The biggest game on the 40K calendar this year is Warhammer 40,000: Darktide and the latest insight we have into the title is a look at character customisation.
Juras Rodionovas, lead character artist on the game, walks us through how players can expect to make their character more personalised when Darktide launches on 13th September.
The first step in this process is choosing the sentence your character is serving. For those who haven’t been following the pre-release story of Darktide, you play as a band of sentenced convicts who need to go on a suicide mission to the Hive World of Atoma Prime to route out a Chaos insurgency.
Four types of sentences are shown in a screenshot: Dereliction of Duty, Insubordination, Misplaced Faith and Sedition.
We’re only shown the effect of one – Dereliction of Duty – which grants a yellow prison jumpsuit. Hopefully the other sentences come with more interesting effects.
Thankfully things get more interesting outside of sentencing.
“When creating their first convict, the player can select between predetermined classes, backstory, and personality choices, which affect voice acting, specific customization options, perks, etc,” Rodionovas writes.
We get a few screenshots showing off more appearance options with body type, face, eye colour, hairstyle, facial hair, face tattoos, body tattoos, scars, height and personality.
Two points worth mentioning here: firstly, given what looks like a soundwave icon next to personality this will likely determine the voice of your character.
Secondly, “face tattoo’s” and “body tattoo’s” are written incorrectly in the screenshots are those apostrophes shouldn’t be there.
All the screenshots mentioned in this story and released so far are in the gallery below too.
Rodionovas also mentions a diversity in facial structures for characters which is always nice to see. Outside of reflecting the hard living of Warhammer 40K and offering more opportunities for representation in games, it also means we get customisation for the playable Ogryn in Darktide.
Ogryns are mutant humans characterised by huge size and strength and have been part of Warhammer for decades.
While face customisation is nice those who want to cover said faces up with gear will be happy to see lots of options on that front too.
Apparent has four slots in this game: head gear, upper body, lower body and accessory cosmetic items. These can be mixed and matched and are meant to mimic kitbashing – the process of creating new table top miniatures by mixing existing ones together.
Those who have never heard of this phrase should know that all of the original Star Wars films got most of their design language from kitbashing physical models. It really is an important part of many hobbies and it’s good to know that developer and publisher Fatshark has this in mind.
