“We had a guy in Korea that broke Vermintide 1 because he had played it so much he hit, in the background, level 999 or something like that,” says Victor Magnuson, currently design director of Darktide. “He just got stuck because it couldn’t go above that number. We had to patch the game to allow him to play more, because the number just couldn’t go up. Then we started counting, like, he must have played almost every waking hour since the game launched to be able to hit that number.”
So yeah, Vermintide and its 2018 sequel have some devoted players, happy to rinse the games in perpetuity as they work their way up the difficulty levels and run maps over and over until they perfect them. In good news for those hardcore ‘Tide heads, Fatshark plans to continue support for Vermintide 2, which has already grown so much it barely resembles the game we reviewed seven years ago.
On the 10th anniversary of Vermintide, Fatshark revealed its roadmap of plans for Darktide and Vermintide 2. Both games have months of support sketched out, but what’s coming after that? Well, it won’t be Vermintide 3. As its design director Joakim Setterberg explains, Vermintide 2 still has a lot of places to go.
“We can always do campaigns going off in different directions, exploring the Warhammer Fantasy world,” he says. “There’s still a lot of stuff, which includes expanding on the things that we’ve already been doing, like Chaos Wastes. For that matter, there’s a lot of gameplay stuff that players would want us to revisit or—not ‘fix’, but we have some systems in place that are a bit rough. We could always tweak those. Quality-of-life wise, I’d say there’s a lot of stuff to do still. So Vermintide will keep on going.”
The Warhammer World is a big place, and it’s true there are huge chunks of the setting left unexplored. Fatshark has already gone deep on some areas, with DLC inspired by and named after decades-old adventures from the first edition of the TTRPG Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, but even there it’s got more to draw on.
“Vermintide 1 started out more based on the RPG license than the tabletop license,” says chief creative officer Anders de Geer. “We looked a lot at all the old editions and adventures for the roleplaying game obviously, because that’s where we could find the most details. But it also came from passion. We wanted to try to show people why we liked Warhammer, and focus on the things that made us all in love with the IP, and a lot of that came from the roleplaying game.”
That includes the skaven, Vermintide’s distinctive ratmen enemies (ratmenemies). While Vermintide borrowed a lot from Left 4 Dead, seeing hordes of patch-furred rodents flowing over the peaked roofs immediately gave Vermintide an identity of its own.
“We were tempted to look at orcs and other things,” says CEO Martin Wahlund, “but orcs, you know, there’s a lot of different games that have orcs already. There was no game with skaven. This was sort of an easy pick after a bit of thinking, basically.”
As Vermintide 2 continues being added to, maybe Warhammer’s orcs will eventually get their time to shine. Though Setterberg has a higher priority. “We introduced a very cool sprinting technology in Darktide,” he says, “which is the one thing that always gets me when jumping back and forth between the games testing them. Shift key does nothing. Why? That is crazy.”
