Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide

Originally posted by Hedge:

Heroes,

There is no doubt that there has been some concern over where we’ve been (and where the updates are). We’ve had a number of unfortunate delays lately, and a lot of us have been away for holidays.

The good news is that we’re still alive and we’re still working on delivering updates to Vermintide! Including the Summer Solstice event, Quests & Contracts update and the ever important stability and bug fixes.

I’d like to take this opportunity to add voice from our side to hopefully address some of your concerns or at least share with you where we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going.

As we often see, game development never quite goes the way you think it will. (Did you know that Grand Theft Auto was originally a car crashing and racing game titled Race’n’Chase?)

We had a great plan for the summer which unfortunately didn’t stand the test of reality. We missed a number of deadlines, causing something of a snowball effect that ended up impacting our plan as a whole. Fixes that should have gone live long ago are still waiting to go and we’re sorry they have been left unaddressed for so long. Key members of our team became needed in more place than one and long evenings and weekends have been spent trying to catch up on missed deadlines. In other words, not an ideal situation.

We’ve held several meetings over the last few weeks to discuss what went wrong to make sure we can learn from our mistakes and avoid them in the future. Vermintide is our largest project ever in terms of scale and team size and we’re definitely still learning to both handle it, and do it justice.

Back in May, we had plans to release the free Quests & Contracts DLC along-side the Drachenfels DLC.

Since the release of Vermintide we’ve been hard at work on lots of new backend functionality that introduces some neat new possibilities and speeds up development. Both the Quest System and Summer Event utilize this “new backend” and are, as such, dependant on it being released alongside or before them.

We met with problems in rolling the new backend out in time and had to delay Quests to a date which we felt we could be confident the new backend would be ready for public consumption. Having Quests come out with Drachenfels would have been be a great marriage of releases as there would be cool new ways to interact with the new levels, as well as adding more rich rewards to players playing old levels as well. Alas, it was not to be.


Because the Drachenfels DLC did not require the new backend for release, we went and released it as per schedule. Around this time we reviewed the status of the Quests & Contracts DLC again.

The new backend worked in the traditional sense but had this one truly boggling bug that really did not make much sense. It wasn’t game breaking by the QA definition of the word, but you’d really have not appreciated it at all. Not understanding the cause was also a red flag warning us that other issues may be caused by that one.

With Drachenfels now live and experiencing some stability issues (some the result of exploits, some just fairly atypical problems), as well as some new bugs (and sure, some old!), we had already begun work on a juicy patch to remedy these. The plan was for this patch to now coincide with the release of the new backend and also introduce the Summer Solstice event.
In other words, the patch we built relied on the new backend going live alongside it.
Hands up - this was another mistake on our part, because once again we missed the deadline for the new backend.

We truly expected to have released a patch and have the work for the Summer Solstice event complete in time for midsummer where we’d planned to toy with a new type of event for Vermintide. We hinted it on our livestream back on June 16th and had planned on having it live (along with Quests) in time for the Steam Summer Sale. Alas, the issue prevailed and evolved, and we had simply no choice but... to delay.

There’s that word again - delay. Perhaps the theme of this summer. This delay like those that came before it continued the vicious snowball effect and with the vacation period rapidly approaching, the snowball grew and got uglier. Key team members who were first tasked to work with the backend and with Quests development had already been scheduled for other pressing tasks and key production requirements for the start of the summer period with the (at the time) fair assumption their work on Quests and the back end would be complete. Scheduled vacations were taken (people of course have bookings, bookings that no reasonable employer can suddenly disregard).

So, here we are - and it certainly might look like we’ve gone nowhere.

The good news is that we’re getting pretty close to finally being able to fulfil those missed promises and soon deliver new content in the form of Quests, Summer Solstice, bug fixes and stability resolutions. We also have more exciting content seeing polish which hasn’t been mentioned above.

What remains now is the final work on the new backend and our final testing pass. I’m going to respect the Curse of Delays here and avoid promising any dates for this. We’ll keep you in the loop as best we can going forward (our weekly livestreams will resume shortly) and hope to ship the bug fixes and new content as soon as we can.

We hope that this open letter gives a centralised text for you to get an understanding of what’s happened. Feel free to vent below, share your thoughts or draw a picture of a cat - should you so wish. We’ll try our best to answer any questions you might have.

Thanks

TL;DR - We missed several deadlines (announced and internal), we made several mistakes, we’ve been hard at work catching up.

Hedge
Fatshark Community and Social Media Manager | @Fatshark_Hedge