The simple truth is this game lacks personality. It lacks the feeling of a single underlying and coherent vision of what the story and background is about and where the game is going. It is too impersonal, too general. Too light hearted. There is no sense of anything personal being on the line for anyone anywhere.
And it’s not just story-wise the game is lacking. We need more of that oppressive 40K feel. We need more grimdark. More atmospheric intensity. More mood and story and atmosphere setting lighting. More environmental story telling.
There is simply zero character investment. Nothing makes me care about the story in Darktide. There is just the body that I steer around, and the level in which I battle an enemy. I don’t care about any of it. The only thing that really carries this game for me in any way is that I like the combat. It’s got nothing else going for it.
Space Marine 2 is the other way around. I care much more about the story and the characters, the environments tell much better stories, the atmosphere is much better. But the combat sucks.
I wish the people who knew how to make these two aspects of the two games would get together and make a third alternative.
Good points. The psychological aspects of coming face to face with the daemonic from the immaterium has always been a major thing in all things 40K. In the tabletop game, and all representations of 40K TTRPGS such as Dark Heresy, Black Crusade, and so on, seeing daemons (or even sorcery and witchcraft) would have lasting impressions on anyone present. They cause fear and terror, their sheer presence corrupts their surroundings and erodes people’s thoughts and faith.
We see an actual beast of nurgle. A massive and terrifying daemon and a thing of pure corruption both physical and spiritual, and the very essence of decay and rot manifesting in real space. What do our characters say? Nothing. It’s smell alone must be so obscene as to render most people unconscious if they get too close. There is close to zero exposition about it beyond naming it. Oh look, a beast of nurgle. Just another tuesday afternoon I guess.
The daemonhost? “stay away from it”. The end. Wow. The sheer indifference to it all you’d think we were all blanks.
The existence and manifestations of these entities should be subjects of discussion and alarm on the mourningstar, in mission descriptions and in briefings, at the conclusions of missions and in debriefings, and finding and destroying them the goals of entire campaigns. Their effects on the acolytes mental, physical, and spiritual health should also be constant subjects. You saw an actual daemon manifest in reality, on a mission? You got it’s unspeakable discharge on you? Yeah that guy needs to be kept under constant watch. To go through 666 cleansing rituals, and to prove his loyalty and purity at all times.
The point of a game is to do game things. No one would want to deal with lore accurate characters screaming in primal fear and curling up into a paralyzed ball of wails at the mere sound of a BoN or lore accurate deletion of player character after a single mission via inquisitorial blamming.
It’s not so much about literally recreating all these elements in a 1:1 copy, but to capture the spirit and tone of the sum total of all these elements. Darktide doesn’t do all that too well, as has been pointed out.
I have no idea why the whole Reject angle is what they settled on. Maybe it adds more customization options as far as character backgrounds go, but that doesn’t even make any difference to anything at all. The better thing would’ve just been to make every player a generic Inquisitorial agent of some kind and kept it at that.
Funnily enough the story literally goes there, but the actual character writing is kneecapped by the fact that it has to work for rejects at level 1, too. It was a bad idea to have significant character development for players in a game of this format. It would’ve necessiated entire new sets of dialogue for each “phase” the character is in. Which would’ve been cool, but you know, effort.
To my knowledge there even IS some amount of dialogue that only plays at lower levels and lower difficulties, it’s just a little bit though. The issue this brings up in turn is that you have missable dialogue you will literally never hear because you never heard it while playing uprising on a new character.
Fatshark explained it once. In an attempt to paraphrase it was to “foster a community with an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ attitude”
As far as making the game scary, I don’t know how the devs are supposed to do that.
They can’t maintain the mystery of the cult because they’ve dropped the environmental storytelling and are pretty explicitly using the NPCs to move the plot along, such as it is. We went from “that’s need to know and you don’t” to npcs being the main characters and freely talking into an open vox while the player characters are fighting for their lives.
They could make the character dialog outwardly afraid, but it would be annoying and ludonarrative dissonant because of how much fire power the players are packing.
I mean that’s all stuff as it relates to actual words spoken by characters. I think what people were getting at, at least I was, is there is no real sense of dread or threat to anything once your character is fully leveled and you have even just a decent handle on the game. You’re so powerful that nothing really poses an existential risk if you have a good grasp of the basics. We chop down hundreds of poxwalkers, gangs and gangs of fully carapaced ogryn and several platoons worth of guardsmen in one mission without skipping a beat. It is, as I mentioned before, ridiculous on its face. It’s very entertaining in one sense, but it also completely shatters any chance for the actual in-lore premise of the game to shine in any meaningful and evocative way.
I suppose that’s good enough for the most part, but I would’ve held the game in a more special place in my heart if it REALLY went all in on selling the 40k reality of this scenario to you and really sold the experience of being a mortal human in that position. It doesn’t really even try to, which I think think is a shame.
No, but there’s quite a bit of wiggle room between the two extremes of completelore accuracy, versus virtually non-existant effects or consequences in the game.
Right now the BON and Daemonhost are little more than just another monstrosity, no more developed in terms of atmosphere or story development or consequences, than any other cultist captain, monstrosity, or miniboss in the game.
I suppose what I’m saying is they shouldn’t be random monstrosity spawns at all. They should be mission goals, possibly even campaign/event goals. And a story developed around them.
“Complete all these missions from this corruption event”, which gives access to the final mission where you fight the BON (and made significantly more difficult, a real bossfight requiring all players to participate). Another story and a set of missions could be centered around finding the DH and killing it. Complete with mission briefings and debriefings, and the story developing as you go through each mission.
Once you’ve done all that, they could become random spawns on auric maelstrom (or Havoc 35+) missions only. Just to pick something out of a hat.
