Darktide is a Tale of Woe
A Player’s Retrospective
First, a bit of context
I’ve been playing the ‘Tide games since Vermintide 1, and am a big fan of cooperative FPS games overall, going all the way back to the OG Left 4 Dead. The ‘Tide series, Payday, and Deep Rock Galactic are my favorites. I have over 900 hours in VT2, and 890 hours in Darktide. I started with Darktide during the beta pre-launch, and have played regularly. I’ve certainly got my money’s worth.
However, at the time of writing this I have NOT played expeditions or fired up Darktide to try the new patch/update. I last played in December 2025, and sadly my desire to continue playing Darktide has dried up (I’m still playing VT2 regularly!). No one I have played it with is interested in playing Darktide anymore either.
So what’s this post about? How did we get here?
Here’s my overarching thesis: Darktide is a tragically missed opportunity and fails to retain its potential fanbase.
This being a retrospective, I want to break down why I believe Darktide has struggled through its development path and share some thoughts as I put the game down (for a while at least). I want to explain in detail why I think this game is a missed opportunity on so many levels.
To start, what do I mean by a “missed opportunity”?
Left 4 Dead 2, a game from 2012, had 32,340 players in the last 24-hour peak. Deep Rock Galactic, from 2017, peaked with 38,141 players in February 2026, and averages have been hovering near or above 7,000/month since 2021. Often much higher. Payday 2, a game from 2013 where development has formally stopped and been brought back to life several times, and has averaged over 20,000/month consistently since May 2025.
Darktide had a "biggest content release ever” this month. Yet the 24-hour peak is only 11,308 and dropping. Averages for Darkside the past year, outside of the month the new DLCs were released are hovering around 5-6k.
This shouldn’t be the case.
Darktide (and the ‘Tide series as a whole), has phenomenal combat gameplay, amazing graphics and immersion. And it is leveraging the ever-more-popular Warhammer / 40K IP. Darktide should be rolling in players. Yet it is not. People come back for new content, but drop it just as fast. People who try Darktide aren’t consistently getting hooked, and the few people that are hooked aren’t staying engaged.
I think there are some explanations for this. Let’s get into it.
Problem #1: Misguided assumptions about how to drive engagement/retention
Much of Darktide was clearly designed around appealing to some C-Suite’s understanding of “player engagement practices” and this led to an initial game design rife with dark patterns at launch. The randomized loot progression and item locks, the weird design of the Mourningstar Hub Area, the limited rotating mission selection, the FOMO cosmetic shop. It all points in that direction.
It was like someone said to the boss: “I got it all worked out! We’ll get people grinding away forever to find the exact weapons they want, flushing resources down the drain randomly upgrading stuff while logging in every 60 minutes to check the store refresh, and while they are doing all this they’ll be constantly running back and forth across the hub seeing people in fancy cosmetics that they’ll want to buy, but we’ll have this rotating FOMO shop because research says that’s the best way to sucker people into spending the most money so they don’t get caught looking not cool, it’ll be amazing!”
Sigh.
It took basically TWO YEARS of the community being very vocal about the way item progression worked and what we wanted changed to finally get the locks removed and the new mastery system in place (which happened in September 2024). And while that change was positive, it also laid bare problems rooted in the initial “dark pattern” based design. Blessings still to this day remain a case where every weapon has 2-3 clearly best-in-slot options and everything else is marginal at best. Or that Melk’s entire reason to exist as a source of secondary objectives and a special shop was made irrelevant.
The dark pattern engagement tactics might work well on free or freemium games, mobile games, and that sort of thing. But ‘Tide is a niche within a niche of dedicated players. People don’t want to feel like their time is being wasted. More so, dedicated fans actually want to support and buy stuff for a game but ONLY IF they feel like they are being respected in return. Darktide’s continued reliance on FOMO and other vestigates of the early design are most definitely a turn off for a niche audience.
Fatshark has admitted in the past to not really understanding why people like their games and play them so much (this was in the context of Vermintide 2 IIRC). That might explain a lot of the missteps along the way.
Problem #2: Terrible Onboarding Experience for “Hooking” New Players
Personal anecdote time:
I have a group of about 7 other friends that I’ve played games with going all the way back to Quake 1. We’ve played competitive Counter-Strike (pre-source days), Left 4 Dead, Battlefield, DRG, ‘Tide series. You name it. They are all ALSO Warhammer 40k fans, and we’ve played the miniature games, read books, played other games in the IP. They are shoe-ins for Darktide. Everyone except for 2 dropped it within about 10 hours or less. One stuck around for 100 hours. Another has about the same as me but dropped it more than a year ago.
