Look, I love Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, but there have been a lot more videogames where first-person melee combat kind of sucks than ones where it's as fun as kicking an orc off a cliff in Dark Messiah was. There's a reason we all play Skyrim as stealth archers. When Fatshark was first working on Vermintide a decade ago, it wasn't really thinking about that, though. The team was so heads-down invested in first-person melee they were literally unaware of their surroundings.

"We were working on the hit effects on staggers and animations, a team deeply into the melee system," says chief creative officer Anders De Geer. "We all had a meeting and we talked about it, and then we went to lunch, and around the lunch table we continued talking, how it should feel and how enemies should react.

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