Warhammer: Vermintide 2 goes Back To Ubersreik today
The rats in the walls, and ceilings, and floors.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2's second chunk of DLC - Back To Ubersreik - is out now, bringing players back to the besieged and rat-infested city from the first game. The heroes were dramatically driven out of town in the first Vermintide's last bit of free DLC, so it should be interesting to see the old stone walls given a fresh lick of paint, and some new rats to blat. Back To Ubersreik contains three remastered missions from the original game, though Fatshark tease that "There might be more content..." - curious. A not-too-ratty launch trailer scurries around below.
Mysterious hints at dark secrets and extras to uncover have my attention, but for the most part this DLC is just three old levels restocked with Vermintide 2's new enemies, including those Chaos gits. Players will be able to delve back into the Horn Of Magnus, Gardens Of Morr and Engines Of War missions, and a bundle of new quests and challenges. Naturally there's some new loot to be found in here as well - a bunch of new weapons, plus some fancy illusion weapon-skins. Good stuff for folks who started on the second game, but perhaps a bit too familiar for returning players.
Vermintide 2 has been getting around this year. It's even infested our big advent calendar, digging deep into the December 8th door and probably eating whatever goodies we had stashed in there. We'll forgive it, though, as it's a lovely bit of co-op hack n' slashery. Its central format is lifted mostly wholesale from Left 4 Dead, but its chunky firearms, crossbows and heavy melee attacks have far more oomph than any gun I can think of in Valve's co-op zombie mash. Plus, the jabbering lunatic Skaven are far more entertaining to bash than any shambling corpse.
Sadly, it's not all good news, though. Fatshark's DLC policy has changed to something that sounds a bit more limiting, and retroactively applies to the earlier DLC, too. Here's what they say in the patch notes - bold emphasis is mine:
Our DLC policy for Vermintide 1 is something that we are very proud of. Players who owned a DLC, could invite their friends along for the ride - not everyone in the party had to be owners. We felt that was a fair deal.
But for Vermintide 2, when we released our first DLC 'Shadows over Bögenhafen', we received feedback from our players that, because of how Quickplay works, the value proposition of our DLCs wasn't all that clear.
So for this release, we're changing how access to DLC missions works. From now on, in order to have a DLC mission be selected for Quickplay - you, or another player in your Keep, will have to own that DLC.
Where it was previously possible to join a DLC mission through Quickplay, even if you didn't own that DLC, from today that won't be the case. You will have to join a friend who owns it.
These changes also affect the missions from the Shadows over Bögenhafen DLC.
We're in the process of making more finely grained options for random mission selection in Quickplay. In the next major update, planned for January, we will present players the option of playing only certain sets of missions - excluding, or including DLC levels.
The Back To Ubersreik DLC is out now on Steam for £7/€8/$10. You can find the full patch notes here.