Feature Highlight - Skitarii Character Customization

Rising above the shackles of the flesh, the Skitarii have been rebuilt with the divine augments of the Adeptus Mechanicus to best serve the Omnissiah, as an impossibly efficient tool of war.

In case you missed it, check out the reveal trailer here.

This is part of an ongoing series of feature highlights focused on the upcoming DLC class: The Skitarii.

In our previous highlight we went over the overall vision of the Skitarii’s visual design! This feature highlight focuses on unique options available to the class as far as character creation and customization goes, from unique physical options to voice modification! We’ve interviewed our Associate Art Director, 3D Technical Artist, and Sound Designer to get you all the details!

“My name is Lucas. I am the Associate Art Director on Darktide and I’ve been involved in overseeing the art delivered in the production of the Skitarii class, working closely together with the different disciplines in our production development team. \[...] As a huge Warhammer fan myself, getting the opportunity to explore something from the Adeptus Mechanicus faction was very exciting. ~Lucas

“My name is Erik Lindqvist, I’m a Senior Technical Artist at Fatshark. I’ve been at the company for about 10 years, mainly working on Vermintide and Vermintide 2, and now I’ve also been leading work on Skitarii on the Technical Art side.” ~ Erik

“I'm Ola, I'm the VO Designer at Darktide. I'm in charge of wrangling all the VO we record, processing it and getting it to play in the game.  Sometimes I show up to bother Matt and the actors with strange requests in a recording session. Other than that I like to get my fingers in some UI code on occasion (Personality Scourge and this upcoming Voxcaster Tuning for example).” ~Ola

“When we started talking and discussing about how we’d go about presenting this class, a lot of our ideas went naturally to the character creation of it.” ~ Lucas

While Arbites and Hive Scum fit quite comfortably using the base ‘human’ body as the core classes, the same isn’t true for the Skitarii. Due to their cybernetic nature, there were a lot of visual aspects we wanted to represent that warranted a brand new body type to go with it. 

But this also gave us a unique opportunity to show something rarely seen in other Warhammer: 40,000 media, which is how they look under the robes and the hood, something that the entire Art team was eager to work on.

“There wasn’t really an established visual reference for what a Skitarii looks like underneath the robes and armor, so that was a mystery which we needed to solve. The idea of them being flesh fused with machine raised a lot of questions. And because this was such an interesting hook for us to think about, it naturally evolved into a focus for the class!” ~ Lucas

Because this is rarely depicted, we found most of the relevant information (and inspiration!) in written narrative mediums – books, lore excerpts in codices, and so on. While we always collaborate closely with Games Workshop when bringing all aspects of Warhammer: 40,000 to life in Darktide, this was especially true when working on the Skitarii character creation. 

“I don’t think we left any ideas out. It was more the other way around, that we added ideas as we went!” ~ Lucas 

We worked extensively on concepts and design, shaping together the look of these seldom explored facets of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Things like how their bodies look after such extensive modification, the type of scarring left on their flesh after all the assignments and environmental hazards they’re often subjected to. How exactly it looks where machine meets flesh.

As you might expect, many of the customization options available to the Skitarii are very different from our other classes, in part because of the fusion of man and machine, but also because they’ll be almost completely covered up once you’re done. We had to figure out how to let you add your personal touch in ways that would still be visible under those bulky robes, after all!

“The character creation flow became very different. We cannot use skin colors, we cannot use faces in the same way, to express the character. So we need to find something else.” ~ Erik

Like our other classes, you’ll get to pick from several background options to shape your character’s history, and you’ll get to tweak their height (although they are on average taller than the regular human classes!). Additionally, you’ll also be able to pick your Skitarius’ Forge World of origin, which plays a similar role as the Hive Scum’s choice of Gang, such as altering your starting cosmetics!

One of these Forge World options, Branx Minor, is linked to Atoma itself!

