my first foray into 40k was buying a set of space marine figures when i was in gradeschool. i didn't assemble them all or paint any of them. i don't think i ever owned a rulebook. they mostly stayed on their sprues. i'd look at the hobby magazines in Borders and ogle the fully painted armies. my own miniature figurative sculptures were very militaristic back then. i'd make platoons of fighting men out of sculpey clay, stage huge battles and design the armies, dreaming up stories for them. when there was a casualty, i'd get a tool out and make the wound channel in the model and pose them gruesomely. i was permitted to explore this part of myself at home from a young age. it's anyone's judgment if that was good policy.
it wasn't until i was in high school that i revisited the franchise with WH40k: Dawn of War. i've always enjoyed an RTS, and at that time i was playing games like Warcraft III and C&C Generals. RTS games with 3d models were relatively new on the mainstream scene. Total Annihilation was an early one, along with Earth 2150 and another big one i'm forgetting.
I sunk hundreds of hours into Dawn Of War. i'd recolor my own army in their little army painter tool, stage huge skirmishes after i'd finished the campaign. the ideas of the fiction got into me pretty deep. the idea that the future could look like our brutal past, that there's no such thing as a "good guy" in a trans-galactic genocidal struggle, that the characteristic most science fiction franchises celebrate about humanity - that we are emotional and spiritual beings - is also the attribute which makes us prone to fanaticism and hatred.
if you're a kid in middle america then the core tenets of the 40k universe are not a hard sell, chiefly that religion is used to justify hate and violence, that the clarity of prejudice is commonly preferred over the murk of tolerance and that the reasoned progress we congratulate ourselves for isn't guaranteed or even universally valued. Star Trek never seemed plausible to me the way 40k did. and 40k has, like, magic spells and demons in it.
after THQ and Relic had their financial troubles in the 2000s, Games Workshop sorta rejiggered how they licensed their IP to software developers. they went wide, letting basically anyone try their hand at making a warhammer videogame. while we, as consumers, got large volume of titles to choose from, there was no longer an association between the brand and good quality products in the digital space. since then, 40k games have been mostly misses with the odd hit every few years. a lot of stinkers, a few bangers.
in the last 5 years i've picked up Dan Abnett's 40k novels and read maybe 30 of them. i've spent time on the wiki reading up on lore when i should have been doing grownup stuff. i've watched those youtube lore synopses in the background. i never painted a mini or played the tabletop. not yet anyway. It seems expensive. I've discovered a few of the aforementioned hits in the 40k video game arena as well. Mechanicus and Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters are both phenomenal tactics games. Space Marine from a few console generations ago was also a very well executed and thoroughly dumb third person action game, and the upcoming one looks cool with they Tyranids. Dawn of War had two sequels which were decent, although i spent a lot more time with III than i did with II. II was doing sort of a moba thing that i didn't really understand.
Arguably the biggest of those hits (from the fantasy side) was Vermintide, which got a sequel, which i played and enjoyed. vermintide is a descendent of the Left 4 Dead model, where 4 players cooperate against hordes of zombies (and the occasional monstrosity) in order to move from A to B, with some light puzzling along the way. being outnumbered and overwhelmed are the predominant feelings in games of this kind; there are hundreds of mindless slavering corpses swarming you and your friends, and you need to work together and leverage mass violence in order to escape with your lives. to a certain kind of player this is an appealing fantasy. i am that player.
swap out zombies for skaven (read: rat-men) and give it focus on melee combat and that's vermintide. additionally, the five characters you can choose from each have their own personalities and huge banks of well voice-acted lines of dialog, which play off one another, the events of the game and NPCs seamlessly and charmingly. Vermintide is an achievement in writing and acting in games. And the music is also very good. i've got the vermintide ii soundtrack playing right now as i write this, as a matter of fact.
Darktide is Vermintide in 40k, AND written by Dan Abnett, whose books i love. if a game were ever made for me, this is it. I've looked forward to this game since before the pandemic when the first trailer came out. its themes, its tone, its verbs, all of it is aimed directly at my center of mass.
I played in the closed beta in october, which was a lot of fun. It was relatively stable, only crashing once or twice that weekend for me. but this new beta is, on a technical level, dogshit. i crash out of the majority of the games i attempt, sometimes losing the rewards for a completed mission in the process. two in every three mission attempts either begin or end by crashing to desktop. i've exited the game using the menus a handful of times in the past 10 days. i open the client a LOT.
This is unfortunate, because when it works it is absolutely gorgeous. It's everything they promised and more - visceral, smart, dumb, scary, humorous, thought provoking, transporting, intriguing... I know they're going to release incredible stuff through the product's life, they've already trickled out new features during the preorder beta. i have to assume they'll do more after the games' full release in two days, but damn. the game just isn't ready for its closeup, functionally speaking.
i have a 3070. i have my settings on medium. my connection is strong. the problem is not my hardware.
i understand that it's a beta and that nothing is gonna be perfect, but there is a serious, critical brokenness that found its way into the game between the last beta and this one. something is capitol-f Fucked. and i hope they unfuck it soon, because this game launches for real on the 30th.
a game this aesthetically good with this much potential and this much obvious love invested into its every detail deserves a stellar launch. i worry that instead it's gonna disappoint a lot of people on wednesday.
