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Heyo Devoted Rejects,

We’re excited to announce the next free update coming to Darktide - Unlocked and Loaded - will be releasing on September 26, 2024.

Unlocked and Loaded will include the overhaul to itemization, a new mission with a new objective, and improvements to social features.

Itemization Overhaul:

• Unlock Your Potential: With the itemization overhaul, players will master their weapons over time, unlock blessings, weapon marks, and perks, and tinker with their gear to increase its Power. This overhaul will help players carve a clear path to get the weapons and gameplay they want. (More dev blogs on this soon and the next Q&A blog will be released this week!)

New Mission:

• Time’s running out! Players will race against time and repel heretics in this shorter high-octane mission in which players’ strike teams are the only thing standing between a barreling freight train and Tertium. (Did you see the end of the teaser trailer?) (We’re also working on a dev blog for this mission, too!)

New Social Feature:

• Team-up against Chaos: As Darktide is made to be enjoyed with others, our new Group Finder features will make teaming up with like-minded players easier. Before embarking on a mission, players will be able to form groups and band together to wreak havoc among the ranks of the heretics. You can form groups based on language, difficulty, mission focus, and more.

Heyo Everyone,

Earlier this month, we released an Introduction to Itemization dev blog. After sharing the first looks of Itemization, we got a lot of messages from players. We collected over 13 pages of feedback, questions and concerns. As promised, we’re following up on them.

While we cannot answer all of those questions yet, as some things are still being decided and iterated upon, we wanted to answer a batch of them today. We will continue to share more answers as we move closer to release! We want to hear more of your feedback and opinions through this dialogue.

Note: All of the questions we’re answering in this are pulled directly from the comments on the Forums, Reddit and Discord. We kept the players’ wording instead of writing our own questions.

Before we dive in, we want to make it clear for those who might’ve missed prior communications: WE ARE BREAKING THE LOCKS WITH THIS REWORK.

Devoted Rejects,

Today we are sharing with you the provisional notes for our next patch - Patch #14. This update will mainly be comprised of needed balance changes and bug fixes from the Class Rework in Patch #13.

Just to make you aware these notes and changes are not final, and may still be changed before the release. We will release the final patch notes when we deploy Patch #14 which may come at a later date Patch #14

These notes contain the second part of changes based on community testing that we’ve had with select members of the community the past 2 months, and adjustments to live issues that have appeared. We once again want to thank the community members for their continued help with improving areas of the game that need extra attention.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Here is part 2 of the patch notes for Patch #13: Class Overhaul.

Devoted Rejects!

Here are the Patch Notes for Patch #13: Class Overhaul Part 1. Not all our notes would fit in one post!

Rejects,

Here are the Patch notes for Patch #12 - Into the Maelstrom. As part of this patch there will be a maintenance period in which you will be unable to log in into the game. We expect this to last around 3 hours, commencing from 07:00 UTC. Updated Features Mission Board

With this patch, the Mission Board will now primarily utilise its Dynamic System. This means that the conditions chosen to be available on the mission board will cycle much more frequently through all released conditions available.

We want new players to have a smoother experience in the early game, while still adding challenges for advanced players with harder conditions. As an example, you will see much less frequent occurrences of Low Intensity conditions on Damnation, while lower difficulties like Uprising will have less frequent occurrences of High Intensity conditions.

Maelstrom Missions Maelstrom missions are now available on the mission board! These are missions with a set of new Conditions, which is a mixture of new modifiers and existing ones in different variations. They will be accessible through a unique slot on the mission board, which is available at all times so that they are easy to find and try out. We will be experimenting with different variations going forward.

These Maelstrom missions should be approached with caution as some of them can be quite challenging! As a reward for completing these challenges, both XP and Ordo Dockets will have a higher payout than usual.

Auric Operations

We are introducing an additional mission board for players that will consist of a set of high difficulty missions that will always have a condition applied to them. You must be level 30 to play these missions.

With the changes we made to the dynamic system, Auric-level operations will always have available conditions which include the high intensity modifiers (this means some of your favourite high intensity missions will appear more often!), except for the Maelstrom missions. Elite Resistance is also being re-worked based on prior feedback and will not yet be available. Progression

The Experience Points requirements for levelling up characters have been adjusted. Overall, the XP needed to level up between levels 2 - 20 have been reduced by an average of 20%.

