Warhammer 40,000: Darktide News

Fatshark has announced another delay for Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, the studio's follow-up to Vermintide. The co-op shooter, previously set for launch in September, has been pushed back to November 30.

This is a delay of over two-and-a-half months, but that's sadly not the end of the bad news. Fatshark also said that the Xbox Series X/S version will not arrive on the same date with PC, and will instead launch "shortly after."

The studio shared a statement on Twitter by co-founder and CEO Martin Wahlund, who said the decision to delay the game was hard, but necessary to ensure the day one experience is the best it can be. More specifically, Wahlund cited game stability and performance as two key areas in need of improving. The extra time will also be used to "mature key systems."

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To our community,

Today, we decided to delay the launch of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide to November 30th for
PC. Xbox Series X|S will launch shortly after PC, with a specific launch date to come.

Delaying a game is perhaps one of the most difficult decisions a developer faces and one we
are not excited about making. Still, we hope this speaks to our commitment to taking the time
necessary and doing whatever it takes to get you the best possible game.

While we have been humbled by the great feedback on the game so far, we also need more
time to improve stability, performance, and to mature key systems. Each is critical to making
sure we have the best possible experience for you, the players.

We also want to invite you on this journey.

Soon, we will start a series of technical tests and betas in advance of our launch, to ensure we
deliver the best version of the game. If you’d like to participate, you can sign up for a chance at
https://www.darktide.live/signup

Thank you for all the excitement and appreciation you have shown us thus far - it really does
mean the world to us.

Martin Wahlund
CEO & Co-Founder

It’s fun to create bad guys, and the Moebian Sixth are bad to the bone.

To me, in games just like novels, the bad guys have got to be interesting, not just cannon fodder, and that’s hard to pull off in a game because there are going to be a lot of them coming at you as you dig in and play, and some of them will be cut down quickly (if you’re doing your job right!).

It’s pretty much impossible to build them as characters, or establish any depth of personality, because there isn’t the space or the time, and you’re not going to have the sort of interaction with them you’d get in a novel or a piece of prose. You might get to learn about a bad guy’s motivation or impulses in a book, but in a game like this, they’re just going to loom at you out of the dark and try to kill you.

So what we’ve attempted to do instead is build, if not characters, then at least character types. The ‘character’ is the Moebian Sixth itself, the regiment, and the soldiers who make it up come in distinctly different ‘flavours’, with different looks and different behaviours. So you might not get to know them on a personal basis, but you’ll get to know their types, and from that, a picture of the Moebian Sixth will quickly build up.



The question, then, is who are they? Well, they’re Imperial Guard, which is to say soldiers of the Astra Militarum. They are - or were - humans, just like you and me. They are the sort of conscript troops who, in other circumstances, would be the heroes of a story, fighting to protect the citizens and unity of the Imperium. They may all be ‘uniform’ because of their, you know, uniforms, but they are individuals, with different skills and strengths, and different flaws and weaknesses.

There’s something chilling and sad about seeing a proud regiment of the Militarum filling the role of the enemy. These men were veterans: brave, well-trained, determined, and tough. Raised, for the most part, on Atoma Prime itself, they were sent away to war, and served long tours in the so-called Fringe War, a pacification campaign that has rumbled on for years in the feral worlds at the edge of the Moebian Domain. There are several Moebian regiments, in fact, but the Sixth is the most famous, the most decorated, and the most celebrated. Back home on Atoma, to the citizens of Tertium Hive, they are heroes. You don’t get lasmen any tougher than the Moebian Sixth.



They have spent their lives (and, in many cases, given their lives) to fight that campaign and keep the people of Atoma, and all the other populated worlds of the Moebian Domain, safe and free from invasion. Though it’s only a small chunk of the unbelievably vast Imperium of Man, the Domain is a significant tract of space. It’s a fiefdom of several important worlds, loyal to the Throne of Terra, ruled over by the Lord Margrave of Atoma. Think of it like a province or a self-governing state. It pays its tithes and taxes to Terra, it obeys the laws of Terra, and it manufactures vast quantities of goods for the Imperium. It’s important. It must not be lost, or invaded, or ever fall to the darkness that lies in the disputed territories it borders. Those territories, which are ‘parts unknown’, wild worlds outside the Imperium’s remit, are a hotbed of alien (“xenos”) and daemonic threat. To the average citizen of Atoma and its sister worlds, the nature of that threat is a mystery. It’s just called ‘the Darktide’, a boogeyman threat that must be kept at bay. That’s why they have the regiments of the Astra Militarum.

The Moebian Domain, like all worlds and world-groups of the Imperium, is responsible for raising, supporting and equipping its own armies, which fall under the auspices of the Astra Militarum. The young people recruited to regiments like the Sixth have no idea where they’re being sent, or what they will face. They are as ignorant of the ‘Darktide’ as any other regular citizen, for they were all citizens themselves.



