Anyone else get tired of being treated like crap and then told to prove yourself so people won’t treat you like crap? And then even by level 30 you’re still being treated like crap?
I remember reading that they hired a well known warhammer novelist to write up the storyline for Darktide but where’s the story? The cutscenes we get as we level up are like
Hey, prove your good so we know we didn’t make a mistake by not killing you.
You have to keep proving yourself to make it around here.
Keep proving your worth and maybe we won’t be mean to you.
There might be a spy or something. Prove your worth so we don’t get suspicious.
Yeah, definitely a spy. Keep proving yourself.
Oh we found the spy. It was that lady who nodded at you once. We didn’t kill you. Keep proving yourself or we might later.
I love Darktide but I mean, wow, great plot right?
Would have been nice if she spoke to you or something so you could actually feel like it matters. Or maybe she tries to recruit you or something. Some kinda plot would have been cool.
My guess is that guy probably helped with the dialog and a lot of world-building elements (what should/shouldn’t exist in the game world), granted I got the sense the devs also had a decent amount of 40k experience to know that stuff.
But I do agree it’s weird he didn’t help form the core of a good narrative arc to the game’s launch missions. It’s weird they bothered with cutscenes at all if they weren’t going to try to walk players through a story.
I think they should’ve just had progressively broader exhibition cutscenes:
Prologue and prologue cinematics establish who you are and what you’re doing here.
Cinematic 1 would be Zola (whose trust you slightly earned) giving an overview of the situation, explaining what Tertium is and that hostiles are invading, possibly including key events like if that train disease-smoke cutscene was the instigating event that kicked off the invasion.
Cinematic 2 would be Zola formally introducing you to Morrow (probably saying “you may have worked a few missions for him already” to account for the random nature of mission objective-givers), who introduces who he is in the organization, possibly provides a few more details on the strategic situation, but mainly just officially “okays” your access to Curios.
Cinematic 3 would be Morrow introducing Hadron (the assumption is stronger, “here’s Hadron who you’ve run missions for”, even though nothing really guarantees the player has definitely run a Hadron-guided mission yet), and Hadron explains who she is, and describes your newly-unlocked options for Crafting items.
Cinematic 4 would be just Zola again, this time actually explaining what the Inquisition is that you’re barely part of, and setting up the expectation that she wants you to fully join it. She describes Rannick but you don’t actually meet him. (Nothing unlocks here.)
Cinematic 5 is the level 30 cutscene where Rannick officially lets you join the Inquisition. It’s fine for him to have several recruits he’s welcoming and then shoot one of them, just to make it clear “how the Inquisition works”. But you’ll notice there was no cutscene establishing the “traitor aboard” story (since that feels totally irrelevant because the player can’t interact with it at all) and so if a traitor is shot here at all, then it’s just out of the blue and kinda weird. Because let’s face it: the Inquisition is kinda weird like that.
Basically give most major characters a chance for the player to see who they are while gradually explaining the broader context of the game, instead of the weird cutscenes we have now where if they tell a story at all (traitor) it’s weirdly outside the player’s interactions.
Yes, Masozi is missing from my cinematic list, but honestly with the Story-Lite approach of the game it probably doesn’t even make sense to include as many different characters as I already did. There simply isn’t time to do them justice, since you flit from person to person each cutscene.
Personally I would’ve considered a cheaper implementation of those interactions by having characters show up with limited dialog at the Mourningstar (example from Chaos Gate):
With this version of things:
the game’s cinematics would be cut down to maybe 2 characters (mostly just Zola, with Rannick appearing at the very end)
however each mission person (Zola, Masozi, Morrow) would periodically show up and let you talk to them on the Mourningstar. And Hadron is already there, so she’d have dialog too.
These dialogs would be how you learn more about each of those character’s role, their personality, and they’d also give you more info on what’s happening in the war for Tertium.
Yeah, I like where you’re going with it. Makes more sense. And it does finally recognize the player at the end by letting them become an official inquisition member. Though I kinda would prefer Masozi to have a role. She’s the only person who’s pretty decent to you. I think she could be set up as your friend. Like you could get cutscenes where you talk to her off-duty or something.
Being a bit meh is really high praise for the story.
My guess is that they ran out of time. Maybe they could have had something to tie the missions together. I don’t play tide games for the story, but they made a big thing of it.
… then you have the character creation screens that really don’t seem to do anything (unless you’re from Cadia)…
The story content shown during the levelling to L30 is what used to be just the prologue in VT2. And TBH it hurts me to go through it for each character. And if I am forced to level another character, I will seriously consider if it’s worth it.
VT2 had 5 L30 (later L35) levellings, each shared between 3 classes. DT has 4 L30 levellings where 3 feel like the same character classed in VT2.
It was Dan Abnett and he’s been hugely instrumental in the worldbuilding of the Warhammer 40k setting, especially the more base human elements and stuff away from the battlefields. At Games Workshop, he really is a big part of the writing team, doing work on the lore for the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. He’s written novels for Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, producing favourites like the Gaunts Ghosts series (and other stories set during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade), Inquisitor series (with the Eisenhorn, Ravenor and Bequin trilogies), and Darkblade. Aside from his work at Games Workshop, he’s worked for Marvel, Darkhorse, and DC on things like 2000AD (Judge Dredd), Superman, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Doctor Who. as well as much much more.
Around 6 months before release Fatshark sent some of his work on Darktide out to 40k lore YouTuber Luetin09 to make an hour long video and much of the content he covers isn’t in the game. Abnett created a lot more than Fatshark made use of.
Abnett’s work on Darktide seems to have primarily built the history of the planet Atoma, hive Tertium, the Moebian Sixth and the surrounding worlds and systems in great detail, to give Fatshark an environment within which to place the game. Some of the lines of dialogue about this fringe war, the pointless background choices and things like that are all related to the detailed background that Abnett gave Fatshark. He wasn’t so much a story writer, but rather built an extensive and deep backdrop, and worked kind of like a loremaster to make sure everything fit correctly within the 40k lore for Games Workshop. How much that background is touched upon is very much down to Fatshark, and the main “story” or lack thereof, is also very much down to Fatshark. Regarding the character’s background choices; the descriptions there wouldn’t have existed without Abnett’s work, but Fatshark just did sweet FA with it.
The Path of Trust is just a character-centric prologue BS to establish our place in this Inquisitorial warband (hint: it’s the bottom).
The actual plotline is supposed to play out in a live-service model a la Destiny 2. Or maybe a more generic “evolving conditions on Atoma” kinda like we get with DRG seasons. We already had the first chapter in The Signal back in December. I speculated that they initially intended monthly or maybe quarterly expansions. Unfortunately, it’s been put on hiatus until they get caught up and rework the progression systems in accordance with the feedback.
So, yes, there isn’t much of a story yet because we haven’t gotten the first season yet.
you mean you dont see the award winning 40k novellists impact to the game?! /s yeah its pretty bad, what is their timeline for the actual story, like a year? game will have 100 people left.