My partner and kids all play Vermintide 2 to this day (it’s magical and I’m blessed, truely). They all dropped Darktide after less than a handful of missions and went back to Vermintide.
Why? What’s happening here?
Darktide unfortunately makes for a pretty frustrating and underwhelming new player experience. I’ll list of a bunch of the reasons below:
Reason A: The “time to fun” curve is too long.
The early difficulty levels are painfully easy and almost boring, yet players are soft-locked out of “having fun” by being more challenged because their gear takes a while to get going. The game finally gets good and engaging on Damnation and higher, but a lot of people just get bored and underwhelmed before they get there. Despite the improvements to item progression, it’s still not a great new-player experience, especially when starved for resources and feeling like you’re being artificially held back.
Reason B: Jarbled and incomprehensible experience.
I get that it’s Warhammer 40k, and that we’re rejects on a “need to know” basis of information. But if you asked me to explain what the heck the various characters in the game are babbling about, what the purpose of a particular mission or task is, 900 hours later I can barely tell you. The story is opaque and doesn’t draw you in. I had people trying Darktide getting actively frustrated by having nonsensical voiceovers going all the time.
Reason C: Poor in-game explanations of how things work.
What does brittleness do? How is power different from cleave or stagger or damage? What does toughness regenerate mean? Nothing is explained well in-game (or even attempted to be explained). People are confused from the get-go. They get confused and then disinterested.
Reason D: Lack of characterization.
I understand that Darktide wanted to let people make their own character. But… in the process they seemed to have lost of LOT of opportunity to make a connection with their character. Sure, maybe we’re all unique now. But we’re also all faceless and nameless. So much of the appeal and memes made for Vermintide 2 come from the awesome characters we play. You just don’t get that in Darktide. Imagine for a moment if every “voice” profile was actually a uniquely named character with their own lore and backstory. Sure, it would be like 20+ characters, but at least they would be an anchor point and something for people to connect to. The Vermintide 2 banter is so charming and endearing - it adds a lot to the experience.
Reason E: Static-ness and same-ness of the levels and environments
Darktide looks incredible. And there are big differences in their environment. But when it comes down to the moment-to-moment feeling, it all feels like the same variety of dark gray and tan. Having multiple levels in the zone, often with overlapping elements, actively contributes to the sense of “haven’t I been here before already.” We really have like 5 levels in the game, and there’s so much shared visual language even that feels like a stretch. Compared to Vermintide or other games with a much richer diversity of environment, Darktide just feels like you’re retreading the same space over and over. I so wish procedural generation for the missions happened. Oh well.
Reason F: The Mourningstar Hub… sucks
Compared to the Inn, or the Keep, or the DRG loading zone/bar, the Mourningstar hub area is cold, lifeless, and non-interactive. Going there sucks the joy out of playing this game. That it forces 3rd person is so awful too. It ruins the immersion, ironically makes it HARDER to see other people’s cosmetics, and changes the vibe in a bad way. There’s no interactive elements, no jumping puzzles. You don’t even consistently load into a hub with your own friends and strike team. The magic of good games often lies in the in-between moments. There’s nothing magical about the hub.
The reasons above are structural and endemic to game design at this point. Reason C at least has the “Enhanced Descriptions” mod, when it’s available and updated. The rest, sadly I don’t think will ever be rectified. Maybe next time, Fatshark.
Problem #3: Lack of Variability and Interesting Rewards to Keep Players Engaged
Yes, we all agree the core combat gameplay is great - and you don’t “need” loot and progression for a coop FPS to be engaging (look at Left 4 Dead). But short of user created levels and weapons, rewards and gameplay variety go hand in hand to keeping players already hooked playing the game and staying engaged long-term.
Couple of big factors at play here:
Factor A: No Long-term Rewards or Goals
If you do manage to cross the few hundred hour mark, chances are you have most or all characters at max level, and at least one of every item at maximum mastery level. You’ve probably picked up a lot of the penances, especially ones giving out cosmetics. At this point, the game doesn’t really have any rewards left to give. You have all the dockets and plasteel and diamantine that you need. Don’t need more of that. You bought all the stuff from the commissary. Weapon rewards from missions are irrelevant. Melk is irrelevant. You really only have grinding out some very long-term achievements. There’s nothing on a run-by-run basis that you’re excited about.
Vermintide 2? I still get excited opening vaults because there are red weapon skins I’m missing, and various worn cosmetics too. Darktide? The only rewards that are remotely interesting are the couple of events that had 500 dockets at the end, because I could use those to buy something from the premium FOMO shop. Literally that’s it.