Due to this change, some of your characters may enter a higher level than before now that they meet the XP requirements. Please note that characters will not decrease in a level they have acquired.

Standard Operations Total available missions on the standard operations board have increased! We have rebalanced the introduction of difficulties and spread of conditions over our mission difficulties as follows:

For both Sedition and Uprising difficulties, the amount of missions available with conditions has been decreased.

Sedition difficulty missions will no longer have conditions.

Uprising will now only have one available mission with a condition active.

In Heresy and Damnation the amount of missions available with conditions has been decreased.

Level requirement to access Heresy difficulty has been increased to 9 (from 6 previously).

Level requirement to access Damnation difficulty has been increased to 15 (from 12 previously).

Dev Note: This is due to the introduction of the Auric-level operations available with these difficulties and conditions.

The duration timer for how long a mission is available for has been changed for Standard Operations to coincide with other changes made to the Mission Board. The intent is for you to see a faster rotation of conditions and maps available to select from.

For missions without conditions this has been adjusted to the following values:

Sedition: 10 minutes (from a value between 10 and 20 previously)
Uprising: 10 minutes (from a value between 10 and 20 previously)
Malice: 15 minutes (from a value between 10 and 20 previously)
Heresy: 15 minutes (from a value between 10 and 20 previously)
Damnation: 20 minutes (from a value between 10 and 20 previously)

And for missions with conditions, the following adjustments to the duration have been made:

Sedition: 10 minutes (from a value between 30 and 45 previously)
Uprising: 10 minutes (from a value between 30 and 45 previously)
Malice: 15-20 minutes (from a value between 30 and 50 previously)
Heresy: 15-20 minutes (from a value between 30 and 45 previously)
Damnation: 25-30 minutes (from a value between 30 and 50 previously)

Quickplay Joining games through quickplay will now award you bonuses to the Experience, Ordo Dockets, Plasteel, and Diamantine that you acquire.

Quickplay will match you to games from the mission board you are currently viewing, whether it’s the standard operations or the auric-level operations.

New Conditions New conditions are being introduced in this patch.

High and Low intensity variants of the Ventilation Purge special condition will enter rotation on both mission boards.
Power Supply Interruption with High Intensity will only appear on the Auric-Level operations.

Advanced Mission Board Options The mission board now has an advanced options menu:

Private games have been relocated to this menu
You can select the server region used for matchmaking purposes in this menu.
Dev Note: The latency from your location to the servers is also displayed giving you information when making a choice. By default, Darktide has always selected the server region that has the lowest latency.

Shrine of the Omnissiah

Refine Item The Refine Item action has been updated. When choosing this action at the Shrine, you can now select from a list of all available perks for the weapon or curio you are refining. There is a direct cost to pay once for each refine action.

As with the other actions at the Shrine, the amount of required resources will scale depending on the base item rating of the weapon, and will scale depending on the tier of perk being selected to refine into.

For Refining an Item, the following amounts are at full price (for at item base rating 380)

Tier 1

50 Plasteel
500 Ordo Dockets

Tier 2

75 Plasteel
1000 Ordo Dockets

Tier 3

100 Plasteel
40 diamantine
2000 Ordo Dockets

Tier 4

200 Plasteel
100 Diamantine
4000 Ordo Dockets

Weapon Modifications

You can now modify two different aspects of your weapon (be it perks and/or blessings) locking out the other options, that being said, you’ll be able to change the two aspects you have selected as many times as you want. This means that you can choose to modify a perk and a blessing, or two perks, or two blessings. This increases the potential permutations of the item that you want to modify. The perks or blessings that you chose to modify will be indicated now in the item card.

Modified slots are represented with an icon. After two slots are modified on an item, the remaining slots of Perks or Blessings are represented with a lock icon.

We have also extended modifying perks to the Curios (as you cannot change its Blessing). You now have the ability to modify two out of three of the perk slots on the curio for further customisation.

Cost Scaling

In addition to the above, we have made changes to the cost of actions at the Shrine of the Omnissiah for both Curios and Weapons.

The change modifies how the cost scaling is applied at the beginning of scale (the minimum cost, at lowest item rating).

This change is to reduce the minimum amount of scaling from 35% to 20%. This will mean it will be cheaper for newer characters who are levelling to use the Shrine. Economy

All character bound currencies will now migrate into an account bound wallet where access is shared across all characters on that account.

