Design Director Joakim breaks down the upcoming rework of progression systems and new player experience.
Hi, my name is Joakim Setterberg and I’m the Design Director on Vermintide 2. The season of Geheimnisnacht, pumpkins, and general spookiness is upon us, and on behalf of the team, I’d like to share some upcoming changes coming to Vermintide 2.
Over the last year, we’ve touched on nearly all areas of Vermintide 2 to improve the core experience of the game with a wide range of features, updates, and improvements. I’m sure Saltzpyre would agree that like an old Reikland wine, we are not aging, we are delicately maturing. One thing we haven’t done though is to address some of the frustrations and issues we’re seeing for players that are new to the game. With the upcoming Versus mode being an opportunity for new players to jump in and experience the End Times, we want to make some improvements to our onboarding and progression to help those new recruits to stick around.
Let’s start out with the issues we’re seeing:
- If you’re starting as a new player, the restrictions on Hero and Power levels make it hard for you to play together with experienced players until you have leveled up. This is particularly tough if you’ve been recommended to play Vermintide 2 by a high-level friend.
- The time investment to level up a Hero or career is quite significant, making it a slow grind to unlock a fun playstyle and/or promote a behavior where players feel the need to play (Screaming Bell) repeatedly on lower difficulties.
- The Spoils of War chest rewards are varied enough, but the gear journey can be unsatisfying due to random factors, and promotes Commendation Chest hoarding until you’ve reached higher Item Power levers.
- The drop rates for the Spoils of War are not visible to players, which results in community guesswork and a lack of motivation to play certain difficulties.
So going forward, what are we changing to improve the Ubersreik 5 experience?
Unlocking Difficulty
First off, we’re removing any Hero Power restrictions for Private games. This should make it easier for a mixed group of friends to find a difficulty they can tackle together (and if said friends think your first experience should be Legend then… well, friendship carries a long way). It is also a chance for new players to check out the higher difficulties and practice for those Legend runs.
We’ve also removed the Hero Power restriction for the Veteran difficulty for Public games. We believe that Veteran can be a suitable entry point for players familiar with similar games, like Darktide, and are looking for a more challenging experience. However, we are keeping the Public restrictions for Champion and Legend as a necessary skill-check (although we have lowered those requirements just a tad) - the same goes for Cataclysm.
Introducing Experience Multipliers
To tweak the time investment for leveling we are (re-)introducing Difficulty Multipliers to the experience gains when playing a mission. When completing a mission you will now get the regular XP gain multiplied by an additional 0.25 for each difficulty level:
- 1x for Recruit (same as current)
- 1.25x for Veteran
- 1.5x for Champion
- 1.75x for Legend and Cataclysm
We hope that this better motivates and rewards players leveling - especially when progressing their other careers that have unlocked and gotten access to better equipment like necklaces, charms, and trinkets.
For our PC players, Versus will have its own game mode-specific progression, but doing things like completing matches will also feed into the main progression.
Reworking Spoils of War
To make the journey to get better gear both faster and more interesting, we are making some significant changes to the way Spoils of War rewards work.
All gear has an Item Power value attached to it that indicates how good it is. Without going into detail, the way Item Power rewards are currently calculated is based on an average obtained Item Power level with a random modifier attached to it, which leads to players getting generally slightly better loot than they previously have obtained. We are now changing this to be a range based on Hero Level, Difficulty played, and Chest Tier.
So when completing a mission you will get a Spoils of War chest, like normal. The rewards it contains will be within a range defined by your Hero Level, with a floor and ceiling cap based on the Difficulty. Recruit is capped out at an Item Power level of 100, Veteran at 200, and Champion and beyond at 300. Chest Tiers, upgraded by Ranald’s Blessings, Tomes, Loot Die, and Grimoires, will raise the floor of the range to push the rewards to higher Item Power levels. As you level up your Hero, the range first expands and subsequently narrows toward the higher end of the range.
