In his 80-scored review, our Steven described Warhammer: Vermintide 2's combat and level design as "feverishly fun", despite struggling with its matchmaking and RPG progression. Elsewhere, he described the first-person action slasher as "maddeningly difficult". With the latter in mind, developer Fatshark is working to "remove the extreme spikes" and reduce the game's harsh learning curve.
"We have already deployed tweaks in our first patches to make the game a bit easier on recruit," Fatshark's CEO Martin Wahlund tells me when asked about Vermintide 2's inordinate difficulty. "The first goal has been to remove the extreme spikes. We have for example adjusted the minibosses that was a bit too tough for new players.
"We have also reduced the amount of elite enemies in each pack on recruit but we will of course continue to monitor and do adjustments. Watching streams of new players playing the game has been a very helpful tool for us to understand what has been the largest obstacles for new players."
Mods might play a part in this process and Fatshark plans to roll out Steam Workshop support in "late April", says Wahlund. As hinted at in this roadmap, beta-stage dedicated servers are also planned for this time.
"We've been working together with Vermintide 1 modders for the last six months to be able to build a system that both caters to the concerns our unmodded users have had with mods and offers our existing modding community more power to change more things," continues Wahlund. "For instance, during the winter we have enabled Vermintide 1 modders to start altering and adding things like textures, character models and not only code.
"All this will carry over to Vermintide 2 with the previously mentioned ability to separate the modded realm from the standard realm that our unmodded users have requested."
Wahlund explains that while he and his team don't have a set process for sanctioning mods, they will play it by ear from the outset. He adds: "This is uncharted territory for us, but being able to use the workshop's voting system down the line to allow our users to show us what mods they want is definitely not ruled out."