Their natural eyes have long been replaced with bionic upgrades, giving you several color options to choose from! There will be a primary and a secondary lens color option, and of course you can pick the same option for both to have the lenses look the same. Not only that, but these colors will show up no matter what headgear cosmetic you end up using for your Skitarius!

“And that is a bit different depending on the headgear. Some only have two eyes, so you’re basically picking the right and the left eye. Some have smaller diodes and things, as well. Some only have one, so then there’s only the Primary that’s showing.” ~ Erik

The Skitarii’s arms, legs, hands and feet have been upgraded with cybernetic replacements, and during character creation these will also be customizable! You will be able to choose different models for the arms and legs, and you will also get to pick from different metallic textures as the Primary and Secondary metals, including a separate setting to handle the oxidation level.

These customizations will also remain and be visible no matter what cosmetics you’re using, giving you more freedom to craft a unique look. And of course, the arms and hands will also show up in first person!

The Skitarii class will have access to four distinct personalities, something only the Ogryn class can match! But, taking advantage of the Skitarii’s cybernetic nature, we added the ability to customize how the voice itself can sound!

The voice modulation system found in certain headgear cosmetics gave us a solid starting point for the feature, but we pushed the concept further, giving the player different ways to tune it to their heart’s content and find the perfect sound.

There are three different settings that you can gradually tweak to modify the base voice of the chosen personality. As you play around with these dynamic parameters, you’ll get to listen to the changes in real time through the example voice lines playing from your chosen personality, or even switch personalities to hear how specific setups sound on all the voices!

As you might expect, one of these parameters controls the pitch… among other things! While there is some correlation with increasing this slider to make the pitch higher, or decreasing it to make the pitch lower, it is not so straightforward. There are various effects being influenced by this parameter, purposely making the pitch shift unpredictably in certain ranges, and sometimes making the normal, unmodified voice shine through.

The second parameter is a delay effect, which can sound like multiple voices at once, or like the voice has an almost immediate echo. Like with the pitch parameter, modifying this parameter is not as straightforward as it might seem, affecting not just the intensity of the effect, but also other sound effects linked to it to create some unpredictable variations.

“You will hear stuff change as you move this around, but our goal is also to… You know, we want you to stumble into something that sounds cool, rather than necessarily be like ‘Oh this goes up and this goes there’, you know. \[...] We modulate it along the way so that different aspects of each effect comes in and out to get as much variance as possible.” ~ Ola

The final parameter modifies the distortion on the voice, with various different crunching effects modifying and distorting the sound. Once again, we wanted to make players experiment, so as you move the slider along you’ll notice that certain aspects of the distortion lower in intensity while others pick up, varying independently to create unique sounds as you explore the possibilities!

“There is always a built-in effect on the voices, so they will never sound fully human. \[...] Even if you skip through the character creation and don’t mess with any of the dynamic settings, the character will still sound like a Skitarius.” ~ Ola

“I do think that going deeper into what the character creation of the Skitarii looked like, and exploring the character under the suit, was especially interesting to me.” ~ Lucas

“I think it’s interesting to work on something this mechanical. It’s a different process! In some ways it’s more complex, because you have to make things mechanically work.” ~ Erik

“I think the class itself is really cool, there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do in regards to voice for the class. But this \[the voice modulation] is definitely, for me, the stand out fun feature. It’s been super fun tweaking these effects and having these moments where you go ‘ohh, this sounds really cool, this sounds really cool, let’s try that, oh that also sounds really cool!’.” ~ Ola

That’s all we have for today! We hope you enjoyed this early look at the character creation of the Skitarii class!

Stay tuned for the next feature highlight, which will focus on the Skitarii’s game design and talents, coming soon!!

Praise the Omnissiah!

The Skitarii Alpha Primus class will be available on the 23rd of June, but you can already wishlist it now. 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4355570/Warhammer_40000_Darktide__Skitarii_Class/https://store.steampowered.com/app/4355580/Warhammer_40000_Darktide__Skitarii_Class_Deluxe_Edition/

We’ll see you on the Mourningstar.

– The Darktide Team