Exclusive Interview with Fatshark's CEO: How to not ship broken games and more

One of the surprise hits on PC last year is about to release on console, and that gave us here at GameZone an excuse to visit developer Fatshark again, and who are we to pass up an opportunity like that?!

Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide was one of last year's surprise hits on PC, it chased down Dark Souls 3 six months after Vermintide’s initial release on Steam, and managed to sell over 500.000 copies in half a year. Now console players will be able to get their hands on this Left 4 Dead-inspired fantasy-style, rat-slaying, first-person-shooter/melee game.

Recently, a lot of multiplatform games have released with one of the versions being awful. Vermintide's CEO, Martin Wahlund, took the time to assure us and eager fans that Vermintide won’t be another Arkham Knight on PC, Vermintide will be a good console game and not just another port.

So, with premium coffee from a premium coffee machine placed inside a premium factory building on Södermalm in Stockholm, Sweden, in hand, a very serious CEO and an even more serious journalist sat down and had a serious chat about Vermintide, PlayStation 4 Pro, VR, and the future of Fatshark. The interview was done in a three square meter gaming room which should be called “The Chamber of Inspiration.” For it's hidden behind a wall of Warhammer figurines and a can of Swedish Surströmming (Google it), and in this room they “test” various games for “inspiration.” It’s hard work making games.

Also, the coffee at Fatshark is better than what they serve at Paradox, sorry guys. 

Without further ado, join Martin Wahlund and me for an engaging and in-depth interview about a little bit of everything.

The whole interview was conducted in Swedish and was translated into English by me, beware of mistakes!

Atle: Let’s starts with a not so serious question: if you had to pick any game that has already been developed to be developed by Fatshark instead, what would that game be?

Martin Wahlund: Everquest.

A: Alright, now we can start with the serious stuff. It has been about six months since I was here last and a lot has happened, more importantly, Vermintide has been announced for consoles, which is one of the main reasons I am here, can you tell us a little about the process behind the console release?

M: Yes, the console release is a bit special, for one we decided to separate them (the PC and console versions) to enable us to focus on making it a console game. Vermintide played quite well on console to start with, but there is always things you want to push a bit further, polish a bit more, work more with the controller input, UI, and all that to make everything feel like it was made for consoles. I mean, Vermintide has a big melee focus, something we are grateful for, which is something that works well with a controller, for example, that’s one of the great things about it. 

The process has taken much more time than we anticipated, and longer to get it out that we thought. We thought we would be able to release Vermintide much quicker, but we haven’t been happy about the status Vermintide has been in until now, so we waited until we felt that the game was ready to be played.

A: So it’s a bit difficult to develop from PC to console?

M: No, it’s not really difficult, it’s easier than it has ever been, back in the day it was much more challenging, for us, it’s mostly about the gameplay aspect. You have to think about that there are different types of players, and they play in a variety of ways, of course, that’s easy to forget. In one case you sit with mouse and keyboard in front of a PC monitor alone, and in the other, you sit on a sofa with a controller with a bit more distance to the screen you’re playing on. 

That’s a few of the things you need to consider. And of course, the input, menus, the interface, and such. Then there are things we discovered during development that we want to improve on from the PC version, things we felt weren’t that sound from the PC version, things we could improve to make the game better, and these improvements have been implemented in both the console and PC versions. 

So there’s that as well, it’s not just purely console related stuff, we want to make general improvements. We have also added much more content than we had on PC, more maps, like the two DLC packs that have been released on PC already. We are trying to keep both versions as close to each other as possible when it comes to content.

A: So it takes time because you want to make a console game and not just a fast...

M: Exactly! We don’t want to make a port! That’s the most important thing for us not to do; It’s not supposed to feel like a port where we cut corners. Because sometimes when you play a game, you feel it, often it’s on PC where it feels like everything was made for consoles and that’s pretty bad. Sure, it’s more work, but compared to making a whole new game it’s not that much. It’s mostly testing, test the game, make sure you get the right feeling. To make the features usually goes pretty quick, what takes time is to make everything feel right.

