Winds Of Magic Community Blogpost August 9, 2019

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Announcements
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Hello Vermintide Community

We wanted to provide some information for you, give a bit of insight on what is happening here at the studio.

We have launched the pre-release beta and just now an update (2.0.3) to the Winds of Magic. It has been a huge push from the team to get this pre-release beta out the door in one of our most stable build releases to date. There are still issues we are seeing and you are finding, we are working to fix these bugs asap, thank you for your patience!

One thing we have seen is an issue with enemies not staggering the way we intended, we did a big balance pass after and during the previous betaā€™s. What we shipped with was still heavy handed especially on lower difficulties making enemies feel a little more spongy or surefooted. We have pushed a fix for this in our first patch (2.0.3), so hopefully you can feel the difference.

We are committed to making this game better, to getting the balance into a good place and working on adding new content going forward.

Season 1 is going to run for 3 months ending with the ā€œGeheimnisnachtā€ event to line up with Halloween.

We are looking to kick off Season 2 Mid-December.

What things are specific to the seasons?

  • Leaderboard placement and leaderboard portrait frames
  • Weaves

How long is a season?

  • Seasons run for 3 months

What about the seasonal reset?

  • We have absolutely heard all of your feedback regarding the previously announced plans for seasonal resets, and weā€™re taking some time to redesign the specifics on how this will work for Season 2. This will take some time for us to nail down all of those details. Weā€™ll get back to you in a couple of weeks when we have further specifics to share. Do continue to share your thoughts with us!

What kinds of rewards will there be?

  • For Season 1 there are season specific portrait frames

What will be changed between seasons?

  • We will be iterating on many of the systems based on how players are playing and feedback provided

Hopefully we have answered some of your more burning questions.

We look forward to seeing you in game. Now time to get back to work :slight_smile:
Sincerely,

Vermintide Team

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Will you guys be working on making the game more stable/optimized? The amount of framerate drops that Iā€™m experiencing (and some friends have said similarly) are making the game legit unplayable. Iā€™m talking like a third of the time here, and this did not occur during the previous beta cycles.

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I second this.
Once I started up the beta, I experienced a huge FPS increase. I could crank up the game from medium to high and remain in the 90-110 FPS range.
Now itā€™s gone live, I put everything to high, then decreased shadow related settings to medium and I have like solid 50-60 FPS.
I have no idea what you guys do differently between betas and live versions, but it s*cks balls how bad the live performance of the game is compared to betas.

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I did try bumping my settings down, too - absolute minimal settings have made no difference for me.

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Appreciate the blog post, as always. But with all due respect, I donā€™t think you could be more vague about the season reset if you triedā€¦

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leaderboard portrait frames is bad idea imo

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This is largely because we understand that our original design needs revision, which is now a process weā€™re going through. We canā€™t be clearer until we know where weā€™re at, but we want to let you know weā€™re making change.

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Fair enough, thanks. Good luck thinking up the right solution, know youā€™ll figure out something. :slight_smile:

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We will be monitoring stability and pushing fixes as fast as we can manage

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Thanks for the hard work, and despite the framedrops mentioned here (and experienced by me, too), the game still runs better on higher settings then before, i see what you meant there.
Also, as you are aware, there has been a lot of discussion about crunch in the videogame industry as of late (and there absolutely should be). This is mostly coming from the U.S., iā€™m aware, and you guys have long holidays. But i also know that some kind of crunch is unevitable before a major release.
Still, if you can give us some kind of insurance that everything in that regard is a-ok at Fatshark, i would be glad to here that.

