Short trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=Zp44GNRzvCc&feature=emb_logoBeing made by Fatshark, the same folks who did Vermintide 1 and 2.
For those unfamiliar, the Vermintide games are the equivalent of Left 4 Dead, set in the Games Workshop's fantasy world. Massive hordes of enemies, strings of missions that deliver the overall story of the game organically, best enjoyed with friends or at least other human players.
I'll be talking a lot about Vermintide because it's pretty obvious that this is the 40k version of it, and it's probably easiest to imagine what to look forward to based on VT.
Vermintide is a largely melee focused game set in GWS fantasy universe. And it's a pretty fantastic looking and playing game (I've been playing with friends on and off since release, and have been playing pretty much nothing but it for the last three or four weeks, so it's timely this was announced today.) It's one of the best presentations of the Warhammer Fantasy IP next to like, Total Warhammer that I can think of. So it stands to reason that Darktide will be a more ranged combat focused experience.
As a fan of both fantasy and 40k, I'm really excited for this. Fatshark did an amazing job with both Vermintide games. It's easy to just sorta slap that adjective on to something you like, but the craft and detail and obvious love that went in to making Vermintide warms the cockles of my heart as a fan.
Visually, VT is gorgeous, rich and detailed with visuals that really do look like WHF stuff come to life and have never once taken me out of the game for their lack of quality or attention to detail.
It also has really high quality sound engineering and voice acting, so it delivers a great cinematic experience.
The writing in VT is also really strong, which manifests mostly in the playable characters and the sheer amount of dialog between them that they helps explain who they are and what they're about without getting in your face or getting old fast. (The kind of voice acting that, to me, you don't resent hearing over and over again. Especially when there's so much of it.) And most importantly, it actually uses the WHF world and its lore and shows both a deep understanding of it and a real appreciation for it.
The action of the game is, if not always super precise, very satisfying. I could crush rat skulls and lop off limbs and heads all day in VT, it's the kind of combat that you enjoy for its own sake rather than because it's helping you get through a game. VT is a pretty fast paced and hectic game that's usually about charging ahead into a mass of enemies to carve them up, only to get wrong footed by special enemies and overwhelmed until you get slaughtered. I imagine Darktide will probably follow the same format and I'm largely ok with that, but I wouldn't say no to a slower, tenser gameplay experience either.
All these things, brought in to my favorite IP, and WE FINALLY GET TO PLAY REGULAR ASS PEOPLE IN 40K! Someone finally had the talent and the nerve to do it instead of yet again making a game about Space Marines. (Although that would have been cool too in Fatshark's hands I think.) Plenty of reasons for me to be excited.
That said, despite the name being pretty obvious what it will be about, I'm sure there will be differences besides "now you shoot guns most of the time instead of hit stuff." I can easily see them dialing back the characterization a bit from Vermintide. (Although you can see quite clearly how they're already sketching out the personalities of the playable characters just by their posture and gestures and how they carry themselves.) A lot of what makes Vermintide a challenging game comes from its melee emphasis, so I'm looking forward to what they've cooked up for challenging ranged combat. Also looking forward to "Dark and Spoopy" stuff, because the lighting effects in Vermintide are one of the best parts of the game and exploring a dank, dark underhive with Fatshark's aesthetic sensibilities sounds very enticing indeed. As I mentioned above, people tend to plow through Vermintide maps, especially the more experienced they are with playing them. I'd be interested to see if Darktide, because of darker and more claustrophobic spaces and more ranged combatants, doesn't produce a slower, more methodical kind of gameplay than VT's frantic flailing around to save life and limb.
I also do sorta hope they get away from the "loot box" style of mission rewards and come up with something a bit more interesting. 40k doesn't really do "magic weapons" like fantasy does, so forging and yadda yadda from VT, and how kinda flat that has always been, could stand to have a lot of improvements or just be different. While playing up through VT the crafting and the random drops aren't really bad or annoying, but once you get in to high level gameplay and want specific things out of your gear, the way VT does it starts to get a little tedious and unfun. So I'd hope there's like, some weapon customization and interesting loadout choices you can make.
Or who knows, maybe there aren't going to be strongly defined characters like VT2 that are the "classes" and it will be a more generic, flexible affair. It could easily go either way.
To me there's only one sorta "big AAA-lookin" game out there in the last few years that really nailed the 40k aesthetic, which is Space Hulk: Deathwing. (It's also in the neighborhood of L4D-like horde killin' games.) It is one of the best LOOKING 40k games out there, and it delivered a lot of 40k lore and flavor via that, but didn't do as good a job presenting the 40k universe via characters or making it feel larger than the game it lived in. Fatshark did that with Vermintide I feel, and I think Darktide stands to dethrone Space Hulk: Deathwing for me as the best looking and sounding and feeling 40k game yet made. It's not really a question to me if Darktide is going to be cool and fun, but rather what form it's going to take.
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Topic: WH40K Darktide. Despite the power of Chaos, the Imperium stands! (Read 19595 times)