The War For Atoma Is A War I Have No Stake In

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Lore Talk & Discussion
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…and why that doesn’t make me want to engage with the story.

I’ve played a lot of games with involved stories where I play as someone that isn’t necessarily supposed to be me, and I have had a personal stake in those stories - because the character I play as knows and cares about the supporting characters personally. It makes me care about the other characters that don’t necessarily get involved, and what happens to them.

Being well-written is not the only thing that makes a character likeable, you also need to find a way to relate to them in some capacity, even if it’s just knowing them. This works well in Vermintide, since you’re a motley crew of assholes with a couple of friends who help you get the job done, but what about a game where you’re just another cog in the machine?

I like to look to Deep Rock Galactic when I think of an example like this. There are only two characters that ever get voiced ingame - the dwarves and Mission Control. Management is mentioned, but never given a real personality or mention, because we don’t care about them. It’s implied that Mission Control cares about the dwarves, and vice versa, even if they get on each other’s nerves. Granted, DRG doesn’t have much of a plot, but Darktide is supposed to, and doesn’t.

The fundamental flaw of trying to add “your dudes” into a game that’s supposed to have a rich story is that you can’t write about what Your Dudes are doing, because the developers are writing about what Your Dudes are doing, but they can’t write Your Dudes for you in the way that Your Dudes would act, right? So the developers have to focus on developing other characters, but they did it in such a way that we have no reason to care about those other characters.

This game’s plot was irredeemable the moment it launched. Before then it might have been able to be saved if somebody had taken a serious look at it. But now it’s too late, and we have a story damn near nobody cares about.

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It’s sad when my first thought was “Atoma?”

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Even Helldivers 2 has a more interesting meta-narrative, as slow as it is.

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Even Trepang2 has a better narrative.

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Trepang’s narrative can be completely ignored and I never really gave a damn in the first place. It’s clearly not the focus of the game, it’s John Wick simulator.

One of Darktide’s selling points, and Warhammer as a whole, is that the story and setting is interesting, and something to want to be involved in - we have a failing of that part here.

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I completely disagree. The story is subtle and well presented. Cutscenes are short yet practical and you feel a growing tension in the missions’ pace.
I didnt say it is rich, but the screenplay is coherent, engaging and exciting to discover through the collectible logs.

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Pretty sure the person above you is talking about Trepang’s narrative, not Darktide’s.

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I caught on moments too late stop my post. Disasterous.

Just to add though, I completely agree with you. The possibilities of this setting, the War for Atoma, could have created amazing relationships between the cast and our characters. Its such a waste.

Though I think the story isn’t ruined yet. If they work the cast well, and not shy away from setbacks and even character deaths, we can still get this narrative feeling impactful.

I really think Zola should have been killed off after the twins debacle, it would have given a real sense of danger and stakes.

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NGL part of this is the inability/refusal to use their mission board correctly.

They could have built a narrative campaign off existing missions - just use Zola’s Special Assignments - but instead they’ve been dumping random missions into the pile.

Like think on it this way - build a campaign map via ‘Special Assignments’ (think Payday 2 where the crime.net board exists but you can always grab people to work your way up through a chain of mission arcs). The infrastructure and ability is there.

I really do think they were doomed the moment they swapped over to characters being self-created rather than defined individuals, with their current structure of RNG missions. Without a stable and cohesive core cast (which could have been accomplished with the VAs on hand, and seems to have been the intent when most if not all of the voice lines were recorded) there’s not enough to work with with the mission structure that FS wanted to use.

Now, this could have been remedied if there were still other defined characters. But FS thinks bringing along a non-interactible RE4 ripoff of a character who is effectively a piece of the scenery is a technical marvel so they straight up didn’t want to or couldn’t let your squad be accompanied by actual characters.

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Could be worse, I would flip my desk if LEON, HELP were in this game… and it already is depending on teammates.

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That really gets to me. I think back to the little details you’d get in the keep in VT2. Changes to dialogue as you went along etc. I know it took time, but the story was there from the start.

Like I felt so much excitement going into that big old Beastmen ritual with the Ubersreik Five. I’ve never had the same sense of involvement in something big in Darktide, like I had in the story of their previous game. Heh.

HAAAALP LEEEEOOOON.

At least you could hide them in a dumpster lol.

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Helldivers 2 should really be redefining live service narratives. Having players actually impact the story through their collective decisions and effort is the only way a “Live Service” actually feels alive, and not just a static game with consistent-ish updates, limited-time events and more microstransactions.

And I don’t think it’s as big a push as it seems. I’ve done a lot of GMing for TTRPGs, and I’m able to run very flexible narratives without adding “new content” on the fly. I might have a preplanned combat encounter, but I know how to invisibly guide the player to it regardless of their choices, but in a way that makes it feel like they’re the one’s leading the story. The nuts and bolts might not change, but one can add a new coat of paint very easily.

Unlike in static games, you don’t run the same risk of “lifting the curtain” and revealing that our choices only really change the color of the explosion at the end. There is no exploring other paths to see if there’s a dynamic change, we face the consequences of our choices. And in any form of entertainment, there is no difference between illusion and reality if you don’t ruin the trick.

And the community always has an impact on the flow of a LS game, it’s just that this impact is largely invisible and spread out overtime. Making the community more aware and engaged with this process by having some degree of meta-narrative control over things that have yet to be made adds agency without increased development cost. If we’re heading a certain way, you can plan future content around that.

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NGL if they’d been able to pull off the ‘random maps’ bit and genericized the missions, they might’ve been able to swing it if it was accompanied by a sufficiently adaptive and swift ‘GM’ to manage the war.

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Coming back to this after some more thought:

It’d actually be incredibly easy to give us some stakes in the war, even with their self-imposed handicaps.

  1. Give us cutscenes/ongoing events. This is something they’re capable of (Masozi now bombs enemies in Enclavum Baross and kills off heretics at the ending of Hive Dreyko) and it would do plenty to establish us as the Rejects and the actual characters of the warband as competent. Show us guys killing their way through heretics or doing more than just being voices on the radio yelling at us for not going quick enough.

  2. More secondary missions. In pretty much all of these the strike team is a borderline-invincible train of crackheads sent to kill thousands of enemies for a specific, important objective. This doesn’t jive with the ‘reject’ thing - this isn’t what you trust a penal legion for. Give us stuff where we’re being sent in as disposable meat, either to reinforce a front of an actual war zone, or just to distract people for the other, COMPETENT teams like the guys we see in the prologue to do things.

  3. More meatbags to throw at things. Give us the equivalent of SM2’s Cadians.

None of these are necessarily stakes in the greater war, but they’d serve to generate player investment. Imagine if a couple squads of disposable guard meat shields spawned in at start and you could conceivably bring them along for the whole fight if you were good enough to keep them from dying. People would get attached. And having a campaign with actual characters in it would also work.

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Not happening
Fatshark still has an open position for Head of Marketing.

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Honestly I think a really easy way for them to do this is to recon your characters choosen background as a false reason for the character imprisionment to bury the actual reason they were brought in. It’d fit in thematically with 40ks grimdarkness and the characters already have pretty clear base personalities that just needs flushing out and building upon.

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This sentence really was a mess, looking back on it. It sounds funny, and I suppose humor is kind of my calling card, but a better way to phrase it would be “in Vermintide we are playing as Fatshark’s Dudes, not Our Dudes.”

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