enemies,” says Wahlund. “Now we
want to have the same type of feeling,
but also working with the actual
level itself, so it could be a bit
different depending on how you
play it and the missions that you
play, but also because of the weather,
electricity or gas leaks. There’s a lot
of things we can play around with to
get a completely different feeling
when you play a mission.”
PACE MARINES
Violence, gore and waves of enemies
are probably the first thing your
mind conjures up when you think
about Vermintide, but in Darktide
the pace and the tension will
have more peaks and valleys, with
quieter moments to sneak around
or solve a puzzle. It’s more of what
you might expect in a dungeon-
delving RPG.
“It’s really easy when making a
game like Vermintide to just open the
funnel, and then open it some more,
because the more enemies we throw
at people, the more fun it is,” says
Andersson. “But you can also go
the opposite direction of actually
bringing down the tempo and making
it a bit more lenient. We want to be
able to still provide that gameplay
experience where your heart is up
here all the time, but we also want
to expand it into a place where
you actually have time to talk and
breathe. If we lower the tempo, we
get a completely different kind of
mood, if you will, in a level.”
This is one of the reasons why
you won’t be playing as Space
Marines. They’re unstoppable
juggernauts who, in a real-time
setting, could easily just march
through the hordes of enemies, never
needing to rest, and certainly never
taking a break for a chat. They’re
stoic and a little boring, and Fatshark
wants characters with charisma. Andfear, too, which Space Marines are
also largely unfamiliar with.
Slowing things down doesn’t
always mean making things
comfortable. If there’s a power
outage, for instance, you’ll have
to rely on flashlights to see
where you’re going, making your
exploration of the sector more
methodical, but no less tense. An
abandoned dark sector is obviously
fertile ground for some horror.
While the Skaven are extremely
unsettling, Darktide seems moreTHE PACE AND THE
TENSION WILL
HAVE MORE PEAKS
AND VALLEYS
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
Gothic architecture never^
really goes out of style.