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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide's gunplay is deliciously meaty


Darktide preview - two enemy Ogryns attack with one raising a hammer above its head and lasgun fire in the background

It feels real good to shoot stuff in Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. This might not sound like the biggest deal – its always important for this type of horde-based, zombie-mowing game – but for Darktide good shooting is significant. Developer Fatshark, who previously made spiritual, franchise-adjacent predecessors Warhammer: Vermintide and Vermintide 2, hadnt used actual FPS mechanics before, with Vermintide almost entirely based on melee. And doing it right in Darktide, it turns out, has been a challenge.

“Its been tricky,” says Mats Andersson, lead combat designer at Fatshark, who was speaking to us at Gamescom. He explains its something they had to build up to step-by-step, in part because of the games hybrid approach that mixes both melee and first-person shooting. “We knew that we wanted to do a hybrid kind of thing,” he said, “as we wanted to keep the melee part, because we wanted to extend it, rather than have a completely separate game mode with ranged combat.”

Originally Darktide had what Andersson called “simple ADS,” where holding aim will simply bring a ranged weapon up to the middle of the screen to give you that “aim down sights” perspective, like it would in most FPS games. But Andersson described the result, “if you just have a static animation with some spread on it,” as “less than stellar.” The big push, therefore, has been to “up the quality of that, and doing some more finicky and sophisticated things with recoil and spread, the swaying animation blend sets, lining everything up so its so controlled that the gun lines up and shoots where it needs to shoot.”


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Darktides Gamescom trailer showing off a bit of everything.

This sounds technical and, as Andersson put it, finicky, but he provided a good example. “With the lasguns,” the laser-based weapons used by some of Darktides Imperial Guard characters, “since we have beams, we cant point the gun in one direction and shoot in another. It looks horrible. So weve made this overcomplicated thing of actually having all of those motions you see – they arent really animations, theyre code-driven, so the gun always kind of sways the way the next shot is going to go.” This also plays into another aspect of realism, where you might get hit while aiming, and the aiming animation shows that, but also still lines up with where youre shooting off in a different direction – “but its really tricky, and it creates an even deeper mastery of it.”

On the other hand, he says, the whole challenge has been “getting this extended range thing up and running, because Vermintide had melee, and most ranged games for FPS have a far range – we have a melee, a far range and then a close range in between. So theres basically three different “gameplays” involved in that, and there becomes this meta loop of the team and the enemies fighting over: at what range should we be fighting?”


Darktide preview - an eerie gate in the distance


Darktide preview - a dark area with industrial stairs and piping

This plays into another, more sophisticated part of Darktides gunplay: the enemies that spawn will adapt to how youre dealing with them. “They switch behaviour depending on what range you kind of force on them,” Andersson explains. “Like if the enemies have loads of machine guns you kind of want the Zealot to jump them,” the Zealot being a melee character with a whacking great hammer, “because then they start shooting and youre forced into melee.”

“As we saw with the Psycher here,” he continues, talking about the gameplay session wed just finished, “if hes like, “I want to stand here and pop heads,” then we send in some pox walkers and like, nya! And then he cant do that anymore.”

Andersson has more to say on this – he gives another example of a longer-ranged enemy that will stay in cover and almost protect a kind of defensive sight-line, forcing you to “at best pot-shot them, or you can suppress them and throw a grenade in there, or flank and jump them in melee, if you want.” Closer range shooting is more “twitchy classic old school FPS,” thats “more of the Doom-like, side-strafe, dodge, shoot five guys with a shotgun in a short amount of time, and then leaning over into the melee, because sooner or later your clip is gonna run dry, and you have a chainsword so you might as well use it.”

The takeaway is that there is a wonderful amount of thought to the rhythm and strategy of Darktides combat, more than I could, admittedly, get into with my demo. That featured one, nicely lengthy mission through the bowels of this decidedly menacing megacity, called Tertium. Playing as an Ogryn with a semi-automatic shotgun (that switches to automatic if you like), my job was to tank damage and dish it out rapidly in close-range combat against squishier hordes. It is supremely satisfying.


Darktide preview - enemies work their way down some steps towards the player


Darktide preview - lots of zombies charging the player in a green-hued room

In this demo, mind, it was just about finding enough ammo, which felt very constricted on this medium-tier difficulty without being cruel, to keep the wave-clearing going. In more coordinated groups (no disrespect to my randomly-assigned teammates, who may or may not have left the wave-clearing tank character to solve all the keypad puzzles in an area while they chipped away at the rushing hordes, and then go round rescuing them all after the fact), I can immediately see how combat will get more nuanced.


Darktide preview - Fatsharks Mats Andersson surveys a tabletop layout of Warhammer buildings and objects
Mats Andersson of Fatshark.

That said, the choice is also part of the design. Andersson and Darktide game director Anders de Geer explained that theres a good deal of customisation to how you might set up a game. Difficulty levels will impact the strength and intelligence of enemies, but you can also adjust the numbers, it seems, so you might want a stealthy, high difficulty round against a small number of enemies or a lower-difficulty one against waves and waves of squelching zombies. This also plays into your choice of class – if you like, you can squad up as four Ogryns, but you might struggle when a sniper turns up on the other side of the map, or as four Psykers who can pop heads of mini-bosses with ease but might flounder against the horde.

De Geer also emphasises that, as well as dealing with the novel issue of a varied, and quite ambitious take on gunplay, there were a few reasons for Darktides slight delay to late November on PC (console versions are coming “soon” after that). “Its going good,” he says, when I ask about development in general, “I think, like everyone would say, of course lockdowns and stuff have been worse than we thought, we thought we were in a pretty good place, but now coming back to the office and-” Andersson interjects, “-and finding out what everyones been building,” timeframes had to adapt somewhat. “But then also,” De Geer says, “we have re-written a lot of technology, so its a lot of that, fine tuning stuff, making sure that everything works.”

“I mean [delaying] launch to me is down to what Fatshark does,” Andersson adds, “were trying to be honest with what actually works, and trying to find the problems. It would be different if we did a copy/paste game. In this case, were trying to move to another kind of setting and expanding on the ranged stuff and tuning up everything.”


Darktide preview - a dark area with industrial stairs and piping


Darktide preview - an eerie gate in the distance

The emphasis is that the game has had to change a fair bit over time. “Its really hard to predict exactly when you want to say its enough, unless you just do what you said you were going to do, and then accept whatever quality it is – and thats not, really, what we do. Currently its kind of nice, because were getting into that [stage where] everything is kind of working. The game plays nice. And its fun.”

“The first time we talked about the project,” De Geer says, “its pretty similar to where we are today. But then, there have been a lot of different things not work. We definitely didnt think we needed to go this far with ranged combat. We thought we would get there faster. But then we realised, its not only the FPS experience, its also the enemies, and we also need to do huge behaviour fixes for them, for us to actually be able to play with melee and ranged.”

Andersson gives a final example of the chainsword, which has taken a “full loop” from being “sticky,” where it gets stuck in enemies you attack and follows them, to that feeling “weird,” to it now being something you can activate and being “sticky, a bit,” but then “you can revv it even further, like this – theres a lot of things where the original vision has held true, but the method and the details and implementation have gone through a lot.

“It kind of ties into that “when are we done?” question,” he says. “Well, were done when its good.”


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