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Fat Shark has quickly become one of the best developers of Warhammer-based video games. They have had several cracks at the formula, and whilst every game has had some issues, they’ve all been fun at their core. Vermintide 2 was where things started getting good, and the recent release of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide has cemented that.
But when a developer is well known for making a very specific kind of game, you start to ask questions. The most obvious and glaring of which is: Which is better? Well, neither. They both do things well, and the focus of this article is to go over the things that Vermintide (and Vermintide 2) do better than Darktide. If you are looking for things Darktide does better than Vermintide, then you can find them here.
More Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Content:
Combat Guide | Beginner’s Guide | How To Kill The Plague Ogryn
Class System
This is quite a big one. Darktide has 4 classes, and that’s it. There is a lot of variety in those classes, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are, indeed, only 4. Vermintide 2 on the other hand has a whopping 5. Ok, that doesn’t sound like much more, but it is.
Vermintide 2 also has a Career system that lets each class/character take on a heavily modified version of their class, and there are 15 Careers in total. This gives players a staggering amount of variety and customisation when it comes to playing through Vermintide 2 – something Darktide simply can’t compete with.
Playable Characters
This one might be a bit hit or miss depending on the reader. Darktide has a very nice character creation screen when you start playing the game. This lets you make the perfect character for you, and even select a personality and voice. What does Vermintide do? Well, it lets you pick a pre-generated character with no customisation at all.
So why do we think Vermintide 2 does its characters better? Well, because there is more of a narrative linking it all together. Sure, Darktide has a bunch of Varlets interacting throughout a mission, but when identically voiced Ogryns start shouting, it breaks immersion. In Vermintide 2, not only is every character unique with their own personality, but because you can’t have multiples of the same character in any given mission, it opens up more interesting and believable interactions whilst also providing more difficult team composition conundrums.
Mission Variety
We are huge fans of Darktide’s visual design, however, it often meshes together into one metallic blur. This is just the nature of the setting, unfortunately, but it doesn’t give it a free pass. This is especially true when you consider how varied Vermintide 2 is in comparison.
One mission you could be fighting through a sinking city. Next, you could be battling trolls in an underground mine, fighting through a farmstead, or battling in a sprawling forest. It’s visually engaging every time you jump in, and this leads to some interesting scenarios that have comparatively samey counterparts in Darktide.
Progression System
One of Daktide’s biggest blunders was changing the progression and reward system from Vermintide, with something noticeably worse. In Darktide, rewards are random. Sometimes you get something, and other times you don’t. It’s a crapshoot, and it makes playing missions feel a bit disappointing when you end up with nothing.
Vermintide on the other hand rewards you after every mission, and these rewards are always good. The game uses a chest system that generates equipment for you to equip onto your characters. Think loot boxes, but for free. Not only that, but in Vermintide, your performance in game determines the quality of the chest you receive, incentivising players to try their best to reap the greatest rewards.
Content & Optimization
Finally, Vermintide has more content that is given to you without gating off missions arbitrarily. This is mostly because Vermintide is older and has DLC and extra content added, but that doesn’t disqualify it from getting this nod. Not only that, but Vermintide works, whereas Darktide is a bit of a temperamental beast.
From day 1 of the beta, to launch day, to even to the time of writing, Darktide has had all kinds of performance and stability issues that, whilst being worked on, haven’t been stamped out. Vermintide also had these issues at launch, but Vermintide is no longer at launch – it’s a finished product that runs flawlessly. It’s an easy win for the Vermintide here.
That’s all we have on Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (and Vermintide!) for now, but feel free to have a sneaky gander at other lists and guides covering the game.
