Hey everyone,
The year is rapidly coming to an end, and we have some news on our progress towards launching with Season 2 for Vermintide 2 on PC.
We'd also like to invite you to a Stream on Wednesday December 11th where myself and others will be on board to talk with you about Season 2! This is scheduled for 14:30 UTC over on https://www.twitch.tv/fatsharkgames.
Season 1 ended over five weeks ago, and it has been a fair while since we first spoke about our plans for Season 2 in our blog post and reddit AMA.
Since the launch of Winds of Magic, the Vermintide 2 team has been hard at work focusing on game health with smaller - less substantial updates and a larger experimental branch which went live in patch 2.0.15 after positive feedback to the changes from a lot of you folks. Thank you for testing that out and giving us all your feedback, warts and all, and helping us get closer to what we can all agree is a more stable and fair experience. Is it perfect? It’s not, but thanks to all your reports and commentary, we’re working towards it and hope that with your input, we can give you an experience you can rely on, and have a blast bashing the bad guys to bits.
Season 2 was intended to start fully in December, alongside the first of three free maps to all Vermintide 2 players as part of the ‘Curse of Drachenfels’ update. This update would also feature the long-awaited ‘Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders’ for everyone, Quick Play enabled Weaves for WoM owners, alongside other considerations as noted in the Season 2 blog post.
These plans have, given our focus on ‘game health’, been adjusted slightly. Given the success of the latest experimental test and our ongoing commitment to improving our releases, we are instead bringing the changes intended for Season 2 into a Beta Test. This test will be available - all going well - from December the 16th and runs through the festive period. This will include revisions to the Weaves (including unranked Quick Play) for Winds of Magic owners, the first of the Drachenfels maps, Lohner’s Emporium, and more. Lohner’s Emporium will be a limited experience for the time being as we test out how you interact with currency and look for edge cases in the machinations that bring it all together.
As for those playing on Xbox One and Playstation 4, we owe you an update regarding Winds of Magic and the launch of the expansion on those platforms. The cascade of events above has had an impact on our plans for Console releases, but not too dramatically. We are currently going through platform certification for the console versions, and if all goes well with that, we hope to have it with you before the year is out. We’ve been going through extensive testing for this, using both in-house and external QA teams, and we still plan to have Winds of Magic released this month on both platforms as always intended. Winds of Magic for consoles will be equivalent to patch 2.0.15 on PC, with the addition of Quick Play weaves.
Should all go well with the certification process, the above will still be true; however, the best-laid plans can trip up, and in such an event, we’d have no choice but to delay Winds of Magic on console until January 2020. While we don’t expect that to happen, there is always a chance, and so we want to be as open as possible with you now so that there are no surprises going forward. Season 2 is planned for next year including the full release of the Emporium and free Curse of Drachenfels adventure maps.
There will be cool stuff going on in 2020, from the upcoming Vermintide: Versus and much more beyond.
We hope you enjoy the beta and we look forward to reading your feedback.
Seasons greetings,
Martin / The Vermintide 2 Team