Lots of the missed opportunities for the game to shine connect back to the lack of interesting rewards. Why are there no cosmetics that only drop as mission completion rewards? Imagine if the weapon modding mod was implemented and the weapon mods could drop as mission rewards? What if more regular rewards or challenges handed out a trickle of Aquillas so players could grind for and eventually get a premium cosmetics every now and then?
Factor B: Silo’d Gameplay Modes & Wasted Mission Potential
We have normal missions, Maelstrom missions, Operation missions, Havoc Mode, Mortis Trials, and now Expeditions. Each one of these has some assortment of interesting modifiers or mutators or special tasks to do. But why on earth are they silo’d into different modes? Why does Havoc require the hurdle of dealing with party finder? Why are mutator pools in Havoc different from Maelstrom?
Variety is what keeps the gameplay interesting and keeps players on their toes. Imagine for a moment a world in which there were only five difficulty levels and one game mode. Each difficulty level added more different mutators that could potentially spawn in. What if different mutators were tied to different secondary mission objectives from Melk that gave out actually cool rewards (weapon mods or cosmetics) and so players were actually incentivized to do side quests during missions (ala DRG). What if you approximated Chaos Waste in a more flexible manner where simply stringing run of missions together added escalation factors for enemies but let you stack boons from Mortis trials over a series of runs.
If the focus was on diversifying and improving the core gameplay loop, all of the new features and aspects from all the different modes could’ve been folded into the standard experience in a way that kept it more varied and interesting for everyone. But no. We have solids modes that are each only presenting a limited slice of pie, fragmenting the player base, and making balance all the more difficult.
Factor C: Still Can’t Play the Game How You Want to Play It
While we’re talking about missions, Darktide still doesn’t let you customize your own mission experience, nor let you run a solo mission. If players were able to customize their own missions, pulling from all of the available mutators and parameters, the game would have so much longevity. People would devise all sorts of challenges and contests. And all within the framework of what the game currently allows. As it is, you’re stuck at the mercy of whatever Havoc effects are in rotation, what the one Maelstrom mission is offering, what the handful of missions on the board are up, etc.
And people still can’t play solo just to horse around and test stuff, or to challenge themselves, or to just play without having the pressure to “perform” given the other players that you might be impacting. It’s ridiculous.
Factor D: The Stale State of Balancing
Fatshark is woefully under-estimating the importance of both shaking up the meta and also making more weapons and builds viable at the higher difficulty levels. The more balanced the weapon selection is, the more people are encouraged to use different weapons - if only to reduce the monotony of having used the same kit over and over and over. People don’t want to play “down” just to take weaker weapons and they also don’t want to feel like they are doing their team a disservice. From weapons themselves, to the blessing pools, the whole state of weapon balancing is long overdue for a shakeup.
Factor E: Limited Cosmetic Customization & FOMO
The popularity of the Weapon Customization and For the Drip mods should indicate how much of a win these features would be in the game. Imagine a world in which you could earn (as mission rewards, commissary, etc.) both materials and colors that could be customized and applied to base model cosmetics. Almost like painting your figures in Warhammer! Or earning mod kits that can use to trick out a weapon to look like how you want it to. Refactoring these systems in a way that dovetails with better loot and mission/objective rewards would not only make missions more interesting but would give fun cosmetic things for chase long-term. Another missed opportunity.
And for the love of god just open up the premium store already. Remove the FOMO. Have a sale that rotates as a way to feature new stuff in the shop.
CLOSING REMARKS
Darktide had a rough launch. There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears poured into the forums here pushing Fatshark to fix some of the foundational problems with Darktide. By the time Unlocked and Loaded came out in September ‘24 (the patch that removed weapon locks and added the new mastery system), I was feeling pretty good about the game’s direction.
But since then, the game has focused on adding more game modes that no one really asked for (Havoc, Mortis Trials, and now Expeditions were all released after locks were removed). We’ve only had 2 actual main missions added since. The new DLC’s classes are fun and interesting, but here too they feel incomplete, with limited cosmetics on offering and with the class not feeling fully integrated into the game.
I don’t know. The whole experience just feels disjointed and fragmented. And I doubt Fatshark has the appetite or motivation to do anything to make the structural changes needed to turn it around. Continuing to tag along and keep up with the journey would be fine and dandy IF Fatshark’s communications were better and if we (as in the community) felt like we were worth engaging with. But with things as they are, the copium is running dry.