In another regard: Are you planning on releasing Lohnerā€™s Emporium with the beginning of season 2, as the next ā€˜majorā€™ update?
During stream, Martin mentioned it being the next update, with a lot of work already done before focussing on WoM.
Or is it maybe coming before the end of season one? :wink:

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Than maybe we could start by going back to the pretty solid balance we had before this stagger fiasco that is constantly being changed (wasted energy on, that is very much needed on other issues) because the feedback over all versions is like horrible-horrible-justno-horrible ā€¦ while before it was kinda only ā€œhey, shields need buffing guysā€¦ alright? And maybe, it would be nice to buff the low performers a little, weapons like 1h mace etc.ā€ which would be very easy to do compared to the constant stagger mechanic tweaking. (pushing one brick in, while 3 more pop out somewhere else)

I did not play the 2.0.3 yet, still at work butā€¦ do you guys understand that lowering the stagger resistance significantly (2.75 to 1.7) is again kinda core not-really-subtle change to the game and it will be much easier to bully enemies with everything ? That is not goodā€¦ that is another example of how more things are getting changed and moved into disordered state because of that damn stagger mechanicā€¦ canā€™t we finally drop it ?

I bet itā€™s the beastmen AI, since I notice most issue while those come into play. And thatā€™s CPU bottlenecked so, lowering graphics wonā€™t help much.

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Fatshark is the best company I have worked for especially in this regard. No forced crunch and if people want to work late they get to bank all their hours, which is nice if you get into a flow and work late, you can choose to take the morning off to sleep in or take a Friday off and flex your hours out.

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Thank you, thatā€™s a huge reliefā€¦ :sweat_smile: :heart:

Still awaiting some response to the second part. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Lowering settings that push the CPU like shadows etc seems to have a slight effect on performance.

Couldnā€™t agree more. Unfortunately for me personally itā€™s to late for Fatshark to redeem themselves. That bridge is burned. Already uninstalled and I refuse nto support them with my money anymore.

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I donā€™t have WoM installed.

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Do continue to share your thoughts with us!

Ok, here are my thoughts and suggestions :slight_smile:

  1. Seasonal rewards

There should be more than portrait frames. We already have tonnes of them, some rarer / harder to get than others, and we can only use one at a time. I understand that they are also cheap to produce for you, but we need more than cheap rewards to remain motivatedā€¦
You can keep the idea, but also add weapon skins and/or clothes. This would be more appealing, especially if only one weapon (or two : one ranged and one melee) per character gets its seasonal skin each season. This would probably make us want to collect them.
An important point : donā€™t make these rewards too elitist (this is coming from a hypertwitch player). For example, in D3, the ā€œbigā€ seasonal cosmetic (like a pet or banner) is rewarded at chapter 4 of the seasonal journey, out of 9 chapters. Most people that play during the season should earn them, not only the best / most dedicated (leaderboard glory is there for them).
In the best scenario, these could be unlocked through different ways, Weaves being only one of them (see below).

  1. A seasonal game mode

On top of weaves, which a significant part of the community doesnā€™t like / want / etc, you could add a seasonal mutator to the regular maps, through another game mode simply called ā€œseasonalā€.
An obvious choice would be winds of magic.
Since season 1 is what it is, you could begin with season 2 and make it, for instance, the season of Shyish. Then season 3 would be season of Aqshy, etc.
This way, you get an easy theme for the coming 8*3 = 24 months.
You also have an obvious theme for the rewards, with cosmetics based on the color of each wind (and eventually, their effects if you want to add shiny sparks or whatever else).
You could combine this with some deed mutators if you want to make it more interesting, but remember that it should not be too elitist.

  1. Seasonal objectives in the main game

You could add simple objectives like ā€œcomplete all missions of Helmgart during the seasonā€ for each hero, if you want to diversify cosmetic ā€œsourcesā€ and are willing to give us many for each season.
Since this is simple to do, there could be one reward per difficulty as usual, they could simply be vaults but a bunch of essence could be added to kickboost Weaves progression as you intend to reset that.
That, or make these an alternate way to get the weapon / clothing skins, for those who really donā€™t want to play Weaves but who still want to play VT2 for the coming months, and years.

Thank you for reading !

