Warhammer 40,000: Darktide’s Xbox release marks a fresh start, and Game Pass is all the better for it

I was looking forward to the release of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide from the moment it was announced. I’ve played over a hundred hours of Vermintide, and Vermintide 2, so I knew I could count on developer Fatshark to deliver a compelling action game.

But when Darktide came out at the end of November, 2022, the action was solid, but everything around it felt unfinished, missing, or frustratingly misguided. Performance on PC needed big optimisations, especially in CPU-utilisation. In-game itemisation was paper-thin, once you put enough hours into the game to get to a point where you needed good loot.

Then there was the bizarrely aggressive monetisation. Darktide had fallen into the common trap of prioritising paid cosmetics and launching with an in-game store – in such a way that it gave players the ick – especially since large parts of the game clearly needed a lot of work.