Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s Endgame Just Got Way More Interesting

You’ve probably heard it before: Pretty much any hardcore action-RPG player will tell you that their game of choice only really begins in the endgame. This is when the player’s interest slowly migrates from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, from mastering the game’s basic mechanical concepts to engaging in big-picture activities like min-maxing character builds or hunting specific pieces of rare loot. In action-RPGs, the endgame often signifies the introduction of the metagame, the point at which the game’s pleasures are as much about maintenance and routine as they are about minute-to-minute combat. The specificity of the endgame’s challenge quests thus becomes less meaningful as they simply become vehicles towards a larger goal.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2’s latest expansion, Winds of Magic, takes a unique approach to its own endgame, however. Instead of setting its players loose in a series of randomly generated dungeons in search of randomly generated loot, Winds of Magic presents players with carefully hand-crafted, consistent challenges called Weaves that are designed to get more and more punishing every time the player completes them. Winds of Magic refuses to settle for an endless grind as an endgame; instead, it seeks to introduce new types of challenges that demand different kinds of mastery.

Fatshark, the game’s developers, wanted Winds of Magic to provide every kind of player with an extra challenge. “Our players take Vermintide 2 at their own pace; some reached a challenge ceiling quite soon after Vermintide 2’s release, some are reaching it now, and some may never reach it,” Gameplay Programmer Tom Batsford said. “Despite this, we wanted to add a system that could challenge all of our players regardless of skill level.”

That’s where Weaves come in. Weaves consist of passages from previous levels that have been modified by a number of special effects. Each Weave ends in a final, arena-type challenge in which the player must brave waves of enemy forces. Defeating a Weave unlocks another level of difficulty, which heightens the effects of its modifiers.

Each Weave’s set of modifiers corresponds to a Wind of Magic. “Within the Warhammer universe, magic in all its manifestations can be broken down into eight Winds of Magic,” Batsford explained. These Winds each have different visual representations and dramatically change the look and feel of every Weave, even though Weaves borrow from levels you’ve played before.

What’s most intriguing about the Wind system is that many of them are balanced in such a way that their modifiers have both benefits and drawbacks. Weaves imbued with the Golden Wind, for instance, make armored enemies tougher to kill but trigger a “bladestorm” ability any time one is downed. Weaves imbued with the Celestial Wind, on the other hand, level the playing field by striking both players and enemies with lightning if they remain still for long enough.

Fatshark explains that the only limit to the new game mode is a player’s will. “The intention is to make each Weave progressively more difficult to a point where even our most stalwart players cannot complete them,” Batsford said. Since Winds of Magic’s Weaves are fixed and non-random, players are expected to learn the ins and outs of a Weave to beat it at higher levels. Furthermore, online leaderboards will allow players to compete with each other to beat world records for different Weaves.

This leads to a completely new way of conceiving challenge in Warhammer: Vermintide 2. It gives the endgame a much more concrete direction: instead of working towards a character build just for the hell of it, players might be incentivized to develop a character build to meet the challenges of a specific Wind. Additionally, the fixed nature of Weaves allow them to function more like puzzles than combat challenges, which force players to rely more on their ability to recognize patterns in enemy behavior and memorize level layouts than on their gear.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Winds of Magic will be available for PC on August 13.