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Bardin dual hammers with lighting effects, Thor roleplay. Ahhhh, Iā€¦ I am cumming, YEEESZZSS

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I see :frowning:

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When I, along with many other people, write the reviews for Winds of Magic as a DLC, Iā€™m analyzing whatā€™s in the game now and whatā€™s not in the game. While I appreciate the effort and dedication to Winds of Magic at some level, I hope you understand that I am not writing ā€œwell thereā€™s some cool stuff coming in Decemberā€ as part of the review. If Iā€™m still around to change the review in December, that stuff may cause me to change my recommendation significantly. But, in many cases, players donā€™t stick around to postpone judgment on something and adjust their reviews accordingly. As weā€™ve seen with the base gameā€™s negative reviews as of late, players arenā€™t even postponing judgment about the gameā€™s state until WoM is officially released.

Look at No Manā€™s Sky, for an extreme example. From what I hear, the game is actually not too bad nowadays. The gameā€™s updates didnā€™t just wipe out the 50,000 negative reviews for the game regarding its earlier state. Thatā€™s something the game had to work through for quite some time.

What is probably going to get a mention in the review for WoM? Probably some positive things for sure about the new map, the new weapons, and etc. What else is going in:

  • Thereā€™s no Twitch mode for Beastmen and thereā€™s no Cataclysm Deeds, which kinda shows how the update callously disregards those two systems by not interacting with them at all.

  • Thereā€™s no extra loot for playing Cataclysm. Currently, I have more fun playing Twitch Legend and I get more loot than Cataclysm.

  • Thereā€™s no new weapon illusions available to the regular mode, no new character skins, and no new hats. Thereā€™s a smattering of portrait frames to unlock for the Weaves, Cataclysm, and the new map.

  • The Okriā€™s Challenges for Cataclysm give commendation chests for beating Legend challenges on Cataclysm, when beating them on Legend gives Emperorā€™s Vaults and a cool portrait frame.

  • The tedium, the grind of unlocking my weapons to experiment in the Weaves. How I have to pay Essence to unlock a different weapon and then use more Essence to make it good enough to use.

  • The progression pace of the Weaves.

  • The fact that my friends have to buy the DLC to join the new game mode, so I have difficulty progressing normally through the Weaves without bots, friends, or random players regularly joining.

  • The static nature of the Weaves, so thereā€™s significantly less replayability unless youā€™re trying to speedrun to compete for a better time.

  • The Beastmen seem almost omnipresent on maps once you get the DLC, so you look for safe-havens like Into the Nest and Skittergate for a change of pace because they feel significantly harder than the regular enemies.

Now a lot of the things above are up-in-the-air right now, so theyā€™re subject to change between now and Tuesday. Itā€™s a pre-release beta, and Iā€™m probably not even going to write my review until at least after Iā€™ve experimented with the released version over the next weekend.

Whatā€™s not going into the review? The things that are ā€œon the tableā€ for next season. The things that are ā€œsomething weā€™re looking intoā€. The things that are ā€œbeing consideredā€. Iā€™m not writing the review based on anything you say is in season 2 or season 3 or season 8, just like I didnā€™t write ā€œgoing to add dedicated serversā€ or ā€œpotential to add new characters/classesā€ in my review for the base game. Iā€™m not writing the review based on the untapped potential of the Weaves, because I could write very good things in general about the gameā€™s potential, but thatā€™s not what a review is for. Itā€™s for the current state of the product being reviewed.

Thatā€™s my perspective. If Iā€™m still getting a lot of bugs and crashes, I may adjust my recommendation of the base game itself as well, but I want to review the Winds of Magic for the content thatā€™s there, not the content that could be there. If the content here now isnā€™t capturing me, Iā€™m not going to be enticed by the future content.

Thatā€™s all. I am glad from the other post that thereā€™s no significant crunch to force a lot of change and work to scramble in the update. Iā€™m glad the work-life balance is okay. Iā€™ll consider that when writing the review in a positive way. I appreciate the effort you all are putting in the game.

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Yes, we are aiming to have this out around the same timeframe

Try it and let us know :slight_smile:

Valid points, we wanted to start with things we could sustain and work towards growing to new things if we can

For now weaves is our seasonal game mode, and we will be making changes with each season, so keep adding your ideas to the forums for ideas for what we could try next coming in!

Thank you for taking the time to write this, appreciate the bullet points :slight_smile:

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