Dev Blog - Expeditions Visual Design & Environment

A merciless wilderness, an endless irradiated desert, and countless secrets waiting within! Expeditions will take our Warband farther from the Hive than ever before!

This is the second dev blog about the Expeditions game mode, delving into the principles behind its visual design and how they combine to give Expeditions their own unique visual identity.

“My name is Mattias and I’m the Art Director on Darktide, previously on Vermintide. \[...] I started here in 2008 and basically I’ve been a part of every project that we’ve done here, first as a Concept Artist but then during Vermintide 2 I stepped into the role as an Art Director.” ~ Mattias

“Hi, my name is Lucas, I’m an associate Art Director on Darktide. I started out on Expeditions as Senior Environment Concept Artist and I have helped out increasingly on the environment art.” ~ Lucas

“I’m Marco, I’m a Senior Environment Artist and I’ve pretty much been part of Expeditions since the beginning, more or less.” ~ Marco

Visual design is a key element of all aspects of Darktide. Things have to not just look great, but to also mesh cohesively with the rest of the game, and each element’s visuals must properly convey the essence and characteristics of that element.

One of the guiding principles behind the visual design of Expeditions is crafting a look that, even at a glance or off of a single screenshot, players can tell that it’s Expeditions (rather than a normal mission), while still staying true to Darktide’s overall visual identity.

One of the most distinctive aspects that sets this game mode apart is that Expeditions takes place outside the Hive. While we got close to being there in the latest operation, No Man’s Land, that mission still took place in the outskirts of Tertium. This is different, we’re travelling far from home into irradiated wastelands, with the Hive City of Tertium acting as an imposing, but distant landmark on the horizon.

“We have done zones that are creeping further and further towards the edge of the Hive, but this time we wanted to go fully outside and explore what that’d look like.” ~ Lucas

The wastelands we’ll be exploring in Expeditions are a hostile, irradiated desert. While we wanted that to be clearly portrayed, we didn’t want to stick too close to real life deserts or even the kind of sights in The Hourglass mission zone; we wanted to make it look distinct, otherworldly, and aggressive. This is not a normal desert, after all!

As an example, we have these crystal formations sprouting from the ground as part of the terrain. We like to think of it as the surface out here having this dormant substance that crystalizes when exposed to air. Some of it probably reacted like this while excavations happened, some of it might come from the ground splitting up. All in all it gives a very unique “feel” to the areas we will see in Expeditions.  

“It’s also something that we wanted to read very easily, to form the silhouette of whatever geoform that we’re building. So it’s sort of a visual tool to help us tell the players that it’s Expeditions” ~ Mattias

While it’s a big open desert, players will still run into man-made structures here and there; long-forgotten buildings that have since turned to ruins merged with the bedrock and terrain.

“My idea was to kind of try to tell the story that it’s hard to understand what was there first, because the timeline is so long. \[...] It is also trying to portray the idea that it goes deeper than the surface.” ~ Mattias

We wanted to take the opportunity to show traces of what used to be there as a form of visual storytelling. Abandoned mining operations, excavation sites, even traces of structures older than Hive Tertium itself. Atoma has a longer history than its current Hive City, after all.

“So there used to be ‘more’ there, but now it’s buried by rock and dirt, creating a new natural landscape.” ~ Lucas

Like with No Man’s Land, a lot of the buildings (or what remains of them!) were inspired by Warhammer 40,000 terrain kits that keen eyes might spot and recognize! We picked the pieces that would fit the environment and level design intention the most, which also sometimes meant mixing and matching between the buildings, both to make the most out of them and to not overuse one or the other.

Still, ruins and structures are only a small portion of the terrain in Expeditions, the merciless desert and natural geography dominates most of the landscape you’ll be traversing in it.

All of this is combined with the more open nature of Expeditions, providing both a visual and gameplay contrast to normal missions found in Darktide’s other game modes.

“I hope that everyone will be happy to see a big shift from what they are used to playing in Darktide. \[...] it will be a big departure from what people are used to, even from No Man’s Land.” ~ Marco

It’s not just the enemies and the locations that change every time you embark on an Expedition.

To add to the replayability of the game mode, each run can feature different Environmental Conditions and start at different times of day, letting you get a fresh look even on locations you’ve already visited.

“We’re kind of building the network and the foundation of what we think it should look like, but every run is its own thing. \[...] We try to give the player as many different experiences as possible.” ~ Mattias

Beyond visual flair, these can heavily impact gameplay, as the weather can get quite brutal out in the wasteland…

“I think the idea sprung naturally from us being outside. That opens up a lot of possibilities that we can delve into. It felt like an interesting avenue to explore that could drastically change the worlds you play in.” ~ Lucas

Expeditions differ greatly from typical Darktide levels, both on the types of environments and assets used, and the level design & layout created for it.

The open nature of the maps required a completely different approach, especially as the engine wasn’t originally meant to handle these kinds of huge, open levels. Both gameplay and art were exploring uncharted territory for a Tide game, and a lot of work went into optimizing the terrain assets and their use, to maintain performance while still delivering on this vision.

Players can see much farther into the level itself, which means that the terrain in the distance, which normally would just be backdrop elements, is now actually playable and visible up close.

“It’s a lot easier to control that in an interior space, especially if you don’t have a sun. \[...] So there's a lot of back and forth, what works, what doesn’t work, ‘hang on, we have to rethink this’, and stuff like that. So that was quite an undertaking which we hadn’t really expected when we started out.” ~ Marco

Additionally, the environment and open layout required its own considerations for how to best fill it out, to sell the idea of this abandoned desert while keeping things interesting.

“When you make a classic adventure mission, for instance, you have more control over what the player is going to see and when they see it. So here it’s more like, how can we make a cool canvas that the players themselves can direct themselves through.” ~ Marco

Concept sketches - exploring chests

Another aspect of setting Expeditions outside the Hive was actually Hive Tertium itself. The structures of such Hives are so inconceivably massive that they presented a creative challenge: How to do the enormity of the Hive in the backdrop justice, while also making it look credible.

“One of the biggest challenges with this is to portray the Hive in a believable size. \[...] How does it look when you’re standing at the foot of a mountain that is the size of a small continent and reaches out into lower orbit? It’s a very hard thing to portray, visually.” ~ Mattias

“You have to use a lot of creativity to get the shape you’d expect of a Hive city but still have this atmosphere and depth to it. \[...] That was tricky to get right, but I think we landed in a good spot.” ~ Lucas

Concept sketches - Sanctuary door

“I think it’s challenging-slash-exciting to not just be the first to \[portray] what the Hive looks like on the inside, but also how it actually looks standing next to it. \[...] And that is very exciting, to be creating that.” ~ Mattias

“For me I can say right away that the most fun was sculpting the rocks and the natural environment stuff, because we don’t really do a lot of that in Darktide so it’s fun to do something different than what we usually have. And it’s also nice that we could kind of use some of that stuff in No Man’s Land as well!” ~ Marco

“And for me it was working on the concept and matte painting for the Hive City, getting it to look just right, together with the Technical Artist Vargek and Lighting Artist Gustav.” ~ Lucas

That’s all we have for this dev blog! We hope you have a blast playing Expeditions, and exploring this brand new environment that we’ve crafted for you guys!

Let us know what you think of Expeditions in the comments, and thank you for reading this dev blog!

We’ll see you in the Mourning Star,

• The Darktide Team