Darktide Anniversary Update Deep Dive

Last month, as a bit of a surprise, Fatshark launched the first part of a massive anniversary update. The second half of the Traitor’s Curse has now been released and I’ve been working very hard to get my veteran up now that the new talent tree for the class has been revamped. If you’re a player who hasn’t touched the game since launch, or a longtime 40K fan who hasn’t yet gotten stuck cleaning up Tertium, I’ve compiled a few of the major changes in the update and what they mean.

First and most obvious are the two new missions, which revolve around a new zone called The Carnival. A huge slum, as outlined by the developers, the Carnival encompasses the meanest streets Tertium has to offer. Filled with numerous businesses that would love to say out of sight of the Adeptus Arbites, corruption everywhere and an overall grim appeal make the Carnival perhaps one of the grimmest places we’ve visited yet, in that perfect Warhammer 40,000 grimdark way. Your eyes can’t help but be drawn to the red glow of the carnival, as you wonder what this place looked like before a bunch of Nurgle worshippers broke in and turned everyone into monsters.

While the aesthetic took some getting used to, and I still would have liked to see more of the carnival before it became yet another place infected with the plague, it certainly does its job of making you feel like you’re somewhere else in Tertium without looking like a district that should appear in another Hive City or on another planet. As you also go deeper into the carnival in the second mission, your surroundings change from sprawling, Victorian-inspired cityscapes that make you want to slowly turn the camera as if you were in an E3 demo, to cramped corridors that make you tremble every time you hear the dreaded howl of a smallpox dog.

As for the missions offered in The Traitor Curse, I have to say I prefer the second one. The first mission feels pretty standard for Darktide, where you fight through hordes before holding off countless enemies until you can be extracted at the end, while the second mission is a much longer affair, including a great ambush, lots of diversity in your environments and a part where you smash a few glass containers with the most satisfying “thump” sound I’ve heard all year. They are a great addition to the selection of missions, and with the addition of the new Karnak Twins, these levels are also a worthy challenge regardless of your preferred difficulty level.

The Karnak Twins have not only been unleashed in these missions, but have been unleashed throughout Tertium. I first encountered Rinda during a random Quick Play mission while leveling my veteran and was absolutely battered by their massive sword swings. Both Rinda and Rodin can appear at any time and they feel like better versions of Daemonhosts. You can just bypass a daemonhost if you see it early enough, but the Karnak Twins pop up out of nowhere, ruin your day and disappear in a green cloud of what I hope is smoke before you even realize what’s going on. Because they are timed encounters, they can’t just ruin your run out of nowhere, and yet the concept of them popping up as a new and terrifying threat now haunts the back of my mind as I travel through Tertium.

However, the addition of The Carnival and the Karnak Twins have brought more than just new levels and bosses. They have brought a good story to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. There is a story in the base game, but it largely revolves around gaining levels and meeting someone who tells you that you deserve the Empire’s trust, but you haven’t earned enough yet. It’s cyclical, without much ever happening. In The Traitor Curse, we made the Moebian 6th feel like a real threat, with Wolfer as our primary antagonist, who has legions at his disposal, including superpowered troops like the Karnak Twins. In the Vox Transmissions and Carnival missions, we know that Inquisitor Zola has set out on her own to find out what’s going on, and it’s likely that this story will be picked up in another new mission. More of this, please. If we can’t have the connection to the world through the characters we play like in Vermintide, the next best option is to have NPCs we care about as our main narrative device.

If you don’t care about the story and levels and just want more meat in your gameplay, you’re in luck. The new talent tree for veterans lets you get to the fun skills faster, although I still felt like I was spending some points on rather pointless upgrades (basically anything that didn’t have great text telling me that grenades go boom). Still, it’s a marked improvement over what it was, which until recently made me avoid being a veteran. My favorite addition to the gameplay are the Stims, which give you a number of buffs and can be found in crates alongside ammo and grenades. From combat buffs to health boosts, these can be snatched for your own purposes or, if you’re like me, you can poke a friend with a random speed boost to send them hurtling toward an enemy horde much faster than they expected.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster, with fans not entirely satisfied with the game when it launched, but since then we’ve seen talent trees, the Xbox Series X/S version and of course this Traitor Curse update. With the focus The Traitor Curse has on new content, I hope we can see similar major updates in the future that can make Darktide the incredible package that Fatshark’s previous game, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is. But even now, it is clear that we have come a long way in our quest to save the Empire from this pox rot.