The fact is that there are things fatshark could do to develop on the story and atmosphere aspects of these daemons.
I think the overall feel of Darktide is absolutely incredible. It’s done such a good job of world building imo.
The writing can be perhaps a bit too quipy when coming from the official leaders on the mourning star but the banter between the player characters is often hilarious and amazing. Usually very realistically funny and dry. It’s a very British humour though so perhaps I enjoy it more than other nationalities might. Joking and jibing in horrible situations is a natural defence mechanism and I imagine it would be deployed a lot by the lowly footsoldiers. It makes it feel more like we’re getting a glimpse of the real people instead of the drier-than-weetabix Astartes we see so much of.
I just logged in after a break thinking I might hear something new in the Mourningstar…Morrow/Rannick talking about a missing communique; generic broadcasts espousing the benefits of clean weaponry, having faith in the emperor and earning forgiveness through blood; Brahms saying all operatives need to be checked out pre- and post-mission; all of the mission broadcasts; Zola chiding Hadron for being a cranky bot, which is causing operational issues; Morrow and Dukane talking about his incomplete record…
All the same stuff. And I love it, even the goofier bits. Darktide got me interested at all in 40k, and I’ve been hoovering up Dan Abnett novels since catching the bug. Even though I’ve been on a DT break, I’m still chugging through those books. To me, Darktide captures the world, the tone, everything to a T. Especially the grimdark…
We’ve got medicae units showing signs of consciousness and asking to be taken with us. PC dialogue talking about how workers are ground to nothing in the Imperial war machine. Posters that say “production must never cease” and “even a man who has nothing can still offer his life.” I mean we even have a character in the level 1-30 “story” (which is a journey from reject to effectively just an expendable extra in the warband) who goes from a spunky heretic to a servitor who refers to herself as a “unit,” twitches involuntarily, and has dialogue like, “Your choices in life carve the path ahead.”
It’s all pretty on par with what I’ve read so far (Eisenhorn trilogy, Ravenor trilogy, 2 Bequin novels, 1.5 Gaunt’s Ghosts). And just as inconsistent (always for the sake of the overall action, just like in the game)…one minute a ragtag group of humans is mulching Chaos Marines, another scene and people are puking just from looking at Chaos symbols, daemons get murdered left and right and no one talks about them again. The infighting and squabbling is all there in the books. Even the sillier stuff, like Oska or Hallowette, fits in just as well as too, with characters like Sholto or a daemon prince literally saying “Mother of s#&t!”
40k is equal parts action, horror and silly. And I think Darktide makes it look cooler than I’ve ever seen it.
lol oh no, I’ve skirted around 40k for many years. It’s theoretically right up my alley. Used to go to the local games shop where there were some hardcore games, but didn’t catch the bug. Played some other 40k games. Tried reading some books. Just never got sucked in until Darktide.
I’ve read/listened to probably somewhere around 50-60 40k books over the past 5 years ish. Darktide really does not match tonally with the world of the books beyond the visuals themselves. As great as the visuals truly are in Darktide, they are still the (relatively) easiest part to get right. Where it falls short is in all the things that have already been mentioned. The type of overt attempts at comedy seen all throughout Darktide are true rarities in the books. Things are at times funny in some way, but rarely is it because someone is trying to be.
The silly stuff that is in Darktide is exactly what detracts from the 40k aspect of it. There’s a reason people are calling for a more oppressive and grim tone because that is what the game lacks. I understand that a video game is a different medium of entertainment than an entirely narrative focused book, but there’s still a balance to be struck. I don’t necessarily mind a 40k game having a slightly more lighthearted tilt but it has to be placed in contrast to the absolute horror of that world. Darktide leans too far in the direction of goofiness in this regard and consequently loses some of the grimdarkness of the setting.
It’s not some dealbreaker or something, but I think it’s fair to say that in hindsight it would’ve been better to tone down some of silliness. I mean come on, we have a Tech Priest saying “gooderer”. It’s a little over the top.
Yeah I bought the V1 40k tabletop box when it was on the shelves in games workshop. I’ve loved the world since back then and bought every decent 40k themed videogame ever since. But I’ve mostly been a 40k voieure during young adulthood and never stopped loving the world despite distancing from it for many years.
I didn’t read (well ‘listen to’, I’m very dislexic) the HH until after starting DT, but reading all those and the End and the Death series (or whatever the title is) hasn’t changed my view of the 40k world whatsoever.
DT was the thing that made me finally buy all the books. TBF those books didn’t exist when I was going to golden demon awards etc we just got excited by painting, minis and rules lol
THIS would have been a much more logical and overall better approach to both. We should have gotten them as assassination missions, rather than the random scab captains we have now.
Just played Smelter Complex and she said “Come on, you all! No time for Shilly-Shallying!” In a tone comparable to a children’s cartoon. This line is definitely new, and at this point, they are insulting our intelligence.
This is only a small fraction of the reality of 40k.
The childish humor being injected into Darktide in order to please more sensitive consumers has no place. Warhammer 40k is what it is and should not be compromised to appeal to a “wider audience.” You either like it or your don’t, its that simple
Please don’t try to rationalize it. The writing sucks lately, and most will agree. We’re headed down a slippery slope of just completely disrespecting the setting of the game into an all-out goofy Borderlands territory. Dukane is the worst addition to this game lately and has left a permanent stain. Politics aside, her presence in the game just screams modern DEI. She is not threatening/intimidating as a Commissar, not believable as veteran who has survived countless battles, nor is her personality fitting of a real Leader. She is badly voiced and written amongst a few other characters.
we just got excited by painting, minis and rules lol
