Look, I love Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, but there have been a lot more videogames where first-person melee combat kind of sucks than ones where it’s as fun as kicking an orc off a cliff in Dark Messiah was. There’s a reason we all play Skyrim as stealth archers. When Fatshark was first working on Vermintide a decade ago, it wasn’t really thinking about that, though. The team was so heads-down invested in first-person melee they were literally unaware of their surroundings.
“We were working on the hit effects on staggers and animations, a team deeply into the melee system,” says chief creative officer Anders De Geer. “We all had a meeting and we talked about it, and then we went to lunch, and around the lunch table we continued talking, how it should feel and how enemies should react. We talked a lot about hitting people in the head with axes and stuff. And then at one point, I looked up and I realized that everyone else was just looking at us. ‘Who are these lunatics?’ We had to continue the meeting after lunch.”
Fatshark’s CEO, Martin Wahlund, found out that designing an entire game based around first-person hand-to-hand combat was considered a risky move during a chat with one of the co-founders of fellow Swedish studio 10 Chambers. “He came over and talked to me, like, ‘You’re brave guys doing melee in first-person. Every time I tried to do it, the company always went into bankruptcy, so I would never try to do it again.’ I was so scared, I went up to Anders, like, maybe we should just go more ranged?”
Fortunately they stuck to their guns, and by guns I mean swords and axes. OK, a couple of the characters have guns. But while the wizard can throw fire around and the elf has a regulation bow, Vermintide is mostly a game about hitting things up close and personal.
As Wahlund recalls, “The first weapon we did was a two-handed hammer, I think. We just worked with that for a long time. What would it be like to hit with? The first idea, when Anders asked me, ‘What do you want to achieve?’ I said, like, ‘Do you know the Lord of the Rings movie, early on in it, when Sauron is hitting with this big thing, [people are] just flying left and right?’ That was the feeling we wanted.”
Fatshark succeeded. When I first played Vermintide I experimented with a few different characters, and the only one I didn’t gel with was Saltzpyre, the witch hunter. Then I unlocked his zweihander, which lets him scatter skaven just like Sauron. He immediately leapt up the rankings, and is still one of my most-played characters in the sequel.
“We worked a lot with just one weapon to get it to feel right, and then that’s how we do it,” Wahlund says. “So then we did weapon by weapon, enemy by enemy and so forth. It’s a lot of hard work.”