With Spoils of War rewards being dependent on the Hero level when obtaining the chest, a chest obtained in level 1 will now yield level 1 Item Power rewards, regardless of when opening it. Thus, we are removing an incentive to hoard chests when leveling up, and instead aim for players to continuously open chests for more satisfying “jumps” in Item Levels (over the current flattened grind).
Related to this we are also changing the Rarity rates for rewards to not factor in Hero Levels. Again, we are simplifying the way the system works to make rare loot drops possible in every game. You will now almost always have a chance to get Common, Rare, Exotic, and even Veteran items from a game, but by playing on higher Difficulties and upgrading your Chest Tiers you will simply increase your chances for the rarer items. This means that you don’t have to have that perfect book run to get a cool reward and that you might get lucky finding a rare weapon even when starting out playing the game.
Veteran items will always be maxed out within your current Item Power level range.
In addition, we’re also changing how we decide what weapon skin you get when opening a Veteran weapon in a chest. You will now, if possible, get a non-unlocked veteran skin before defaulting back to a random skin. We’re also making it possible to obtain DLC weapons from chests (as long as you’ve unlocked all requirements for said weapons)
We hope that these changes will incentivize players to open Spoils of War more regularly as they progress, especially Commendation chests, rather than hoarding them - but we will of course be open to your feedback for any adjustments to all of the systems previously mentioned.
Crafting Changes
“Hold on, drengbarazi, surely you aren’t reworking crafting as well?”
Well, we are making some changes to it to align it with the rewards rework. So first off the items you craft will be based on your Hero level, similar to chests, with Veteran rarities set to the max of your possible range. However, upgrading to Veteran will only be available for Hero level 30 or above to ensure that players don’t spend their crafting materials at a point where they will come to regret it later.
The crafting economy will see some tweaks where we’re generally lowering upgrade costs by decreasing the amount of Scraps needed, but also requiring a small amount of Dust. To balance this we will be giving players more Dust when converting higher rarity Dust into lower rarities.
Oh, and we are also making sure that item properties and traits remain after an upgrade, so you will now be able to more reliably tinker with your favorite gear.
Showing the Numbers
As you can see, these are significant changes we are doing to the item and rewards system. Our intention is simplification, but we can’t do that without making it all understandable in-game. With this update, we are providing additional information in the Difficulty Select menu screen, as well as for individual Spoils of War chests, where the Item Power range and rarity percentages are clearly visible. Again, we hope that this clears up any confusion and motivates players to push for harder Difficulties and increased Chest Tiers, as the Ubersreik 5 can more clearly see what to expect in terms of potential rewards.
Introducing the Handbook
On the note of showing things, there is a lot of information a new player needs to understand about how the game works. Everyone gets to play the Prologue in the beginning, but after that we are pretty much throwing the players into the fight against Skaven, Chaos, and Beastmen without further onboarding. So far it’s been working OK, but there are a lot of nuances and mechanics to the game that you as a community have (very helpfully) had to relay through forums and social posts. We want to provide that same information in-game without adding more tutorials you need to play through, so we are happy to announce the in-game Handbook, available both as a Menu, with an interaction point in the Keep, and as helpful pop-ups when reaching key moments in the progression.
The Handbook is a collection of images and short videos explaining the mechanics and systems of Vermintide 2. Initially, we’ve focused on the basics, but there is room to expand this feature in the future to dig deeper into specific game knowledge for our various game modes. Make sure to feedback and comment for features that you would really have liked to see when starting out (or even have missed as a veteran player)!
So when do you get to see this?
We’re aiming to have this out for the release of Versus later this fall. Due to certification and submission processes on consoles being slower than on PC, we’re hoping to get those platforms on an even footing shortly after.
We will also get around to some additional career balancing around the same time - more details at a later date - but for Geheimnisnacht we’ve snuck in an initial fix addressing the Outcast Engineer bomb cooldown bug.
Also we haven’t forgotten about Adventure - here’s a little teaser image for something that will come out in just a bit.
On behalf of the Vermintide production team and Fatshark, thank you for all the support and memes throughout the year - and stay hyped for a packed finale of 2024!
