Vermintide 2 is one of our favourite co-op games, but with Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Fatshark is switching to Games Workshop’s sci-fi setting. It’s time to pick up a chainsword and do battle in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium. Expect to fight hordes of enemies in the claustrophobic depths of a hive city alongside your friends, while enjoying banter and a story co-written by best-selling 40K author Dan Abnett.
When is Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s release date?
Darktide will release early in 2024. While previously scheduled for a 2024 release, it was yet another game pushed back by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have a responsibility to deliver the best game we possibly can, and frankly we need more time to accomplish this goal,” Fatshark CEO Martin Wahlund wrote. “It is no secret that building a game during a pandemic is a challenge, and we are not immune to this.”
You can sign up to a newsletter on the official site, and it’s currently available to wishlist on Steam.
Who are the player-characters?
Darktide’s gameplay trailer debuted at The Game Awards in 2024, and gave us a look at four characters we’ll surely be able to play: an ogryn (an oversized descendant of humans sent to harsh, high-gravity worlds generations ago), a hammer-wielding religious zealot who may be a confessor or some other servant of the Imperial faith, and two soldiers who are presumably members of the Imperial Guard.
Fatshark have been tight-lipped about these characters. We know they’re agents of the Inquisition sent to investigate heretical goings-on, but are they the only characters we’ll be able to choose from? The Vermintide games were also four-player co-op but had five heroes so the player picking last wouldn’t be stuck without a choice, but will Darktide follow suit? One piece of art shows a cloaked character who looks like a sniper or scout.
Either way, we know from our interview with co-writer Dan Abnett that we’ll be starting the game as essentially a prisoner, “an unwilling recruit into this life of serving the Inquisitor. You’ve got everything to prove, and I suppose everything to lose.” The warband will also include NPC professionals who “are kind of using you as cannon fodder.”
Inquisition Acolytes serve as lowly assistants to Inquisitors in 40K fiction. Acolytes are great for a game because they come in many archetypes, and there’s an acolyte hierarchy (acolyte, proven acolyte, trusted acolyte, throne agent and so on) that would serve nicely as a progression system.
That’s assuming that Darktide will include detailed loot and progression systems, as Vermintide does. The ‘tide’ suffix suggests the two games will have plenty in common.
Who are the enemies?
Uh oh, it’s Nurgle. The Chaos god of pestilence, who has a surprisingly good sense of humor, tirelessly experiments with new strains of disease with the ultimate aim of inducting everyone into Nurgle’s garden: a festering organic plane of existence in which everyone and everything is subject to Nurgle’s experiments. You do not want to go to Nurgle’s garden.
In Darktide we’ll be facing a cult of plague-worshippers called The Admonition, who seem to be thriving. The hordes in the trailers are poxwalkers, the zombie hordes of 40K, and make sense as low-level fodder in a Left 4 Dead format. We also see well-armed cultists, some of whom may be traitor Guards given the autoguns they’re carrying and the armor they’re wearing, though they have modified it with spikes because of course they have.
There’s a glimpse of a hulking boss at the end of both the gameplay trailer and the writer reveal, a one-clawed creature with a long tongue and its guts hanging out. That could be a daemon, an infectedogryn, or a Chaos spawn like those in Vermintide.
A dog leaps out of the darkness in the trailer, perhaps a mutated mastiff perhaps? There are plenty of other servants of Nurgle from 40K that would work in Darktide too. The roly-poly Nurglings would be good fodder, and hilarious. Plague Marines would make good bosses. A Great Unclean One could serve as a big campaign finale, though it’s unlikely a squad of plucky Acolytes would stand any chance against one of those large, large lads.
Just tell me about the weapons
Fatshark excel at melee combat, and the gameplay trailer shows some familiar animations for that. One of the soldiers wields an iconic 40K chainsword and the other a power sword, the zealot has a thunder hammer, and the ogryn a real big knife. That last one may sound underwhelming, but it’s a blade the size of an ordinary human being.
Darktide has more of a focus on ranged weapons than Vermintide, however, and it seems like we’ll be modifying our loadout with plenty of those. Multiple characters have autoguns for continuous fire, and there seems to be two lasguns, one a sniper’s long-las. There’s also some kind of shotgun or perhaps just a real heavy-duty pistol. The ogryn’s sawn-off grenade launcher also doubles as a melee weapon, which is nice. One of the other characters hurls a frag grenade to break up a horde at one point as well.
The hive and the hub
Darktide is set in a hive city called Tertium. Hive cities are awesome. They’re vast, layered cities populated by a diverse population of warring gangers, corrupt diplomats, and a few billion hardworking folk who tend to die quite quickly. Planetary governers and senior Imperial agents enjoy good living at the top of a hive city’s spires, while in the tangled underhive corridors that form the bowels of the city, citizens form gangs and battle for territory.
It’s a good place for Nurgle to do his work. A Chaos-instigated pandemic can take down an entire planet if allowed to fester, so the stakes are high in Darktide. As a location to explore, hive cities risk being eternally dingy, but there is potential to mix up the architecture a lot, from grandiose and gothic Imperial buildings, to more utilitarian spaces reminiscent of Alien.
Between missions we’ll be returning to the Inquisitor’s starship in low orbit to collate the clues we’ve gathered, tinker with our gear, talk to NPCs, and select the next mission from those available.
“You’ve got a place that you can talk to the other members of the team and the other characters,” says Abnett, “the important members of the warband. And also improve yourself and get new kit and get briefed and all those sorts of things that you would expect to be able to do in a game.”
It’ll also have players beyond those we’re grouped with in it. “The starship is much bigger in the sense of player count than the Vermintide hub,” game director Anders De Geer told us. “It’s more of an actual hub with NPCs and people to interact with, but also other players of course.”
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