They quickly learn. The galaxy of Warhammer 40,000 is not a friendly or safe place. There are brutal horrors out there - alien creatures, predators, xenos species, monsters, and worse - who want nothing more than to extinguish the fluttering flame of human civilisation. Out on the death worlds of the Fringe, the lasmen are thrown into the meatgrinder and come face to face with unimaginable danger. Their world-view changes. They learn the nature of the Darktide and fight it tooth and nail.

Sometimes, they learn too much.

Long tours result in trauma, both physical and psychological. Some are broken by the experience. Some are made bitter and resentful that the gruelling combat they experience is generally unrecognised back home, because the Imperial Administratum tends to keep all details of the ongoing conflict quiet so as not to generate public alarm. There might be a few news broadcasts about ‘great victories’, but the rest of the turmoil is screened by propaganda.

Some troopers, of course, serve brilliantly and bravely, and remain loyal. Despite everything they experience. But others fall prey to the insidious touch of the Darktide. They encounter the malevolent effect of the Warp, and it changes them. They become - literally, in some cases - the very thing they are fighting against

And they fight well. The ‘character’ of the regiment comes from the different units and specialisations. They have fierce melee troops who excel at close range and hand-to-hand. They have storm troops, snipers, flame-troopers, demolition units, heavy-weapon squads. They have everything you’d need in an armed unit if you wanted to take down a world.

So the Moebian Sixth is a regiment that’s turned traitor. They have been corrupted, by the trauma of their experiences, and by the polluting effects of the Warp. The guardians of Atoma have turned - in vengeance and hatred and spite - on the people they guard and the hive that raised them.



Ultimately, they are not just monsters looming out of the dark to kill you. They’re highly trained, highly-experienced veteran troopers, with full military gear. They have been seduced by the creed of the Darktide, and they have come home, not simply to kill and exact vengeance, but - more poignantly - to share the ‘truth’ they have uncovered. They truly believe they’ve seen the light, and that the dark ways they have discovered are far better and more liberating than the stagnant rubrics of the Imperium. They want to share that truth with you… with you, and every living soul on Atoma.

So there’s a tragedy there. They absolutely don’t think they are evil. They absolutely think they’re doing the right thing. And they will absolutely kill you if you try to stop them.

You don’t get lasmen any tougher than the Moebian Sixth, after all.

- Dan Abnett

Hello!

My name is Juras Rodionovas, and I’m the Lead Character Artist on the Darktide team. Together with many talented colleagues, I’m working to bring the characters and horrors of Atoma Prime to life. I love everything gritty and creepy, and so working at Fatshark on a project like Darktide for the past two and half years has been nothing but a joy.

Today, I’m super excited to provide an insight into the character customization in Darktide and talk about how we’ve worked together to allow players to create their own characters of the 41st millennium in the Warhammer universe.

[h2]Entering the World of Fatshark and 41st Millennium[/h2]
At the beginning of my journey at Fatshark, my only previous experience with the Warhammer universe was Warhammer 40 000 - Dawn of War 2. I have very fond memories of playing it when I was younger. I also started playing Warhammer: Vermintide 2 about a year before joining Fatshark. I vividly remember playing Vermintide 2 and being impressed by how fun and coherent the game felt. Those were the signs that the whole team was very passionate about the project and the quality of their work. And those were the values that led me to join Fatshark eventually.

A year after playing Vermintide 2, I was brought on Darktide by our Game Director, Anders De Geer. I felt immense passion immediately and understood the vision that the team was aiming for when it came to character art for the project. I felt very inspired to help achieve it. Together with my team, our Technical Director, Mikael Hansson, and Art Director, Mattias Rousk, we helped set the technical and artistic requirements with workflows that would allow us to achieve our goals during production.

I quickly realized that Character Art is essential when working with a Warhammer IP since there is so much raw artistic boldness in the miniatures' designs and the visual descriptions within the lore of Warhammer 40,000. The whole character and concept art team wanted to make sure that visually, our work shows the grittiness of this world and that we portray our characters in a way that belongs to that universe and Darktide’s narrative.



In Darktide, you begin playing by creating your convict - a reject who, by doing missions, will gain trust and climb the tower of respect built within the ranks of Inquisition. Players decide the backstory of their convict and choose a look that matches it. We have decided to peel back on predetermined characters that players could choose in Vermintide 2 and try offering players more freedom and choices in shaping their avatar.



Our goal is to spark a personal attachment to one or several characters that players choose to create and play with. It’s a very daunting task! The Ubersreik 5 in Vermintide 2 had so much personality, both visually and narratively. It’s why fans have grown to love those particular characters. But the way we have tackled this enormous undertaking lies within two significant features in Darktide: The Character Creator and Cosmetic Customization.

This pair of features require a lot of effort to do right. So in the project, we’ve formed a feature team specifically dedicated to ensuring that we deliver the best character customization that we can here at Fatshark. This feature team consists of myself and other incredibly talented craftsmen and craftswomen - concept artists, character artists, weapons artists, and technical animators.

[h2]Visual Style and Intent[/h2]
When creating their first convict, the player can select between predetermined classes, backstory, and personality choices, which affect voice acting, specific customization options, perks, etc.

