For Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, the first paid DLC is coming, along with a free update for all players. This includes changes that have been missing from the shooter since release and are ideal for new players. But veterans will also find value.
What kind of shooter is it?
- You play Darktide in co-op with a team of four players. Although the game is a shooter, ammunition is quite limited, which means you will need to reach for the sword, a common weapon in Warhammer 40,000 just as often.
- You have various classes with different skills as well as customizable equipment and talent trees available. From the magic-capable Psyker to the hulking Ogryn, various playstyles are open to you.
- The gameplay is similar to Left4Dead or its predecessor Vermintide: You complete individual missions in quite linear levels with additional objectives, receive a reward at the end, and can level up. Teamwork is essential.
This is what makes Darktide better now: On June 23, 2025, the first DLC featuring the Arbites class will be released, and a free update with some significant changes will also come. Perhaps the most important change: The story will be much more deeply woven into the game.
Instead of meeting people in fragmented bits and unlocking new content through pure level grind, the story around Atoma, your ship, and the NPCs is embedded in the missions and cutscenes. A 17-part campaign guides you through the game piece by piece. At the same time, you have more freedom of choice through:
- the option to completely skip the campaign and only play missions (if you’re just not interested in the story)
- a revised difficulty system that dynamically expands through played missions instead of leveling as before
- more mission options: each mission on the board is available for every difficulty, instead of previously only for certain difficulties
- an improved weapon selection through balancing and buffs, such as for shotguns – the goal is for you to find and maintain your playstyle
If you want to pay, you can also unlock the Arbitrator as a new class, a brutal space policeman in Judge Dredd style. Arbitrators are particularly the tanks in the team with their shield and are the only class with a companion, a cybernetically enhanced cyber dog.
Darktide shows you Warhammer 40,000 as it truly is: dirty, mean, and cynical
With the new update, Darktide makes it significantly easier to get into the game by embedding progress more organically. This has been a problem for new players, although not a major one: the start often felt a bit “disconnected”.
Darktide is also the ideal entry point into the world of Warhammer 40,000 in general. While in other games you play as a Space Marine or another important member of the Imperium, in Darktide, you are simply scum, which is what is most commonly found in the Imperium.
The world is dark and cruel, the Imperium is not a friendly place, but a harsh military dictatorship. Darktide makes you feel that: you are expendable. If you die, so be it; your death is often not even worth a record.
At the same time, the game features numerous biting interactions between characters (“banter”) or comments on the environment or enemies, often accompanied by dark gallows humor. The Arbitrator is also intended to be involved here. A small fact: one of the voice actresses for one of the female Arbites voices (The Authoritarian
) is Devora Wilde, who already voiced Lae’zel in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Together with the dirty world, this is exactly the atmosphere that Warhammer 40,000 wants to convey. For newcomers, this may feel strange at first, but the world has so many fans for a reason: user asks if anyone was shocked at their first experience with Warhammer 40,000, receives hardened replies
