker Career will let them shine in that scenario allowing the rest of the team to focus on doing damage either as one of the melee focused careers or from afar as one of our more ranged focused careers.”

If you play with a regular group - I always played pick-up groups, myself, so it will remain to be seen if this greater variety helps a pack of random murder hobos work any better together - you’ll really be able to handcraft a group with complementary skills and abilities.

“We have designed the Career skills to really reinforce the core of any of the 15 different Careers available in Vermintide 2,” Victor added. “And we are really excited to see how players mix and match to find their optimal setup, which will differ dependent on the mission at hand.”

Deeper talent trees also offer more customisation of the game, and again, each career has a unique tree of their own. So, not only will no two Bardins necessarily be the same Career, even two Slayers could be quite different when you factor in talents, and then equipment.

There’s also a lot more loot and gear on offer this time around. There are over 50 types of weapons, for instance, ranging from hand crossbows to particularly lethal-looking spears, and they cover all the various careers, and loot drops will also be more focused to who and what you’re playing. There’ll be different hats, too - because hats - trinkets, crafting items, and other stuff to further customise your character.

One particular interesting new bit of loot are Heroic Deeds. These are one-shot quests that offer a very specific challenge - kill this particular enemy type, with a certain weapon, for instance. These mix-up the gameplay to give a short, sharp, one-off experience and a different kind of challenge apart from the usual “kill all the things” gameplay of the base game.

And while the game has greatly expanded in terms of the action, even your time between games has been spiced up. Rather than hang out in a seedy tavern, you now operate from a much larger keep, where you can pick you missions, show off trophies, and even test out new skills.

“The area in itself is much larger, so there will be a lot more areas to jump around in,” Victor told us. “Our ambition is that each player’s keep should reflect their progress in the game at a much more substantial level than what it did in the first game. Players will be able to unlock entire areas of the keep that were locked away when they first started out their adventure.”

I can’t wait for more skilled players to see how crap I really am when they come visiting. Oh well. MAKING A BETTER VILLAIN While the rats are back in impressive numbers, the new Rotbloods make for an entirely different fighting experience. These bigger, stronger foes are worshippers of the Chaos god Nurgle, so it’s a good thing that smell-o-vision has never caught on - they’re putrid and diseased at the best of times. And they’re also much harder to kill, and will require a different way of attacking. So, with so many interesting villains to choose from, why Chaos?

“It was partly because of the great contrast between the weaker, smaller Skaven and the heavy brutal warriors of Chaos but also due to lore reasons of what happens during the End Times,” Victor says. “It made canonical sense.”

Having visited the Fat Shark offices for the first game, I can attest that these guys take Warhammer seriously. There were at least a dozen complete and painted armies in

rather than hang out in a seedy tavern, you now operate from a much larger keep

display for the tabletop game - and not just Skaven ones!

But the new villains, and how they work with the game’s expanded Spawn Director - the system that directs what enemies spawn when and where - offered some interesting design opportunities.

“We’ve done a couple of things to expand the AI for the sequel, while trying to maintain the core gameplay and sense of what Vermintide’s combat and enemies are about,” Victor says. “The larger enemies introduced with the Chaos faction have their own ways of interacting with our slot system, which directs where and how enemies will encircle players in melee. At the same time, the enemies in general are better equipped to maintain contact with the player heroes, with an improved setup of mobility before and during attacks. Chaos brings tougher and more individually skilled fighters as opposed to the Skaven but the team has always worked with the goal to make them shine in any combination, providing great variety in every playthrough.”

