DRG has just started up their annual Easter event and it reminded me that Darktide could really use an Easter/Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension event as well. I don’t suppose we will have an Easter event if it’s not announced by this weekend but I still wanted to ask if there is any plan to incorporate holiday events into the game in a similar way as was done in VT2? Do you have specific plans? Is that something we can look forward to at an unspecified point in the future?
Any word at all on the topic would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
FS has no time for events or anything worth our time.
They are busy doing mostly nothing, and reworking the crafting system on the side (when basically a melk system for blessings and lock removal would be enough).
Don’t expect anything, FS took your money. They got what they wanted, they don’t have to add anything new in a live service game.
Be thankful for your 2-3 missions a year and 2 new weapon marks every 6 months. And buy the cosmetics. They pay for… something.
Oh i’ll bet you the Darktide devs are busy fixing up either Vermintide 2 or a PS5 version.
No way they have a delay this long for nothing. Fatshark is doing what Fatshark does: promising the moon and then allocating staff somewhere else entirely without admitting anything to anybody.
Fatshark is horrifically mismanaged. You aren’t getting anything. They can’t even manage to understand the concept of ‘vacations happen the same time every year, maybe prepare something to drop right after we get back’.
fatshark generally has to get permission for that sort of stuff because GW lisancing is…hostile. it’s possible GW doesn’t let them get ongoing permission for seasonal events and they have to pitch them each time, so it’d just plain be not worth bothering taking up a bunch of management’s time several times a year to get this year’s event approved.
maybe they can ask ahead of time for the event schedule for the year if that’s the case and make things go smoother?
Other licensed GW games have done holiday events just fine. Warhammer Online was doing them 16 years ago, instead of Xmas, they had a Dwarven Keg’s End festival, while the TW:W series has done Festag events.
I think the answer is far more likely that FS just doesn’t have the dev bandwidth for stuff like that. If they’re needing a whole patch just for…pennances, and a boss fight encounter is the only new content we’ve had for four or five months, seems like the dev schedule is a wee bit tight.
Unfortunately they already have holiday events in Vermintide. Pretty decent ones too, tbh! I just think Fatshark is too strapped for content and is too wrist-deep in their own code right now to implememt something like that.
That said, Jakal, that was actually a pretty good thought. Had I not played a bunch of VT2 I mighta come to the same conclusion myself, tbh
no, they had them in VT1, but they were able to tie them to in-setting holidays. crucially, 40k doesn’t ever bother to record this stuff (gotta go grimdark all the time) and so it’s harder to just get GW to go “That’s a good idea” and approve something. GW loses their pea brains at the idea of having to share any sort of credit for their settings since they stole most of the stuff it’s built out of and market spends all their time threatening to sue about that.
There still should be Sanguinala at Christmas and an event for the Skulls for the Skulls throne event (I’m not calling it Warhammer skulls thats stupid).
A common misconception but the 40k equivalent of Christmas is Candlemass, a joyful but subdued holiday with a focus on giving thanks for the blessings of the past year. I can only imagine that the confusion stems from the Roman winter solstice holiday of Saturnalia and the obvious naming similarity but the tone of the holidays are completely different.
Saturnalia was a week-long harvest celebration with great feasts and prayers for a good spring planting.
Sanguinala is a solemn holiday of remembrance and mourning for the sacrifice made by Sanguinius on the Imperium’s and the Emperor’s behalf, marked by personal privation. It is followed several days later by the joyous Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension that celebrates the Emperor’s ascension to godhood and enshrining in the Golden Throne.
These two are not-so-subtle analogs for the RL holidays of Good Friday and Easter. While Sanguinala does not seem to be observed universally but is more of a Blood Angels & friends kinda thing, the Day of Ascension is the most important holiday of the Imperial Calendar much as RL Easter is the most important in the Liturgical Calendar. It also seems that some people (and even some BL authors) have conflated Emperor’s Day (New Year’s Day) with the Day of Ascension, meaning that in some regions of the Imperium, both of those are observed on the same day and Candlemass might well overlap some with Sanguinala in the relatively few places it is observed and still linked with the second holiday. I suppose that could add to the confusion.
Of course, there’s no real reason to observe them in-game on the same holidays that they are themed after. The dates are purely arbitrary, but it would be nice to have an observation (and an event) during the year. For instance, VT2 held the Geheimnisnacht event on RL Halloween simply because the spooky theme matched. Actual Geheimnisnacht has no set date but occurs whenever both moons are full in the sky at the same time. Mannslieb had a regular lunar cycle but Morrslieb, the chaos moon, did whatever it wanted. You might not have any Geheimnisnachts for years, decades, or more or you might have 13 in a single year, one for each full Mannslieb.
There’s also all the standard regional holidays that I’m sure the Moebian Domain will celebrate too. This article goes over the typical sorts: clebrations of victory, birthdays of local rulers, feasts for local saints (St Messelina is big here), etc. I’m pretty sure Sebastian Thor tends to be celebrated in most of the Imperium as well. So the devs could come up with any number of lesser holidays as well.
I see a lot of pessimism in here (and I can’t say I don’t agree), but I admit I’m amused at the thought of an Easter-type holiday. How horrible and grimdark do you think the space bunnies are in 40k?
I imagine it would be much less like the commercialized version of Easter and more like the church version.
But I would expect perhaps Golden Throne decorations. Probably some artistic representations of the Astronomican’s beacon like a great lighthouse, a blazing sun or shining star that sheds its light on all the Imperium. And lots of celebrating. Double the servitor choir. Probably a crap ton more candles. Extra protein slurry in every algae slop bowl. That sorta thing.
That’s a good point. Even in most of the books, most holidays are pretty sparse on the details so it might well be that there is no consensus in GW HQ on the specifics for any given holiday. It doesn’t help that even the major ones will likely be observed in very different ways from one end of the Imperium to the other. So they might very well have run up against an approval block for everything except Skulls for the Skull Throne event which is really dumb if that is the case.
i imagine it’d be more “spend an extra hour in prayer to the emperor in reflection and thanks” and polishing the statues and such. imperium doesn’t seem to be big on disposable decorations when you can make them big, metal, and punishable with treason for failing to keep them clean and free of tarnish.
Well, it’s not like we need to get bound up in excessive realism either. For Geheimnisnacht, we filled the Keep with pumpkins, planted tombstones in the courtyard, added skulls to a lot of places, etc. Did Lohner actually waste resources having his agents haul multiple wagon-loads of pumpkins up the mountains every year? Did he actually repave the courtyard twice in order to put the tombstones in and then again to take them out? Did we plunder the ossuary for “volunteers”?
I think it is okay to not completely overthink things. And even if themed decorations are out then they can still crank up the servitor choir music, fit all the servo-skulls with laud-hailers for maximum praise distribution, and have a few voicelines about it. Like have Zola wish us a happy whatever day and then have Morrow chime in all gruff “Right, now that we got your celebratin’ out of the way, back to work”. Maybe have the hub NPCs say something nice too.
Plus a “kill baddies for this portrait frame” deal going on. Real easy.
