Darktide Is Growing Into The Great Swarm Shooter We Wanted

Every time I’ve written about Fatshark’s 40K-themed swarm shooter Darktide, I was wary of making definitive declarations about the game. Even in my original Darktide review in November ‘22, my obligation to give it a score based on its Day One quality was caveated with my belief that it’d get much better, as I declared it “a simmering cauldron of potential that still tastes a little raw.”

A few months later, I addressed premature declarations from some corners that Darktide was dying by saying that it’s definitely not, but is in a mess of its own making due a weak endgame and inexplicable lack of ‘crossplay’ (if you can call it that) between Game Pass and Steam on PC; dark will be the day when we accept two different storefronts on PC as different ‘platforms’ requiring ‘crossplay.’

Rejects, Arise

But now, the best part of a year on, what I was holding out hope would happen has in large part happened. Darktide was always excellent in terms of the on-the-ground action, but now the experience around it—from the levelling system, to the item shop, to the long-awaited crossplay which arrived with Patch 11 last month—has been improved, implemented, or outright revamped. Last October’s Traitor Curse update, which replaced the uninspiring ‘ability upgrade very five levels’ with a deep RPG skill tree that you get to upgrade every single level, was a massive boon for player counts, with Steam player numbers shooting up from about 2500 players by nearly 600% to an average of just under 17,000 concurrent players at any one time (via SteamCharts).

As is often the case after such major updates, the numbers have dropped a bit since then, but two months on they’re still sitting pretty at nearly 12,000 concurrent players, which is a really strong retention and seems to suggest that the game has finally turned a corner when it comes to uptake. While there was never a time that Darktide could really have been called ‘dead,’ now, 15 months on from launch, it’s well and truly alive.

A fancy levelling system and crossplay are a couple of vital factors in Darktide’s redemption, but there’s more to it than that. A couple of new levels, a bunch of new ‘Conditions’ that throw in wild modifiers to existing levels—such as Maelstrom which mashes together several conditions, or the recently added Elite Resistance, which reduces the number of enemies in a levelbut makes them more powerful—and ongoing major class rebalancing have been tightening up and diversifying an already exciting in-level experience.

The second part of the Traitor Curse update dropped in December, adding a much-needed new boss in the form of the Karnak Twins (as well as a limited-time secret Hard Mode that you unlock by ringing bells around the level, making for a much more challenging encounter with them). It’s all good, engaging content, and while Darktide seems doomed to not get the same level of narrative excellence as its Fantasy counterpart Vermintide 2, maybe that doesn’t matter all too much when it’s just so damn fun to play.

More Hubbub For The Hub

There’s still stuff in Darktide that needs work. The crafting system is steadily improving, with the last major update coming last August, giving players more control over Item Refinement, but it’s still not that compelling. And with many of the core systems like the shop and levelling now patched up, maybe it’s time to look at the Mourningstar Hub and make it feel like more of a social space. To me, The Outlast Trials remains a perfect example of how to make the lobby area between missions feel engaging.

But this is all good stuff from the devs at Fatshark, and as I catch up on the patch notes for the substantial rebalancing update launched for the six-year-old Vermintide 2 last month, it suddenly seems bleedingly obvious that the studio was going to pull through with Darktide. These guys are committed to their games, and while I can’t quite see the Darktide matching the magnificence of Vermintide 2, it’s fast growing into the comprehensive 40K swarm shooter we’d all been hoping for.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Released

November 30, 2022

Developer(s)

Fatshark