Heroes,

The End Times are bleak, and what better way to raise spirits than with Sonnstill headwear to remind the heroes of Ubersreik of the positive work they're doing in holding strong and steadfast against the relentless rat-men.

For a limited time, these seasonal hats are up for grabs.

Summer may nearly be over here in Sweden, but for our heroes, it's just getting started.

See you in Ubersreik!

Hedge lähetti viestin:

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

Fatshark just deployed a patch in preparation for the release of their latest DLC:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/453280/
Patch 1.3 marks the launch of Fatsharks largest DLC to date, featuring an expansion to the map with three brand new Adventure Mode levels to explore, two new weapons to master, some neat new QoL changes that have come from community feedback and a ton of bug fixes.

New Features
Introducing the Drachenfels DLC!

• New Level: Castle Drachenfels
  
• New Level: Summoner’s Peak
  
• New Level: Dungeons
  
• New Weapon: Glaive (Wood Elf Waywatcher)
  
• New Weapon: Volley Crossbow (Witch Hunter)
  
• New Pickup: Torch. Obtainable on Dungeons to traverse dark areas
  
• New Level Feature: Spike Traps
  
• New Level Feature: The Darkness
  
• 3 New Achievements

Feature Changes

• The Map has been expanded: Prepare to travel outside of Ubersreik!
  
• Added a new Fire particle effect for Bombs
  
• Redesigned Lobby Browser
  
• AFK-detection no longer triggers during End of Level screen
  
• Chat can now be scrolled using PgUp & PgDn keys
  
• Chat text size can now be changed
  
• Chat can now be disabled: Notifications such as Player Joined, Left etc will still be shown
  
• The F1 key can now be rebound
  
• Enabled Pixel Snapping when running on 1920x1080 or above: This should make certain UI elements sharper
  
• Ammo Amount is now shown for ranged weapons in the Inventory
  
• Added an option for Overcharge Opacity
  
• Added an option for swapping Gamepad icons between Xbox or Playstation look
  
• Updated automatic hardware detection in launcher
  
• Improved the push distance of Devastating Blow

Bug Fixes

• Fixed crash: bad argument #2 to ‘distance_squared’
  
• Fixed crash: rpc_sync_interaction_state
  
• Fixed a crash related to Gutter Runners losing their target
  
• Fixed a crash in the damage system
  
• Fixed a crash in the lobby browser
  
• Fixed a locomotion crash
  
• Fixed a spawn manager crash
  
• Fixed a crash related to health bars
  
• Fixed a death zone crash
  
• Fixed an exploit on The Fall
  
• Fixed an error with German localization in Shrine of Solace
  
• Fixed a bug where the Fireball Staff effect could be seen floating beside the staff
  
• Fixed a bug where footstep sounds weren’t always playing correctly
  
• Fixed an issue with Rat Ogre pathing
  
• Fixed a bug where enemies could spawn further away than intended
  
• Fixed an issue with enemies hitting through floors and walls
  
• Fixed a bug where Stormvermin Patrols could get stuck
  
• Reworked end of level flow to solve issue with game not ending
  
• Fixed an achievement bug
  
• Fixed a resolution issue when UI not correctly scaled
  
• Fixed a bug where players could respawn with an incorrect amount of health
  
• Fixed a bug where sorting of Damage Taken in End of Level screen was inverted
  
• Fixed a bug where UI hints could get stuck on the screen
  
• Fixed an issue where rebinding Chat to left mouse button would make it impossible to use menus
  
• Fixed an area in The Enemy Below where you could end up outside the level
  
• Fixed a bug where changing the Weapon Switch Scroll Type to Off in gameplay settings and reopening the menu would show an incorrect string as the option
  
• Fixed an issue where the Bright Wizard Overcharge meters were slightly uneven
  
• Fixed a respawn point on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a bug where the Defeat screen could show up whilst starting a level
  
• Fixed a localization bug in the Forge
  
• Removed a hole in the ground where you could get stuck on Engines of War
  
• Fixed a location where Rat Ogres could get stuck on Engines of War
  
• Fixed an issue where players could respawn in an unreachable location on Engines of War
  
• Fixed a graphical artifact when holding any key during the intro cinematic
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when entering and exiting inventory quickly
  
• Fixed a bug where Stormvermin would attempt to swing through walls
  
• Fixed a bug where the matchmaking UI could get stuck if you readied up quickly after closing a menu
  
• Fixed a bug where the Innkeeper’s head could magically disappear
  
• Fixed an odd hole on Town Meeting
  
• Fixed an exploit on Town Meeting
  
• Fixed another exploit on Town Meeting
  
• Fixed a lighting issue on Town Meeting
  
• Fixed a location which bots couldn’t reach on Town Meeting
  
• Fixed an issue where you could see through part of the world on Supply and Demand
  
• Fixed a bug where enemies could spawn under the floor on Supply and Demand
  
• Fixed a bug where the ground was misplaced in a location on Supply and Demand
  
• Fixed an exploit on Supply and Demand
  
• Fixed an issue where a table could magically disappear on Supply and Demand
  
• Fixed an exploit on Horn of Magnus
  
• Fixed a culling issue on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed an odd hole on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a location where you could get stuck on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to pass through a specific area on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a bug where enemies could spawn in the starting zone on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a bug where certain objects would magically disappear on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a stretched texture bug on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in the maze on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed an issue where you could fall through the world on Garden of Morr
  
• Fixed a culling issue on Smuggler’s Run
  
• Fixed some rocks that were defying gravity, also a skull
  
• Fixed some minor glitches with Empire Soldier and Waywatcher models
  
• Fixed a bug where the backend would occasionally return an invalid ticket error
  
• Fixed a bug with the chaining of certain heavy attacks
  
• Fixed a bug where Ratling gunners would fire into walls whilst tracking their target despite not having line of sight
  
• Fixed a crash which could occur when opening a chest
  
• Fixed a bug where Trueflight arrows had trouble hitting their target
  
• Fixed a crash with the Trueflight bow

Heroes, we'll see you in Ubersreik... And beyond!

Fatshark just released a small patch which fixes another issue present in their previous release.

Thank you for reporting this to them and helping push Vermintide forward for all of the players.

- Fixed a bug where players would randomly take damage (for real this time)

Fatshark just deployed a patch to fix a number of issues that have come up since the release of 1.2.

Thank you for reporting these issues to Fatshark and helping make Vermintide even better.

- Fixed an exploit on Town Meeting
- Fixed a bug that was showing green numbers when carrying Tomes and Grimoires
- Fixed a bug where players would randomly take damage
- Fixed a bug where a Skaven horde could spawn underneath the world on Supply & Demand