Darktide’s narrative will be expanded as part of future updates: ‘We are definitely going to be adding to the story of the game’

When Darktide’s Arbites Class DLC arrived, it came alongside a free update called The Battle for Tertium, which added a campaign mode at long last. Rather than the story coming to a halt once the prologue ended, players had the option to be guided through missions with bespoke voiceover, cutscenes, even unique enemy spawns to make it feel like you weren’t just grinding maps for gear over and over. We won’t find out what Darktide’s second class DLC will be until it’s revealed on November 11, but Fatshark did confirm the game’s story will continue to be expanded.

“I wouldn’t say it necessarily always will be attached to a new class or anything like that,” said design director Victor Magnuson, “but each new piece of the game will add to the overarching story of the game.”

Magnuson explained that it’s been difficult to “beat narrative” into Darktide. Two players might come to a mission having had very different experiences leading up to it, and having different amounts of patience for a game slowing down to drop narrative on them. “Our approach is to just add it piece by piece,” Magnuson said, “and build the narrative as little puzzle pieces that slowly fall together and then you see the bigger picture, whatever it is. But yeah, we are definitely going to be adding to the story of the game.”

Another part of the Darktide challenge has been designing a whole new world for it to take place on. The Vermintide games had a huge amount of material from the Warhammer Fantasy world to draw on, with the team finding the tabletop RPG’s adventures particularly useful sources, but the expectation for a typical 40K game is that it will be set on a unique planet.

“It was a big difference,” Magnuson said. “I remember doing Vermintide 1 and 2, we really did look at the adventures, and took a lot of inspiration from the adventures for different scenarios for the missions and stuff like that.”

Creating Tertium from whole cloth meant visualizing a lot of things Warhammer 40,000’s rarely touched on before, and which then became increasingly important parts of the missions. Trains for instance, are something Magnuson says have “just become something that stuck around, and we keep doing train missions.”

Chief creative officer Anders De Geer recalls there was initially a reason for that. “I remember a meeting with a lot of Games Workshop people,” he said, “and then I asked them, if you got to pick something that you would want to see come to life, what would that be? I remember [artist and miniature sculptor] Jes Goodwin’s answer was trains. Trains and train stations.”