We’ve interviewed Lead Level Designer Rickard, Lead Sound Designer Anton, and Lead Gameplay Programmer Theodor about their work on the upcoming free level for Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Return to the Reik!
“My name is Rickard and I've been a Level Designer since the beginning of humankind, I think. [Laughs] I started doing levels for my uncle when Doom came out, that’s almost 30 years ago now. Since then it’s been a hobby, but for the last 15, 20 years it’s been my profession. And it just keeps getting more fun.” ~ Rickard
‘Return to the Reik’ is a re-imagining of one of Vermintide 1’s most popular levels, ‘The River Reik’, which is part of the Death on the Reik DLC. For those not familiar, this level has our Heroes crash into the river bank, fighting off hordes of Skaven as they follow the shore, trudge through caverns, and even sail a ship which gets boarded by the dastardly ratmen! In Vermintide 2, our Heroes are returning to these treacherous waters in search of a family heirloom, and they’ll find that much has changed in the seven years since their last visit!
“We started to think about what we should do for the 10 Years of Tide celebration. So, we looked at all of the old levels and we checked all our forums and what our fans wanted most and I think every query we made ended up with the River Reik level because it's such an epic, different level.” ~ Rickard
The first order of business was porting the original level into Vermintide 2, which took some work just to get running. After updating it and fixing all the errors, we ended up with a playable version of said level and began testing.
However, we wanted to do more than just port the original level, we wanted to make a new experience as our Heroes return to this place, similar to how we re-imagined other Vermintide 1 levels, like Drachenfels. Players familiar with the original will recognize a lot of it, but we also added more side paths, redid the terrain on various areas, added more encounters, and overall updated the level to represent the years that had passed since our last visit.
“We wanted to make something more. So every developer who played it had to give their input on what they wanted. And some were crazier than others, of course!” ~ Rickard
While the original map wasn’t necessarily short, we still wanted to add even more stuff to it, both for the sake of variety and just to make it a properly packed level worthy of celebrating 10 Years of Tide with! Skaven aren’t the only enemies lurking in these waters anymore! Chaos encampments and even raiding ships join the dangers of the River Reik, and we have caverns that act as both a shortcut, and lair of who knows what beastie…
Like last time, you’ll have the chance to board and sail a ship along the river, only the ride will be even wilder this time! Luckily, the ship you’ll be boarding sports a nifty set of cannons, which will be quite useful to fend off the approaching Skaven and Rotblood vessels! Mid-sail combat features more prominently in Return to the Reik, and they not only last longer, but also feature more of them, with unique encounters and new challenges to deal with! Timing your cannon shots to sink the enemy ships circling your boat like sharks while fending off boarders is no easy feat, eh?
“It’s so fun to be able to use the cannons. That’s something that I’m kind of proud of, that I actually got it working, ‘cause it was such a struggle, haha.” ~ Rickard
There’s also plenty of new challenges and secrets to uncover, along the usual search for hidden Tomes and Grimoires. Those of you with a passion for exploration will find many nooks and crannies to look into!
“I know some of our testers said it was almost too much to do, haha. [...] The cool thing was, we said we wanted to convert some of the Vermintide 1 levels [...] and someone said we’re not gonna be able to do River Reik, it’s too complicated, it was made so long ago and I just- I went ‘Okay, that’s a challenge, I will do it.’ [...] It took me like two days just to understand how it was actually made. [...] We had to update a lot of code to get everything working like it did in Vermintide 1.” ~ Rickard
Thankfully most of the assets in the level were already updated by the time we began work on it, but various of the models and texture that weren’t already used in Vermintide 2 definitely needed to be updated or even re-done. But it was the ship sailing mechanics that took the most effort, more on that later!
“There were so many things going on, but I think we got it to work, and it was worth it. Very worth it. [...] It’s been an honour to be working with one of the coolest levels.” ~ Rickard
“I am Theodor, I’m the Lead Gameplay Programmer at Vermintide. [...] I do racing on my free time, driving cars… I drive a Chevrolet Nova 1968!” ~ Theodor
Elevators have never been a big part of Vermintide, and so while they function well enough for their usual purpose, a lot of work had to be done to improve them for Return to the Reik. That’s because the times where the ship our Heroes will be boarding is moving around, the game treats it as a giant elevator moving horizontally.
“When a game is so big, there’s so many layers that can go wrong when you want to move a lot of things along something else and have that look good and proper. It’s not as simple as just attaching a player to the elevator, because that would break so many other things.” ~ Theodor
A lot of the jittering and sudden movements that players have while riding elevators, or the fact that blood splatters and items cannot follow along, are just a couple of things that are just fine in regular elevators but don’t quite cut it when you spend such a huge part of the level riding one.
