10 million people grabbed Vermintide 2 while it was free
The Trail of Treachery free DLC is live too.
With the release of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide just weeks away, and the original Vermintide turning seven in October, developer Fatshark has been celebrating with an event called 7 Years of Tide. It began with a Vermintide 2 giveaway, with the co-op fantasy Chaos hunt free to keep from November 3–7 on Steam. As Fatshark boasts in its latest news post, 10 million people claimed a copy during that period, which made the four-year-old tribute to Left 4 Dead bounce back into the top 10 of Steam's most played games by daily players.
Though the giveaway has ended, Fatshark's celebration hasn't. The first half of a free DLC called A Treacherous Adventure is now live, adding a new map called Trail of Treachery. It's a snowy mountain pass you need to escort a caravan through as they carry a warding stone to the village of Tockstadt, where the second half of A Treacherous Adventure will presumably be set. Watch out for avalanches, and hordes of skaven.
The latest update also brings extra premium cosmetics in a collection called Absent Friends. There's a hat and a skin for each hero, including one for Saltzpyre that gives him one of those miner's helmets with the candle balanced on it that seems pretty precarious to me. Meanwhile, Kerillian gets a cursed set of dark elf armor and Kruber a full set of plate.
A simultaneous patch brings Vermintide 2 up to version 4.8, dealing with issues like "players losing health when returning through the Skittergate" and "a skip where cheeky Battle Wizards could teleport to the portal early in the Be'lakor Arena" per the patch notes. If you're put off the idea of reinstalling Vermintide 2 by its install size, it seems to have been reduced in this update, bringing it down to a 60 GB download for an 85 GB install. That's still hefty, but Vermintide 2 used to take up 94 GB of real estate, ranking it among the biggest game installs on PC.