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. We talked a lot about hitting people in the head with axes and stuff. And then at one point, I looked up and I realized that everyone else was just looking at us. 'Who are these lunatics?' We had to continue the meeting after lunch."
