• A new cinematic trailer has dropped for Fatshark’s hotly anticipated Warhammer 40K: Darktide.
• The developer’s in-house cinematic department has produced a lavish three-minute video.
• Fatshark is set to give players who pre-order the game earlier access than its 30th November release date.

The team at Fatshark are getting ready for the 30th November launch date of their upcoming major title Warhammer 40K: Darktide, and it is clear they’re hefting considerable resources behind the game in terms of both creative and capital.

On Thursday, the Swedish studio published a lavish cinematic trailer intended to be an introduction to the universe of Darktide, the grim darkness of Warhammer’s far future.

Watch the latest Darktide cinematic below

The story of the game is written by long-time Warhammer writer Dan Abnett, known for his Gaunt’s Ghosts series of novels that follow a regiment of Imperial Guard soldiers set in the same universe as Darktide.

Abnett is also on the company’s team of writers in charge of deciding what happens in the Warhammer 40K canon so fans of the universe can expect the game to strictly adhere to the lore and the cinematic trailer is a feast of easter eggs and inside references for the eagle-eyed.

The Darktide cinematic opens up with the shrill voice of Inquisitor Brahms, basically our boss in the game, introducing the forty-first millennium as we travel through the void.

“There is only war,” she says  (the catchphrase of the series), with the menacing shadow of the Morningstar leering across the screen.

This enormous spaceship/cathedral/fortress is featured in-game as the hub area in which players can select what missions to embark on next and where they can purchase better equipment such as armour and weapons.

We get to see it in its full glory in the cinematic, as well as its interior as the camera takes us within the bridge of the vessel. Here, humans dressed in what can only be described as future goth toil in the dark as the ship prepares for warp travel.

The detail here is scrumptious and we can only imagine the whine of the machines that had to render this nearly three-minute piece of CG.

The glow of the starlight on the Morningstar’s buttresses as it approaches the warp portal down to the minute design eccentricities of the characters showcase how this is possibly the best treatment a Warhammer game has ever received.

We even get to see a tech priest, imagine an engineer that loved machines so much he started becoming one, walk through the corridors of the ship as Imperial Guard soldiers pray for safe lightspeed passage through the warp.

All the while Brahms gives us more detail about the setting, and how the fate of the entire universe could be at stake if we fail.

We see a Navigator, a sub-species of humans that allows ships to safely travel faster-than-light, straining as they prepare for warp-travel as tendrils of electricity snake about their body, and finally, Inquisitor Brahms herself, who gives the go-ahead for the jump.

Fatshark has its own in-house cinematic department on which they were recently advertising open positions. We can say that this team is earning their stripes because the art on display reviles some of the industry’s top cinematic departments, including Blizzard’s.

As the Morningstar engages its FTL drive and translates across the warp, we see frost gathering inside the ship and the monstrous entities of chaos, some of which players of Darktide will be facing, as the industrial thumping and church-hymn-fuelled score by Jesper Kyd begins to swell.

The cinematic finally takes us into the hive city of Tertium, and beneath it as a strike team of four guardsmen representing the players are chased by unknown evil creatures lurking in the acrid pollution.

Here, the guardsmen meet a terrible fate as the cinematic concludes, answering a question left by the first teaser trailer released by Fatshark about the game.

We may have rewatched this cinematic trailer an embarrassing amount of times, but the excitement around the Left 4 Dead-style first-person shooter/slasher is palpable.

Last month we played a few hours of the Darktide beta, and aside from some issues around dropped frames, we were very impressed. The gameplay has an addictive quality to it, similar to that found in the developer’s Vermintide series, and the visuals are striking.

Recently, and probably in anticipation of the launch of Darktide, Fatshark has made Vermintide 2 free to keep on Steam. 10 million people downloaded the game as part of the free campaign.

Fatshark is now letting the players that pre-ordered Darktide begin playing earlier than the rest, with an early access period starting from 17th November, several days before the 30th November launch window.

[Image – Fatshark]