'It took a while to get there, but now we feel we're in a good place': Fatshark's design director talks doing years of repair work on Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Warhammer 40k: Darktide had a rough launch—not disastrously rough, mind. The game's core systems, and Fatshark's previous pedigree were all enough to hook players in and keep them popping back for some major updates. Still, clunky crafting progression, chugging performance, and a lack of buildcrafting threw a wet blanket over a game that was otherwise very fun to play.

As you might be aware, Fatshark's sorted a lot of it out, starting with a huge class overhaul in October of its launch year, plus a bunch of free updates. As such, Fatshark's kept it chugging along with decently healthy numbers—fluctuating around 10,000 players in a 24-hour period, which is fine for a 3-year-old live service game—and is now confident enough to release a bit of paid DLC: A whole new class.

As for why it's taken Fatshark a whole two years to put a price tag on something (other than its controversial launch cosmetics, of course) design director Victor Magnuson, speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, explains:

"The philosophy for Darktide is that any content that could split the playerbase, we give away for free. So any mission content, game mode content, or any new weapons and stuff like that we'll give away for free.

"We feel that a player class lives on the side. You don't have to have it, you can still play with all your friends. So that is something we can charge for, because it's an addition to the game. It doesn't split the playerbase in any way."

I think that's fair enough. I don't have the brightest opinion of priced games with cosmetic microtransactions, but around two years of post-launch support is enough to ask for a few credits to snag a new class, in my estimation. Mind, it's not all roses and flowers.

Darktide is just barely sitting at "Mixed" recent reviews on Steam as I write this. Community sentiment from the naysayers seems to be that Fatshark's been slow on the uptake to update the game—based partially on a 2022 blog post that stated the studio would drop "one new class every quarter", which obviously hasn't come close to happening. Mind, Fatshark also completely overhauled how classes work in Darktide, making them a lot more complex.

Some also allege that the Arbites is overpriced at $12/£10—especially since it has a deluxe edition, because everything needs a deluxe edition nowadays. I don't know how I feel about tacking on a bigger price tag for more cosmetics, but I reckon if I've played a game on and off for a few years, $12 seems reasonable.

It is, however, a lot more expensive than Vermintide 2's careers. For comparison, the Necromancer is $4/£3. On the other hand, the Arbites has three paths—so it's more comparable to three Verminite classes. The quibbling continues.

Regardless, Magnuson seems cheery about how things are going: "Players are happy, we feel we've got the base systems in the right place, the progression is there, it's fun to play. We've got these classes that are deep and have a lot of different play styles in them. It took a while to get there, but now we feel we're in a good place, and that we're ready to do something where we charge a little extra."

Overall, Magnuson seems to view the bumpy ride as fans being rewarded for having faith. Which is fitting conceptually for the grim darkness of the future where there's only war, I suppose: "All of our existing playerbase, when we released Darktide, they knew, 'it's going to get better, so don't worry.' A lot of the new players were saying that it was missing something, but all the old-school Vermintide players were like, 'Don't worry about it, they will fix this, they will add systems and it will get better. Just wait'."

Mmn. Don't get me wrong, I think Fatshark's done an admirable repair job on Darktide—but I don't think I'm being presumptuous when I say I think most would've appreciated it if the problems weren't there in the first place.

Still, he maintains the playerbase has "gotten used to the pace of how and when we release stuff. We try as much as possible to keep a three-month cadence, and for major updates, a year. And we've also added small events in between so there's something to play, or something cool happening in the game."

Overall, Magnuson's happy: "Our philosophy is that, as long as you come back when we do an update, we're happy. We don't think it's possible to have the entire playerbase playing the game forever, constantly, so as long as they come back, we're super happy."