Migration Information Upon logging into Darktide after this update is live you will automatically go through a migration process where the character wallets of Ordo Dockets, Ordo Ingots, Plasteel, and Diamantine will merge into one unified account wallet. These currencies will no longer have any character based wallets.

An explanation of this process will be presented at the Main Menu / Character Selection screen, as well as a “Receipt” detailing the balance of the wallets for your characters and the total merged result for the account.

Additionally, the Account Wallet will be displayed on this menu, as all the currencies & resources are now shared between your characters.

Fixes and Tweaks

Adjusted calculations for continuous fire based blessings to be a bit more generous when rounding. More noticeable on Ripperguns, and weapons with smaller clip sizes.
Reduced black overlay when players start regen toughness after losing toughness, added 2 second cooldown
Fixed bug where Mutant decided to do squats instead of chasing its intended target.
Added animation speed scaling for Mutants so that the animations match the speed.
Fixed a bug where the Beast of Nurgle could get stuck in a vomit state.
Lowered Reapers push force when hitting players from 6 to 5 for humans, and from 6 to 2 for Ogryns.
Tweaked down Ragers normal attack duration to make them more responsive
Added small healing over time when Beast of Nurgle has consumed a player
Added the option to rebind “I” used to open the Operative menu in the Mourningstar.
Fixed a crash that could occur on Intel Arc GPUs.

Devoted Rejects,

In this dev blog we are going to dive into three topics and upcoming changes that we will be making to them. The three topics are the Mission Board, Crafting, and Currencies/Resources within Darktide.

All the changes that we will be discussing in this dev blog have been in development, and are being prepared to launch in Patch #12 (1.1.20). These changes mark the next step in our support to the game, we will keep on monitoring feedback and evaluate future changes.

For clarity, these changes are not the only changes currently in development and being worked on by the team. We’re also still hard at work on Darktide for Xbox!

Mission Board

We’re making some key changes to how the mission board generates its missions, while also expanding upon the available content. We are going to cover the details further into the dev blog, but for those of you who want a high level summary here are the changes that will be made:

Maelstrom Missions

We will be introducing Maelstrom missions, which are a set of new Conditions with a mixture of new modifiers and existing ones in many different variations. Most of them will be explained through a string of modifiers. For example: waves of Specialists, hunting grounds, waves of mutants and players have 20% reduced ability cooldown.

These Maelstrom missions should be approached with caution as some of them can be quite challenging! As a reward for completing these challenges, both XP and Ordo Dockets will have a higher payout than usual. They will be accessible through a unique slot on the mission board, which is available at all times so that they are easy to find and try out.

Auric-level Operations

We are introducing an additional mission board for players that will consist of a set of high difficulty missions that will always have a condition applied to them. You must be level 30 to play these missions (sidenote: the numbers of missions available for Auric-level operations in the above screenshot could be subject to change). This board will also sport Maelstrom missions, a few of them will have unique conditions variations that are inherent to the Auric-level board.

With the changes we made to the dynamic system we have made the Auric-level operations favour High Intensity conditions, there will be no Low Intensity conditions active in these missions.

Quickplay Bonuses

We are adding bonuses through use of Quickplay as we want to ensure that you are rewarded, should you choose to lend a helping hand by filling an empty spot in a strike team.

Experience, Ordo Dockets, Diamantine, and Plasteel will be bonuses upon receiving these rewards when a mission concludes (sidenote: quickplay bonuses numbers displayed in the screenshot could be subject to change by the time we deploy this patch).

Matchmaking & Server Selection

For further flexibility with the matchmaking system we have added the ability to set the servers used to matchmake with. Darktide has always used the best latency servers you can connect to for matchmaking, however we realise that some players in the world may need to connect to different servers in order to find a larger pool of players. In addition, we regularly review and update matchmaking rules to provide an improved matchmaking experience.

Changing the servers can have an effect on the gameplay experience through the added latency, and we’ll present the latency values in the server selection so that you can be aware of them.

Changes to the dynamic system of the Mission Board

The mission board on the Mourningstar shows the emergent threats throughout Tertium Hive. Functionally these threats are uncovered by the board through use of two systems, a dynamic system and an event driven system. The dynamic system generates content based upon a set of rules, meanwhile the event system acts as an overriding system that will then substitute its ruleset over the dynamic one.

