2 - 3 new heroes is a perfect number. I asked Martin during the stream if we would have more expansions like Winds of Magic and he said of course.
Maybe they can add new heroes between periods of time between large expansions, like small DLCs (Bogenhafen type) 2 maps and the hero for example.
This would be two lines of work during the year:
1st Great expansion —> new enemies, weapons, talents, level, many maps, etc.
2º New hero DLC —> new hero, a couple of maps and lore/ history.
Doing this we could have 2 - 3 more heroes and 2 more factions to fight (Demons and Undeads for example) during the 5 years that they want to work in the game.
A bretonnian knight would fit the lore. He could have Errant, Questing and Knight of the Realm as his classes, Grail knight would be too strong. Though I’m not sure how you would make his character unique as knights usually fight mounted and he would be rather similar to kruber foot knight.
A human or dwarf engineer would be cool.
A male high elf would open up more classes like white lion or swordmaster.
As pointed out previously another empire mage would also be very cool. Not all of the colleges are very melee oriented however, with bright wizards being the most martial. I think a gold wizard would make the most sense, or maybe an amber druid sort of wizard. Giving him 3 variant classes might be difficult but they managed with Sienna.
Well, to be honest, most of the things in Warhammer Online were terrible since the game was released unfinished. A lot of careers were half done or just broken.
I’m thinking about possible combat pets in Vermintide… Would it work, would it be interesting… that sort of stuff
You could share the health pool with your pet, which would be a blessing and a curse. You would order it to attack, bring potions and bombs to you, res up downed players etc.
I tend to see this same argument everywhere, that careers are more easier to add
So let’s see.
It does not cost ‘a ton of money’ to register several lines for all characters, they even did it for an event map right now and all of the new art only a patch ago.
The new characters does NOT need to be a part of ubersreik 5 so you don’t even have to rewrite that line, they were not in Ubersreik until now, so they don’t need to be an Ubersreik 6. They can be new, seen as new by others characters. Like in the first game, when Kerrilian and Bardin happened to just met.
It’s not ‘a lot more work’ to design a new character (3 careers only) rather than a career for each existing character (5 careers). Each career comes with a new 3d model, a new ultimate and often weapons, skill tree, and a bit of sound.
Therefore the only parts where the character will indeed ask more work is the weapons and the new story.
But a set of weapons for a new character will be easier to balance with the existing (since there’s none already) than a new weapon for older character which already have some.
Not only a new character (or several new) will bring more possibilities to the game with some new mechanic like sienna’s heat management. But it will also bring more ‘choices’ to the last player joining the map.
If they’re going for the new career, why not, I won’t mind. But a new character is NOT “that” harder.
For me, I don’t think that a vampire would be the best choice (or even the Lizardman). And that tend to be about the gameplay part. What would you produce as 3 differents careers with a Lizardman (where they are mostly specialised in 1 task, and tend to change drastically in “species” when they’re doing another task), or which 3 different gameplays would a vampire bring to the party ?
If you have interesting answers, great, I’m all for it then.
The metal lore wizard makes more sense to me, as you could play with that in a lot of various ways.
While a Saurus warrior would be incredibly baddass, lorewise only a Skink would make (enough) sense to include in a game like this because skinks are the only lizardmen that can talk. That being said you could have some kinda magical shenanigans explanation why the character is a lizardman in the first place and let him switch between saurus warrior, skink shaman and skink priest. Whenever he talks to the other members of the party they can understand him because of magic, but all we can hear is grunts and hisses. Warrior would be tanky melee with 2h weapons the skinks can’t use. Skirmisher would be a mix of huntsman and shade with blowpipes, javelins etc. Priests have weaker magic (individually) than empire mages but they can be used by slann as a sort of range enhancer and channel magic through themselves. Lizardment used to have a mercenary unit in the old Dogs of War book so it’s not entirely implausible.
Engineers don’t have much in the way of distinct classes as far as I can tell. What differentiates them the most is equipment. You could have a regular engineer with a mix of melee and ranged weapons. An outrider (who normally fights mounted) with a ranged weapon focus like repeaters and hochland long rifles. And maybe some kind of artillery-themed engineer with an ult that lets him throw a free grenade etc. Basically what makes them different is the ult and talents, similar to how Sienna has three flavours of bright wizard. You could also recycle a lot of the existing weapons, repeater handguns and pistols are built by engineers for instance.
The high elf character could be male or female. Making them a mage is right out, elves are snooty and an elven mage would never waste time futzing around the empire like our merry band. Most high elf classes are mounted and that rules out a lot of them. The remaining ones would be Seaguard, Swordmaster, White Lion and Shadow Guard. Seaguard are pirate/marines and equally skilled with ranged or melee weapons (that they use with a shield). Since seaguard crew elven ships they travel a lot and are the most plausible type to be found in the empire. Swordmasters specialize in the sword and can use it to do all sorts of fancy things like block arrows, but they rarely leave Ulthuan unless marching in an army. White Lions are the king’s bodyguard and the closest thing elves have to hairy manly men, famous for using big 2h axes. Shadow guards are the ethnic dark elves that stayed loyal to ulthuan during the civil war, kind of like high elf shades if that makes sense.
