WARHAMMER 40,000: DARKTIDE
WARHAMMER 40,000: DARKTIDE is coming, so grab your torch and chainsword
Grab your torch and chainsword
After more than five years surrounded by Vermintide’s skittering, shrieking Skaven, Fatshark has jumped into the grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000. Darktide pits another four brave souls against unrelenting waves of monstrous enemies in a city being corrupted by the power of Chaos. It’s a meat grinder, but you get to be the teeth, chewing through hordes, leaving nothing but dismembered body parts in your bloody wake. And this time, there are chainswords.
There was a teaser trailer in July last year, but since then Fatshark hasn’t given much away about its next co-op outing. Chatting to the team, it’s clear they’re being careful about what exactly they reveal at what is still a fairly early stage. They want to keep some surprises, but there’s also much that’s still up in the air. They’re asking themselves a lot of questions about Darktide’s final form.
“We are still iterating on it and still trying to find our feet,” says
Fatshark co-founder Martin Wahlund. “It’s all about the fun factor and getting it right, and getting the feeling right. We want to welcome Vermintide players, but we also want to make sure that everyone who hasn’t played them is just as welcome, and we need to onboard them in a good way.”
What is clear is that Darktide expands on Vermintide rather than completely reinventing it. You charge into missions with three friends, slaughter your way through enemies – with occasional breaks for some problem solving – and over the course of your misadventures you grow stronger, get better equipment, and maybe tart yourself up with some cosmetic flourishes. Within that familiar routine, however, Fatshark is tinkering away and planning some significant changes, with seemingly every little system being put under the microscope.
GRIM TIDINGS
The setting, of course, necessitates some of these changes. This is the far-flung future, so there’s fancy tech, guns everywhere, and gargantuan hive cities that house billions of people. But this is still a universe with knights who wade into battle with swords and shields. There’s a
“AS WE’VE SEEN IN VERMINTIDE, PLAYERS REALLY ENJOY TWEAKING THEIR LOADOUTS”
medieval fantasy element amid the gun-toting sci-fi, which means there’s the potential for a lot more flexibility.
“We want to make it possible for players to play in more ways,” says Wahlund. “So we’re going to have way more customisation than we had in Vermintide. We work in a lot of that, and you’ll see more varied characters.” He stops short of actually unveiling the full list of who exactly we’ll be playing, unfortunately. The Imperial guardsman is the only one that’s been confirmed, though more have been shown off in concept art and trailers, including a huge ogryn.
Fatshark’s desire for variety has manifested itself in several ways, and the most fundamental, perhaps, is melee and ranged combat now sharing the spotlight. Vermintide is a first-person melee series with several ranged options, but in Darktide it’s an even split. Guns are extremely common in 40K, but the tabletop fights still frequently devolve into close-quarters brawls; and this makes even more sense within the confines of a hive city. What you use depends on the mission you’re on, as well as the specific encounter, so character builds are becoming more situational.
“Expanding the gameplay loop to include a ranged component and seeing how we can push that to provide a better variety of gameplay experiences also connects with the loadout choices that you make both personally and as a team,” says game designer Mats Andersson. “You get to play very targeted group setups, or make one with a very wide variety of different playstyles. If you look at Vermintide II, you are more pigeonholed than we want to make this type of game. We want to provide more options for you to approach the same kind of content.”
HIVE MINDS
Before they delve back into the infested hive for another mission, the squad can prepare for the challenge with more granular customisation – it’s not just about picking the right tools and accessories for the job. Fatshark is also considering things like talents for weapons, not just characters, and generally more ways to let you refine your character and get that alluring progression buzz.
“As we’ve seen in Vermintide, players really enjoy tweaking their loadouts,” says creative director Anders De Geer. “And since we have a lot of great modders, they also want to tweak individual weapons, talents and other stuff. So we are working with a system right now that will allow players to have way more freedom than they had in Vermintide to customise their toolkit when they go into a mission.”
This is something Fatshark’s already been trying to do more in Vermintide II – letting players have more control over their rat-slaying adventures, via everything from rebalancing weapon choices to introducing entirely new subclasses as DLC. In Darktide, though, it sounds like an even more targeted approach is going to be cropping up everywhere from the off.
You can’t make choices about loadouts and talents without proper intel, and that’s where the mission map comes into play. This is the evolution of Vermintide II’s rather plain mission board and offers up a selection of crises affecting the various sectors of the gargantuan city. The idea is that you’ll be able to see, at a glance, just how intense the mission will be and what modifiers are affecting it, like acid rain or blackouts. The city is constantly changing, too, with missions vanishing and maps you’ve already explored getting a refresh thanks to some fresh quirks.
“In Vermintide II, a lot of the dynamism came from the conflict director and how we spawned the
enemies,” says Wahlund. “Now we want to have the same type of feeling, but also working with the actual level itself, so it could be a bit different depending on how you play it and the missions that you play, but also because of the weather, electricity or gas leaks. There’s a lot of things we can play around with to get a completely different feeling when you play a mission.”
PACE MARINES
Violence, gore and waves of enemies are probably the first thing your mind conjures up when you think about Vermintide, but in Darktide the pace and the tension will have more peaks and valleys, with quieter moments to sneak around or solve a puzzle. It’s more of what you might expect in a dungeondelving RPG.
“It’s really easy when making a game like Vermintide to just open the funnel, and then open it some more, because the more enemies we throw at people, the more fun it is,” says Andersson. “But you can also go the opposite direction of actually bringing down the tempo and making it a bit more lenient. We want to be able to still provide that gameplay experience where your heart is up here all the time, but we also want to expand it into a place where you actually have time to talk and breathe. If we lower the tempo, we get a completely different kind of mood, if you will, in a level.”