A: Like you said, there are a few bad examples when it comes to porting games, like Arkham Knight on PC, what are the dangers with making the same game on different platforms.

M: Haha, I’m not sure really, it’s mostly that you don’t adapt the game for the platform. There’s a whole lot of dangers, and they all are on different levels. When you go from PC to console, it’s still hardcore gamers, but if you go from lets' say a tablet or Set-Top box TV or something like that there are bigger differences. On a tablet or a phone, you can’t have long game sessions because sometimes you get a phone call so you can’t have a game where you must play 30 minutes otherwise your progress will be lost. But when you go from PC to console the big difference is the feeling of the game; you can feel what platform the game was made for.

A: I was browsing your forums, and it seems like the PC players feel like there hasn’t been a lot of new content lately, what do you have to say to them?

M: We have worked quite a bit with PC content and recently we have worked with future-proofing and upgrading our background systems. We had a pretty aggressive schedule for new content, but we have felt that there have been things we want to improve, and we have put in the time and focus on building for the future as well. I would say that there is much to come. 

The thing with working with game development is that you have this big system, and you are working in different branches of development, and you have to get everything as tight as possible, and there has also been a lot of testing to make sure that everything is tested and works as intended. So there’s a lot of new content on the way for PC as well within the next few months. It gives us time to test everything, and a lot of the improvements that have been implemented on consoles will also be coming to PC as well.

There will be more content for PC, of course, we have at least, or I shouldn’t say too much otherwise the production will get mad at me, but we have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline. And then there is the fact that we are a small team, sometimes we underestimate how much it takes to create new content. We aren’t like some of the big publishers or developers where they can build a lot of DLC simultaneously, have them ready at launch, and then sit on them and release them over time. 

We worked on getting everything we had ready for launch and after that we could start building, which isn’t the best since we want to release content earlier than we did. I even said that I wanted the first big DLC one month after launch and then try and have new content each month, that was the goal. The thing is, you may be able to build but it is hard to test it all, you don’t want to release broken content, you want to avoid that. 

The process is to take it from an idea to produce it, test it, balance it, and release it because we don’t want to ruin the game either because that’s also a classic move when you update a game wildly, and it ends up ruining the game. But we have become better at it, and I hope that in the future we will be able to have a better plan and be able to communicate better. 

The problem is that we don’t always know when we will be ready. We are working as hard as we can so we have said that “it should be done,” but then we discover a bug that we can’t look past so we have to fix it before we go live, and that makes the whole process more time-consuming.

Generally, it’s something we are working on, becoming better at releasing content, I would have loved to release more content, maybe even more experimental content, but we are getting there. But it has to feel right and needs to be made as good as possible. PC players are our core and heart, those we have worked with and have bought the game, so of course, we will keep on supporting them, there’s no discussion about it, it is very important for us. 

We also want to become more transparent than we already are, we try and be transparent but the problem with being transparent is that you say things you believe and then things happen and circumstances change and of course people get disappointed, and I understand that. We are still working really hard with the game, we were about to start with a different project, but we still haven’t started it, we are still focusing 100 percent on Vermintide.

A: They will probably be pleased to hear that! Is there any worry from your side about releasing such a multiplayer focused game on console considering that games like Titanfall and Evolve died pretty fast?

M: No, we haven’t worried about it that much really. Hmm, how should I put it... Of course, multiplayer is always high risk but making multiplayer games is also high reward since it’s fun to play together and to have a player base. The good thing about consoles is that the player base builds up over time. And there is also various methods of getting new players into the game, and we are working with that on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. 

But of course, it’s always something to worry about when making multiplayer. It’s always a concern that “oh, there’s no one playing” but the advantage we have is that you only need four players, you will be able to play as long as there are four players who want to jump in and play. That’s the thing, there doesn’t have to be 100,000 people online for us to be able to play the game, and if you want only to play two-player with bots, then that also works, even if it’s more fun to play with other players. 

A: So that’s not something you have given much thought?

M: No not really, what we have thought about this is to have bots so if you want to start the game on your own, then you should be able to until someone jumps into your game.