After a rather long period of silence, Vermintide 2 has now suddenly been updated with a beta patch that brings with it numerous quality of life improvements, as well as a double XP weekend. The bots are now smarter and easier to control, there is a new Social Wheel to help you communicate on the fly, numerous enemies and weapons have received slight changes, and perhaps most interestingly of all, the much-anticipated Veteran (red) item crafting system has finally manifested itself... though not without some problems.

The way the new Veteran item crafting system works is quite simply - you need to sacrifice five Veteran items in order to create a specific one. A bit expensive, sure, but it's a pretty good way of getting ride of tons of duplicate necklaces and turning them into something that's actually useful. The only problem is that these crafted Veteran items do not come with the fancy blue glow, meaning that they are basically the same thing as your everyday orange items, thus making the whole exercise a bit pointless given the costs involved.

Thankfully, Fatshark does seem to be aware of the backlash against this specific change, so there is still hope that the new crafting system will be improved by the time Update 1.2.1 leaves beta. Once anything changes I'll make sure to let you know, but until then you might want to check out the full patch notes as there really is some interesting stuff in there. You'll find all of the details over at Steam.

While I've briefly mentioned it earlier, it's well worth repeating that there is currently a double XP event going on. It will last until 5pm UTC on October 15th, so make sure to use it to your advantage and level up any of the heroes you've been neglecting so far. Who knows, you might just find a new favorite!