I’ve barely scratched Warhammer: Vermintide 2 yet myself but if you’re hacking through fiendish hordes at an alarming pace and are starting to wonder when the planned mod support might arrive: late April is the current plan. That’s what developers Fatshark told cheery RPS fan zine PC Gamer, in a chat which also touched on intent to smooth out some of the game’s difficulty spikes, especially on lower difficulty settings.

“We’ve been working together with Vermintide 1 modders for the last six months to be able to build a system that both caters to the concerns our unmodded users have had with mods and offers our existing modding community more power to change more things,” Fatshark CEO Martin Wahlund told PCG. “For instance, during the winter we have enabled Vermintide 1 modders to start altering and adding things like textures, character models and not only code.”

“All this will carry over to Vermintide 2 with the previously mentioned ability to separate the modded realm from the standard realm that our unmodded users have requested.”

Still being low-level myself, my only mod request is oh my god remove all of these horrible crufty persistent progression systems this is more mess than many free-to-play games why can’t I just have good swords already please give me a good sword and never, ever make me craft anything ever. That’s maybe more a suggestion to Fatshark than modders. But oh my god.

Speaking of newbies with funny ideas about how the game works, Wahlund spoke a little about Fatshark wanting to smooth out some difficulty spikes. “Watching streams of new players playing the game has been a very helpful tool for us to understand what has been the largest obstacles for new players,” he said, and pointed out several recent patches trying to make microbosses and elite groups friendlier on the easiest setting.

The mid-level bosses have felt a little silly at times to me, deadly in a way that’s more frustrating than challenging – several minutes of kitting and rezzing and chipping away at vast health bars. But, as I said, I’ve been using terrible swords because oh my god this progression system.