“Now if you die with a Tome on you or something, it won’t just detach on the elevator, it will actually be brought along with the elevator.” ~ Theodor
Not only that, but all of the fighting done onboard the ship presented a lot of challenges getting the game to synchronize things well visually, as the boat has its own animation of swaying and rocking with the waters. These random movements are not synchronized between the players, and so figuring out how to make the movements of the players and items make sense according to what each client thinks the boat is doing was a huge headache.
It was a struggle against both the game physics and networking to make this boat ride as smooth as possible, but the end result was worth it. And, while the improvements were mostly made for the sake of Return to the Reik, these changes will also affect all elevators across Vermintide 2.
“My name is Anton, I’ve worked as a Sound Designer for around 10 years now, maybe a bit more. I started out in movies, commercials, trailers the first six years of my career. So I came from that part of sound designing, I worked almost exclusively with linear stuff. Then I transitioned more and more into gaming [...] I’ve always had gaming as a hobby of mine, I’ve always been gaming, so that’s never been an issue. And I’ve always been interested in audio in games!” ~ Anton
You might remember Anton from our previous Sound Design dev blog on A Parting of the Waves! This time around, one of the big challenges was updating the sound design from the original River Reik, figuring out what changes needed to be made and how to implement the sounds for the new additions.
“When we as a team decided we were remastering River Reik, I was really hyped because I like the idea. Like, boats! It’s different, it’s fun. But it’s also a bit scary to take on a challenge that’s already been designed, and it’s already been out there, in Vermintide 1. [...] Like, how much can I change without players feeling that I took something away, or changed too much? It’s a tricky balance.” ~ Anton
Many things have changed since Vermintide 1, such as various constraints no longer being an issue, enemy density being much higher, overall sound quality improving, and so on. This meant that every sound effect in River Reik had to be looked into, to figure out what was acceptable, what needed to be replaced, and what could be improved.
“The mix in Vermintide 2 is completely changed so naturally I had to change a lot of stuff to make it work with our new gameplay. [...] There were a lot of really nice assets from Vermintide 1. I reused almost all of the music we had in River Reik, because we felt like that’s a nice homage [...] and it still sounds really good. We still have the original recordings from the music, so it was just for me to re-implement it.” ~ Anton
Even regular sounds like the chirping of birds, the creaking of the wooden hull, the sound of a cellar door, everything got a pass. But of course the most fun to be had was in implementing the sounds of cannons firing, boats ramming and explosions!
All of the new editions required new sound effects, the sea encounters in particular. The howling wind, the rushing waters, a moody ambiance for the short time of calmness our Heroes might enjoy before being attacked.
“There was a lot of work with the Chaos ships. Because those we haven’t done before, so I’ve added drums and chanting from the Chaos ships to make them more threatening, which was really fun.” ~ Anton
On top of that, the finale of the level has, to put it lightly, received some major modifications to make it more climactic and exciting, and the sound design had to be changed accordingly. A proper grand finale, with the booming toll of Skaven bells and so much more.
Despite how much work and attention to detail was put into these parts of the level, it was actually the Voice Over that presented the biggest challenge in sound design. Without spoiling too much, there’s a particular section where our Heroes are searching an area for something, and the dialogue system had to accommodate for tons of variables and dynamic situations. It might seem simple, but the logic of how to handle each Hero reporting each location, how to handle multiple of these events at once, or what to do when they finally found what they were looking for was a lot of manual work.
“Those small details are always, hilariously enough, the things that take the most time.” ~ Anton
“My favorite part is definitely the Chaos sea battle encounter, because it’s so fun to make use of something new. I mean we have been firing cannons, like for Brachsenbrücke, but not in this way, this way you actually have control over it.” ~ Rickard
“What can beat the boat ride– I mean, plunder and adventure on the seas?” ~ Anton
“It’s so hard not to say ‘the boat part’... I really like the last stand, fighting the enemies back while you’re preparing to leave. [...] And I love all the dynamic parts of how we implemented the boat into combat, and how we made it an actual interactive part of the level.” ~ Theodor
Return to the Reik features not just exciting adventures, but also more mysteries to solve, questions that won’t be answered in this level alone! While we can’t say anything more, suffice to say that this won’t be the last map we make, and that we’re already looking into what can come next in the adventures of the Ubersreik Five.
That’s all for now! We hope you have a blast with Return to the Reik when it comes out!
- The Vermintide Team