Our feature team’s job is to make sure that we can support these choices and provide players with visual options that can match the narrative and tone of the game. Since we’ve chosen not to have predetermined characters with personalities this time, the approach was to tackle customization options in a way that can make up for players in other means to allow them to shape characters that still have expressive personalities. For example, we provided a set of premade face options rather than letting players use sliders to shape them. This way, we could pack in a lot more personality and visual appeal in how the faces look.

Our most crucial visual intent with the customization options is to make sure that they feel like they are part of the world of the 41st millennium while also being connected to the narrative of Darktide. We want the player character faces to look rugged and worn from lack of sleep and food. We want scars to be a brutal reminder of their former life. We want tattoos “made with burned boot heel ink and locally collected gutter oil,” as my colleague and one of our talented character artists, Carin Backlund, would describe them.



All this starts with the concept art team, which has done a fantastic job setting the initial tone and visual style. One of our concept artists, Miguel Iglesias, has provided us with amazing mood concepts that could easily be part of a Games Workshop illustration book. This has helped us immensely when coming up with suitable customization options for a Warhammer 40,000 video game.



[h2]A Drive for Craftmanship[/h2]
One of the more significant values that the whole art team here at Fatshark has is belief in craftsmanship when it comes to our work. We apply this core value directly to what we do with character art and take pride in our handcrafted assets, such as faces.

Faces are an excellent example because the subject is very complex, and it takes a lot of skill to create a hyper-realistic face that doesn’t look uncanny. Today, many studios rely on photo scanning their character assets such as faces and clothing. There are areas where working smarter, not harder, is crucial, and the method of producing assets with scanning can be efficient. We believe that it takes out a lot of the artistic value, and often, the art becomes generic, soulless, and lacks personality.

And so, when we create assets like faces, we want to make sure that they resemble the style, tone, and grittiness of our mood concepts. We want players to see the work that an individual artist has put in when hand sculpting every form of each face. The art becomes more personal because a real person has crafted something with their own hands. I believe this unique and artistic touch is tough to achieve by relying on scanning real people with software that does the work for the artist.


[h2]Diverse Possibilities of Imperfection[/h2]
Diversity in facial structure and ethnic descent has been part of our goals for providing face variations to the player. We want to offer a broad set of options, so players from different parts of the world and age groups can feel represented when creating their characters. Part of that representation is also imperfection, and it is something that we see as an important pillar when it comes to the character art in Darktide. For example, faces in real life are imperfect and more asymmetric than one might think, and we want to capture that in our set of faces. Crooked nose, grinded jaw, moles, veins, and skin conditions: These more minor details are important when making a face look like it has personality and soul. These imperfections ultimately contribute to our view of the ugly and gritty universe of Warhammer 40,000.

With this intent in mind, we want the players to be able to create many different looks with just one face. Do you want to be a prison scum who got a blind eye when the guard hit you with the butt of his lasgun? Or do you want to be a battle-worn Imperial Soldier who was falsely accused by his officer and thrown into the Penal Legion? There should be enough options to allow players to create their own version of a gritty character.




Once the players start working with The Inquisition, they will be able to customize their character with cosmetic gear. Cosmetics in Darktide don’t affect gameplay and are purely for decorative purposes, allowing players to connect more with their characters and show off in the Mourningstar ship in front of the others.

[h2]Ramping Up The Gear Factory[/h2]
At the start of the project, we knew that we needed to build a solid pipeline that would allow us to create significant variations of cosmetics and support the visual level of detail and quality that we were aiming for. Eventually, we ended up with tech and workflows that we were pleased with, allowing us to create a vast amount of cosmetics inspired by various themes within Warhammer 40,000.

The main element that we can set visually is color and patterns. It allows us to create many visual styles based on iconic planets, regiments, and other themes within the world of Warhammer 40,000.



On top of color and patterns, we can also choose between various tileable fabrics or metals, which extend our toolbelt to a greater level. We can, for example, take a pair of pants and make them look either very rugged, clean, or feel completely different by applying a leather material.



As a last touch, we can apply a set of custom decals on the gear, which helps tie everything together and add that final touch of detail that sells the outfit's theme.



[h2]Decide Your Outfit [/h2]
In Vermintide 2, we allowed players to choose between full-body skins and hats. In Darktide, however, we have decided to go for more extensive customization options. Players can pick and mix between the following apparel slots:

• Head Gear
  
• Upper Body
  
• Lower Body
  
• Accessory cosmetic items

A big part of the Warhammer 40,000 miniature community has always been creating cool kitbash miniatures, which has inspired us to extend our customization to this level. We believe that our cosmetic options will encourage players to combine different cosmetic items across the slots to create some stylish outfits to share with us and the community!




I hope you enjoyed reading this peek into our character customization in Darktide and that you have found it interesting! We’re very excited to see players create their characters and configure different outfit combinations with their friends to establish their own fireteams.

-For the Emperor!