As we said, they are tougher, but in interesting ways. You can generally take down a basic Skaven with one blow, but Chaos Marauders require two or three to drop. Normally, you’d also be able to aim for the head for a one-shot kill, but that’s the only place the basic fighters are armoured, so you’ll just have to shoot and hack away at them. Some warriors are also equipped with shields, but by and large they’re otherwise unarmoured, unlike the Chaos Warriors, towering enemies covered in rusted and pitted head to toe plate. Chaos Spawn are large, mutated creatures that are roughly equivalent to the Skaven’s Rat Ogres, while the rotund Chaos Sorcerer may waddle around rather slowly - and be an easy target - but can teleport around the battlefield in between directing gouts of damaging putrescence at the party. DEATH TO CHAOS! AND GIANT TALKING RATS! AND… THAT GUY! And yes, it all does come together rather swimmingly. Well, that is, if you like swimming in gore and rat-bits.

We’ve only played two classes, each with the most basic career of that class - Markus’ Foot Knight, and Kerillian’s Shade - but they already show off an admirable depth to play and very different play-styles.

In both instances we’re tasked with getting into a town, and inside the manor of an important and - by the sound of things - possibly traitorous NPC. The action shifts from a country lane, to a plaza before the city gates, and then into a warren of tunnels and streets inside the city, before a rather large boss fight against an aforementioned Chaos Spawn, after which our preview code ends - but not before hinting at another larger, nasty beasty, a troll-like mutant with two area effect weapons instead of hands. It looks pretty nasty. But getting there is typical Vermintide fun, and once inside the town there are two ways to approach the final fight, and each of those features built-up areas of buildings and hovels that you can negotiate in a few ways. It’s not entirely open-world - the Spawn Director does seem to work better in linear environments - but in all the action and the claustrophobic spaces it feels like the player has much more choice. And, in each of our run-throughs, we saw quite a different array of enemies.

There’s a particularly dramatic ledge in one part of the town; in one playthrough, Chaos Marauder’s swarmed up that ledge, making for a dramatic cliff-top fight; then, at the bottom, the Sorcerer attacked us in our weakened state. In a second playthrough, we were able to traverse the ledge with ease, only to be swarmed by Skaven once on the ground, while a Skaven heavy appeared back up on the ledge to shoot down at us.

It’s hard to really comment on how well the interaction between classes works, as we were playing with an AI that was very definitely programmed to stick with the active player, but playing as both Markus and Kerrillian offered very different experiences. I played Kerillian almost exclusively in the first game, but her Shade career feels like a whole new character. Her ranged weapon is a crossbow (some have suggested that Kerillian’s careers represent the fact that the Elf races came together as one during the End Times, and that the Shade is a reflection of Warhammer’s Dark Elves, which certainly makes sense), but one with a fifteen-shot magazine, capable of rapid-fire if you aim down the sights. Her melee weapon, however, is a spear, and it’s a real pleasure to fight with. Combined with her speed, and her passive ability to do extra damage from the rear, Kerillian is an excellent skirmisher, darting around the flanks, shooting when she can, and then rushing in for some stabbing fun. Her active ability is particularly good for getting out of a tight spot, and she can even shoot while invisible. You do need to pick your moment with these abilities, as they do take a while to recharge.

While Kerillian is agile - if a little… squishy - Markus’ Foot Knight career comes with armour to spare, and a giant two-handed hammer that makes short work even of Marauders. It’s slow, but it packs a hell of a wallop, and Sigmar’s Blessing, while not a real game-changer, does let you stand in the front line a little longer in between necking healing potions. His Valiant Charge ability is great, though, especially if you need to come to a companion’s aide in a hurry.

Both of the characters’ melee weapons are also capable of blocking, but Kerillian’s spear is more effective, lasting longer against sustained attacks than Markus’ hammer.

It all adds up to a game that plays just as well as its predecessor in terms of pacing and action, but with a host of improvements that we’ve barely scratched the surface of. The demo code contains no loot, or interaction with the talent system. On top of that, the game will be fully mod-supported at launch, which adds a whole other layer of customisation and playability.

And the game only costs you $US27! With AAA games looking increasingly precarious in how they monetise games, it’s marvelous to see a mid-tier developer offering a title which looks like amazing value. We cannot wait to see the Skaven horde return in full flight.

teleport around the battlefield directing gouts of damaging putrescence at the party