‘Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’ patch is a thumbs-up for the game

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide developer Fatshark has issued a major patch for the co-op shooter, adding emotes and a long list of balance tweaks.

Darktide has faced a number of issues since launching in November, with ‘Mixed’ player reviews on Steam highlighting problems with missing features, technical problems, and a controversial in-game store.

Yesterday (February 22), Fatshark released Darktide‘s fourth major patch, which aims to improve the game state in a number of areas. Some new features added with the patch include Wargear Sets that allow players to save their custom loadouts, the ability to acquire specific weapon marks, and new weekly contracts for Sire Melk’s Requisitorium. Additionally, existing contracts have been made easier to complete, and players will be able to change or extract blessings on their weapons.

The patch also introduces emotes to Darktide, with Wave, Thumbs Up, No, Squat and Kneel available for all classes but Ogryn, who gets some unique ones.

Patch notes also confirm that Fatshark has taken “a long hard look at the Hunting Grounds Condition” and is looking test changes to make modifiers more distinct. The studio has also issued a large amount of weapon balance changes.

“As part of this update we took a pass at each weapon’s available Blessings, tuning and fixing them as we went along,” explained Fatshark. “The intent is to raise the weaker choices and fix interactions that were flawed in order to provide a wider palette of interesting choices to pick from. Most changes include buffs to Blessings as they were in general modest or sometimes downright pointless in their old format. There are a lot of combinations to test and tune so please keep the feedback coming and we’ll keep the full Blessing configuration of each weapon as part of our patch rotation in the future.”

The patch has been well-received on Reddit, with the Darktide community praising the amount of issues that have been addressed with the update.

We awarded Darktide three stars in our review of the game, praising its “pulse-pounding action” but criticising a lack of content and slow progression systems.

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