Game Theory: We're getting down in the blood and guts of Warhammer 40,000

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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Warhammer 40K is one of those gaming brands with intimidation built right into its name—because, after all, how the hell is a new player supposed to follow its vision of a grimdark future if they haven’t already played Warhammers 1 through 39,999?

But even beyond that (extremely dumb) joke, Games Workshop’s venerable war gaming brand has a healthy scare factor built into its DNA, courtesy of years of hardcore tabletop gaming mixed with a whole universe of novels, stories, and video games. Warhammer is having a pretty good 2023 in terms of getting its message—roughly summed up as “Oh shit, literally everything in the galaxy is trying to kill us”—in front of more people, though; Darktide, Fatshark’s 40K update to its long-running Vermintide series of first-person shove-and-shooters, has just landed on Xbox and GamePass, while Pathfinder developer Owlcat Games is preparing to release Rogue Trader, a new turn-based role-playing game set in a different (if still extremely violent and nasty) corner of the far-flung universe. Truly, it’s never been easier to spend time with the insane, pustule-ridden people of the future!

In playing the two games over the last few weeks, it’s been fascinating to have two very different perspectives—both literally, and otherwise—on this particular set of ugly, awful worlds. The characters you play as in each game couldn’t be further apart, in terms of status: Darktide positions you as a conscripted prisoner, tossed into suicide missions by a whole crew of taskmasters who could each have you executed with a single word. Rogue Trader, meanwhile, has you take on its titular role, which, in the highly class-based society of 40K’s Imperium Of Mankind, is sort of like a mixture of a frontier explorer, an old-school privateer, and a roving duke or duchess. (The ship you travel through space in, for instance, is crewed by hundreds of thousands of serfs, many of whom have been toiling for your glory for generations.) It’s rare to get this kind of look at both the bottom and the top of a single fictional society at one time, and it highlights the interesting oddities of Warhammer’s often brutal approach to storytelling.

Darktide is the more visceral experience, for obvious reasons—even before taking into account the fact that it sees you waging war on the setting’s cheerful god of disease and decay, and his various sore-ridden accomplice. Weirdly, it might also be the more optimistic of the two games: Sure, the hordes of Chaos will always be there, with the game’s Left 4 Dead-esque AI always ready to send another wave of baddies and special enemies at your hapless condemned. But it’s also a game that revels in players taking down said hordes and escaping in triumph, and its overall tone—especially the audio banter between different classes—goes as heavy on quips and humor as it does dread. (Honestly, the scariest part might be the prices the game sets on cosmetic upgrades, and other ways to make your character look like anything but an escapee from the universe’s filthiest mental hospital.)

But while Rogue Trader pulls back from that first-person, “blood and pus spraying on your screen” viewpoint, that doesn’t make it any less queasy of an experience. One of the philosophical lynchpins of the 40K universe, after all, is that it’s a reality in which fascistic overreaction is often the “right” choice, because the enemies of humanity really are that bad. (When a single Chaos-tainted amulet can corrupt thousands of otherwise innocent people into acts of unimaginable cruelty and debauchery, it’s easy to fall into a “Kill them all and let the Emperor sort them out” mentality.) But because you’re playing the game as a lofty noble with a lot of privileges, you have an unusual amount of power to push back on the dogmatic default.

You don’t have to—Owlcat is very good at letting players embody the tabletop game’s default tone of imperious, xenophobic classism if they feel like it—but the game is also perfectly happy to allow you to indulge in such “weaknesses” as mercy or tolerance toward others. Navigating when to do so, then, becomes as tactically challenging as the game’s robust, enjoyable take on turn-based combat; we haven’t gotten far enough in the game for any acts of compassion to really bite us in the ass, but the threats are constantly looming. It’s the most interesting aspect of either game, kneejerk altruistic impulses facing interrogation through conflict with an opposing moral logic.

Which all sounds pretty heavy, for a game where you also have to do tech support for your spaceship’s computers by sticking your hand in a “cybergargoyle” so it can suck your blood, but such is the appeal of Warhammer 40K as a whole: Aesthetics verging on camp, married to deliberately uncomfortable ethics (and very satisfying combat, which Rogue Trader and Darktide both have a ton of). Whether you’re literally slumming it amongst the wretches, or sitting on a throne, nobody gets out of that galaxy clean.