We have made several changes and added functionality to the dynamic system to give much more refined controls over the content generation. The dynamic system refreshes far more frequently (approximately every 10 minutes) and we can now set an individual weighting to each condition per difficulty level.

For you the players, this will mean a more varied amount of conditions available across the mission board. There is also now control for us to weigh certain conditions for certain difficulties differently. As an example, you will see much less frequent occurrences of Low Intensity conditions on Damnation, while lower difficulties like Uprising will have less frequent occurrences of High Intensity conditions. The intent is for new players to have a smoother experience at the start while also providing a challenge to advanced players with harder conditions.

Our aim in these changes is to refine the emergence aspect of the mission board with further variety and the ability to adjust the board as needed.

Crafting

Let’s now talk about crafting, and some of the upcoming changes you can expect. Item Refinement, or previously known as Perk re-rolling is the main focus of our changes.

Ability to select the exact Perk when refining an item

You can now select the exact perk at any tier that you wish for an item (weapon or curio). There is one direct cost to be made for each refine action. This cost will remain flat throughout refining and will be reduced for lower level characters

As with the other actions at the Shrine, the amount of required resources will scale both depending on the base item rating of the weapon and on the tier of perk being selected to refine into.

Two Modifications for items

You can now modify two different aspects of your weapon (be it perks and/or blessings) locking out the other options, that being said, you’ll be able to change the two aspects you have selected as many times as you want. This means that you can choose to modify a perk and a blessing, or two perks, or two blessings. This increases the potential permutations of the item that you want to modify. The perks or blessings that you have chosen to modify will be indicated now in the item card.

Change to Curios

We have extended the ability to make two modifications to Curios, specifically you will be able to modify two Perks.

We are aware that the changes mentioned above do not give unrestricted freedom to all aspects of an item. To do so would have a big impact on item acquisition in Darktide, and we want to explore different paths further down the line.

Currencies & Wallets

And for the final chapter in this dev blog, we’d like to discuss the changes we will be making to the currencies & resources in Darktide. In short, all character bound currencies are moving towards an account bound wallet where access is shared across all characters.

Migration of currencies

After careful consideration and review of how these systems are working and what value that you the players receive out of them, we decided to opt for moving everything to a single unified account wallet. Now you can choose any character you have created and with the currencies you get as rewards, you can now choose how to spend those freely.

With the next patch, after you login to Darktide you will go through an automatic migration process where the character wallets of Ordo Dockets, Ordo Ingots, Plasteel, and Diamantine will merge into one unified account wallet. These currencies will no longer have any character based wallet anymore.

An explanation of this process will be presented at the Main Menu / Character Selection screen, as well as a “Receipt” detailing the balance of the wallets for your characters and the total merged result for the account.

Additionally, the Account Wallet will now be displayed on this menu and show all the aforementioned currencies & resources as they are now shared.

The next Patch #12 - Into the Maelstrom (1.1.20)

All of the above changes are being prepared for our next patch to Darktide, which will release around mid-August. As part of this patch there will be a maintenance period in which you will be unable to log in into the game, we expect it to last 3 hours.

We will continue to iterate on these features and more, in part through community driven discussions and topics that are presented to us by sharing your thoughts and comments on both our Official Discord or Forums.

Thank you for reading, and watch each other’s backs down there on Tertium.

Rejects,

This is Catfish, Darktide Community Manager, here with another comm-link update.

The comms team is back from its break and so are comm-links! Due to the summer hiatus, this edition will be shorter than usual. We will also have a slower pace of Comm-links for the foreseeable future, to make way for more varied types of comms, such as dev blogs.

Here is what you can expect for the coming weeks on Darktide:

* On August 3rd, we will publish a Dev Blog focusing on upcoming changes in Patch #12 (1.1.20), giving you an in-depth look at our plans for account based currencies, perk refinements, adjustments to crafting locks and options on the mission board.

* In the first half of August we will be releasing Patch #12 alongside its patch notes.

See you next week for the Dev Blog!

Rejects!

Here are the notes for Hotfix 1.1.12 that just went live on Steam and will be out shortly on the Microsoft Store. Hotfix 1.1.12

Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when launching the game.

Fix for Bulwarks not staggering correctly if shot while opening their shield.

Shredder Autopistol (Shrineguard Cerulean) from Commodore’s Vestures now has correct colour.