This is one of the reasons why you won’t be playing as Space Marines. They’re unstoppable juggernauts who, in a real-time setting, could easily just march through the hordes of enemies, never needing to rest, and certainly never taking a break for a chat. They’re stoic and a little boring, and Fatshark wants characters with charisma. And fear, too, which Space Marines are also largely unfamiliar with.
Slowing things down doesn’t always mean making things comfortable. If there’s a power outage, for instance, you’ll have to rely on flashlights to see where you’re going, making your exploration of the sector more methodical, but no less tense. An abandoned dark sector is obviously fertile ground for some horror. While the Skaven are extremely unsettling, Darktide seems more
THE PACE AND THE TENSION WILL HAVE MORE PEAKS AND VALLEYS
primed to get you jumping out of your seat, at least when you’re sneaking through pitch-black areas that are filled with poxwalkers, the gruesome zombies cursed by the Chaos god of disease, Nurgle.
Poxwalkers are Darktide’s horde enemy. They gather in large groups and, though weak individually, can overwhelm squads with their huge numbers and relentless attacks. What makes them different from the Skaven, though, is that they’re not constantly dialled up to 11. When you see the Skaven, they’re charging at you, screeching at the top of their lungs, but zombies are typically a bit more chill, giving squads the opportunity to sneak around them. But that can also make them even more dangerous than the Skaven.
Just before we spoke, producer Steven Brigas found himself climbing up a ladder in the hive, believing himself to be alone, only to find a horde of poxwalkers just hanging out, waiting for him right at the top. If they’d been Skaven, they would have been jumping down that ladder straight away, spoiling their ambush. The poxwalkers got the better of Brigas, but next time they might not appear there, or he might be able to mow them down with a very large gun. Having all this
devastating weaponry means you can annihilate more enemies, and Fatshark can throw even more at you – but not all of the time.
IN THE DARK
Making sure players aren’t entirely sure what’s lurking around the corner has been key to keeping people around in Vermintide, and Brigas says that Fatshark’s taken a look at all of its systems to see how it can throw more surprises at players, rework maps and refine Darktide’s ability to keep dragging everyone back to the hive. The city itself gives the team even more freedom to experiment. These arcologies are designed to house billions of people, and while a hive world might contain thousands of them, each is still a self-contained city that functions like a world within a world.
“The scale is huge,” says Brigas. “For me, what’s really fun about a hive is, even if the odds are one in trillions, it’s already happened. And that’s just such a fun concept to play with. It gives us a lot of room to just keep growing and doing interesting stuff for a long time.”
One mission could see your squad navigating the hive’s disgusting sewage system in the dark, while your next misadventure could take you to a well-lit habitation zone that might even contain NPCs who have yet to be killed or transformed by Nurgle’s minions. You probably won’t be making your way through throngs of people, but there will be reminders that you’re fighting in a place that was once teeming with life.
Revisiting an area that once housed some NPCs and seeing it taken over by enemies or emptied by a deadly gas leak is also bound to have more of an impact, reinforcing the stakes and making it clear that
“CO- OP IS SOMETHING THAT W E’VE FOCUSED ON E VEN MORE THIS TIME AROUND”
this is a warzone. Dynamic missions seem to suit live service games in particular, where developers can react to player feedback, tweak the modifiers, or introduce brand new ones in an update. The mission map can be “altered instantly, basically,” says De Geer, with Fatshark able to wrench out a feature, like some bad weather, make some changes and then pop it back in once it’s happy with the improvements. It also lets the team design special missions that appear only for a set time. Wahlund says these could come with additional unique rewards, encouraging dedicated players to watch out for them and jump in as soon as one appears.
If you’re looking for a group to take on these missions, Fatshark’s trying to ensure that you still get to choose where you go. Where Vermintide2 strongly encourages players to use Quick Play, which throws you into a random mission, Darktide will grant more freedom to choose specific missions to play.
“Co-op is something that we’ve focused on even more this time around,” says De Geer, and that goes beyond letting you have more of a say on where your co-op adventures take you. “We’re trying to find more places to introduce co-op, and one of the strongest ones are special enemies, but there’s also customising your loadout with your team and making sure you’ve covered all your bases.”
STICK TOGETHER
Vermintide’s specialists, even the ones who couldn’t take much of a beating, forced players to work together. If there’s an assassin around, you need your teammates to keep their eyes open, or to kill it if it jumps you. In Darktide, Fatshark wants to use them to challenge players more and make them experiment with proper team tactics. It’s still not settled on what these specialists will be, however. There’s a lot of units that could fit the bill, though the team is mostly restricted to the roster of the tabletop game. Whatever the final list ends up being, the goal is to create encounters where it’s imperative that players learn to cooperate effectively. “And if they don’t,” Brigas warns, “then they’re not going to survive.”
There are other things that might be used to bring players together – non-combat activities, for instance, and puzzles that are a bit more involved than pushing some stones in the correct order. There might be times when the party has to split up, too, but with the cooperative elements still intact. Maybe two players could fight off waves of enemies, while the other half of the quartet deal with a less bloody problem. This could also provide more opportunities for players to shine even if they’re not racking up the kills. But Andersson emphasises that it’s really about letting the whole team shine; letting everyone feel powerful together. “It’s way more fun moving down a horde together than you doing it on your own with everyone else watching,” he says. So the idea is to give everyone a chance to contribute, whether it’s solving a puzzle, helping your squad by tanking a tough enemy. or utilising everyone’s skills to kill a specialist.
Darktide is still in this exciting stage where it’s ripe with possibilities, but at this point it’s hard to predict what it will look like when finished. Fatshark’s idea of Darktide is still a compelling one, though, drawing out the best bits of Vermintide and investigating why they worked so well, and how that can be applied in other places or taken in new directions. And honestly, you can’t go far wrong with chainswords.