Vermintide 2 screenshot of Sienna against the Beastmen

[Update #2]: Vermintide 2's Winds of Magic expansion has now fully arrived for PC players. The console versions are still under development, though no release date has been announced just yet.

[Update]: Vermintide 2's Winds of Magic expansion is already playable for those that have pre-ordered!

Vermintide 2's Winds of Magic expansion is set to arrive this August, bringing with it an absolutely massive array of changes. We're getting a complete overhaul of the combat system, a whole batch of new talents, Beastmen as new enemies, Cataclysm as a new and brutal difficulty setting, as well as pre-set Weaves in order to give challenge-seeking players a chance to prove themselves to the world.

However, as you might imagine given the quantity and severity of the changes, not all of the additions have been received positively by the playerbase. So in order to ease some of the concerns, as well as to showcase just what they plan to do with Winds of Magic, Fatshark has now released a rather lengthy "note from the team" discussing the expansion and some of its potential pitfalls.

While there is unfortunately no way for me to summarize their post given that it's all very specific, there is one thing I would like to highlight - Fatshark's feedback-gathering process, as well as how they react to community concerns:

"We use many different methods to gather feedback. We see the forums as a place for the community to gather and discuss things in a friendly manner," reads the developer update. "When it comes to how we asses all feedback and then push design changes forward, we don’t serve people based on what they want, we serve people based on what they need. We do not and will not cater to any specific group, we do our best to listen to everyone and take their thoughts into consideration when looking at what the game needs most." 

A certainly interesting idea, though one that tends to be difficult to put into practice. After all, you can't exactly please everyone, as the Winds of Magic expansion has already proven given that a fairly vocal part of the community seems completely underwhelmed with the pre-set and leaderboard focused Weaves. That said, Fatshark has managed to get Vermintide 2 into a pretty great shape through the last few patches, so hopefully they'll be able to pull off another miracle with Winds of Magic as well.

Once the full release date gets announced I'll make sure to let you know, but until I'd recommend you read the whole developer update over at Reddit.