As much as I’d love a Lizardmen hero. I imagine it would be a little hard to shoehorn into the story and group at this stage in the plot.
An engineer character might work, though I couldn’t say another human character fills me with much excitement. I’d probably be happy with Bardin getting an engineer subclass that is somehow explained as a different path his life could have taken or something.
Personally, if we get a new hero, my wishlist of heroes I could actually see fitting in would be, in no particular order
A Brettonian knight/noble, Though I can only off the top of my head think of one class this hero could be, questing knight (melee variant),
A vampire hero, preferably the Genevieve that everyone talks about when vampire heroes come up. I can imagine classes for a vampire along the lines of necromancer, some form of melee class, maybe a hybrid class.
High elf advisor to the empire. classes could be Loremaster of Hoeth, mage of some description, or white lion/shadowguard.
That said, I would be incredibly excited for a new character to be added at some point down the road, and when the time is right.
Because at the moment, each character and carreer bring something UNIQUE to the table. So posting art of lizardmens without a UNIQUE gameplay linked to them, doesn’t bring something really new (as it really looks like existing classes from Kerrilian). Again, if you find any unique mechanic behind all of them, that’s great.
What about a greenskin Hero for a change. I’m not too familiar with the Warhammer Lore but the only motivation that drives Greenskins is to fight something so they would make some sort of sense. Story wise the Ubersreik 5 might have found the guy fighting of skaven on his own as he was the last man standing and since there was just nothing better to do at the moment they just joined in.
What would be nice is that it brings in more variety and also the new guy doesnt really have to be part of the team or could even be antagonistic in the sense that just does not fit in at all. Voicelines could be quite easy as greenskins are not really good with talking but he does his job. It could also open up some funny dialogue as he wouldnt get all the jokes being thrown arround.
I think that would be much more interesting than another human/elve/dwarf character. There could be also a shaman career which might bring in more intersting new casting things like buffs and the like. It might also interesting to give him a size modifier so he’s bigger than all the other characters (so we dont just have Bardin whos a different size)
What Maddred means to say is that Orks, as made in the Warhammer universe, have a mentality that makes them want to kill anything and everything that moves. They have no sense of right or wrong, they are extremely dimwitted, and they loathe the elves. They specialize in killing their own people because their war-leaders haven’t given them an enemy to fight (they are ‘fighty’, meaning they need to kill stuff to calm down).
They’ll kill themselves, they’ll kill each-other, they’ll kill the dwarves, they’ll kill the undead, they’ll kill the warriors of Chaos, they’ll kill the humies… you get the point
FatShark actually considered making them the enemy of the video games; Orks are so inherently unfriendly in the lore that the only friends they have are the ones they made by subjugating those people.
The problem with a bretonnian is that only Questing Knights are seen outside of bretonnia unless someone is marching to war. And questing knights are sworn not to sleep two nights in the same place and must constantly be on the move towards the next fight. That leaves knights of the realm, errants and grail knights. Realm knights are too busy managing their own kingdoms and are probably caught up in the civil war. Grail knights are horribly OP for vermintide’s power level, they could defeat a chaos spawn just by smacking them across the face with their divine pimp hand.
That leaves errant knights who are the youngest and dumbest, they get sent on errants to keep them out from underfoot of the more experienced knights basically. That makes them the most likely type to see outside of bretonnia that aren’t questing.
However that would still be difficult to translate into vermintide because it would be hard to parse errant knight into three classes with different ults. Plus the fact that knights consider ranged weapons a cowardly thing for peasants.
Though, honestly, I think a Grail-Knight wouldn’t actually be so far off from being on-par with our heroes. Slaying thousands of enemies in the span of 20 minutes (admittedly, it is a game and it is the way it is not for lore-accuracy but for the sake of game-play) seems right up the tireless alley of the Grail-Knight.
As opposed to a ranged weapon, maybe they could have a magic reserve and cast ‘spells?’ We’ve had a few suggestion threads for a Warrior Priest, but you could apply some of them to a rather powerful and magically inclined Knight. You could even build 3 careers out of Grail Knight alone, but it probably wouldn’t be as thematic as the careers of other characters… my ideas would require some work, for sure!
Also, as a side note (and I’m not super lore savvy so help me out here): Bretonnia fell before the empire, didn’t it? It tore itself apart in civil war with the beastmen/skaven lending a hand as part of the End-Times, and this happens far before the fall of the South-Western Reikland.
That being said, any Grail Guardian who isn’t a pompous jerk would be happy to lend a hand against the End-Times. They’re rather righteous folk and respect chivalry above all else; wouldn’t it be reasonable that a solo Knight who’s lost all of his buddies to want to help fight the evils of the world?
And too be sure, this is me trying my best to justify it because I’ve been in love with the Bretonnians since the first Warhammer army was released for them. Knights, armor, whacking people with swords, holy grails, women lying in ponds handing out swords for a basis of government… it’s just awesome!
There’s also the possibility of just giving expansion characters the one class, or even just two. The reason the original heroes have branched out is the experience they had from the first game. Bardin started as a ranger and became a ranger veteran, or he went back to his IB roots, or he became a slayer etc. Kruber started as a soldier, became a mercenary, or went back to being a hunter, or got knighted etc.
