Skitarii Alpha Primus is coming to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide!

Together with Games Workshop we just revealed the next class coming to Darktide as part of the Warhammer Skulls showcase! If you missed it, no worries, you can watch it here.

The Skitarii Alpha Primus is coming to Darktide on June 23rd! 

We asked Juan and Victor, our Executive Producer and Design Director, to sit down with us and walk us through the new class at a glance. Following this we will have a series of Feature Highlights, deep diving into the different parts of the class, leading up to the release! 

Take it away guys!

We have known from the start that we wanted to add some form of playable Adeptus Mechanicus presence to the game. We also know that players really resonate with Adeptus Mechanicus, our Tech-Priest Hadron Omega-7-7 being a good example.

Many of you might ask why Skitarii, and not the more recognisable Tech-Priest? For us this really came down to two things. The first being that Tech-Priests don’t really operate on the strike team level of Darktide’s warband. The Skitarii are a better fit. They are the frontline warriors of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and we knew we could weave them into the scope and narrative of the game way better.

“You don’t often see Tech-Priests run around in larger groups” 

-Victor 

The second reason is that we felt the Skitarii was not very explored in the medium of video games. We saw this as an opportunity to delve deeper into, and we ended up working together with Games Workshop to find the best representation of these concepts for Darktide. The Skitarii that you will play in the game are called “Alpha Primus”, and they are a bit different from the standard Skitarii that you see go to war under the banner of the Adeptus Mechanicus in bigger battles. These specialist warriors can operate with more autonomy, and are more suited to the gameplay experience of Darktide.

The Alpha Primus is a favoured soldier of the Machine God, blessed with mental and physical augmentations beyond those of their fellow Skitarii.. If you’ve played Darktide recently you probably have been out in the Deadside to help Hadron Omega-7-7 finding Tech-Remnants.

The success of these discoveries has led to several Forge Worlds deploying their forces to aid the battle for Tertium. Hadron has now been given the whereabouts of an old Adeptus Mechanicus facility that can upgrade a Skitarii Veterans into the more elite Alpha Primus variant.

The Skitarii Alpha Primus carry out delicate or specialised missions for their Tech-Priest masters, making them well suited to assist the Inquisitorial Warband. Their mechanised brains are force-loaded with advanced tactics, combat data and weapon proficiencies, freeing them to operate more independently from their fellow Skitarii.

This also let us, in collaboration with Games Workshop, to really come up with cool abilities and talents for them. As we said in the introduction, we always wanted to do this class. It was top of the list when we looked at what to add to the game years ago, it has just taken some time to really hone in how to make sense of them being part of the Mourningstars ongoing struggles on Atoma. 

“We have been working on this for a long time, in parallel with other classes, and we wanted to make sure that we got all the intricacies, abilities and weapons right. We hope it will be worth the wait”  

-Juan

We knew going into the making of this class that it would take longer than other classes. We needed the time to explore how the class would fit, both on the level of the larger universe of Warhammer 40,000 and on an implementation level for Darktide itself.

The team has now made two classes, and we learnt a lot during this time. All of these learnings have gone into making the Skitarii Alpha Primus the best it can be! 

There are some really cool unique things we have added to this class. But we won’t go too deep into this today, as we will cover all of this in future Feature Highlights, but let’s look at it from a top down perspective! 

The Skitarii Alpha Primus comes with a completely new set of weapons. You will be able to wield Arc weapons, Phosphor Blasters, Transonic Blades and high-powered Galvanic Rifles.

“The Arc mechanic is really cool. It can hit several enemies if they are affected by the Arc condition, energy will arc between them. Good for handling hordes”
- Victor

There are so many iconic weapons here, and it has taken us some time to really materialise them into the game. Many of these we had to figure out how to represent from the miniatures and art of Warhammer 40,000. Many ideas and iterations later, we are now really happy with how this entire arsenal came out in the game! 

You will also be greeted with a new sight when you go into the Skitarii Talent tree. It’s quite different from the other classes , as it is now a wheel (or a cog if you will) that starts in the middle and you will be able to customize your play experience by going in different directions, instead of the normal top down progression that the other classes have. This makes the Skitarii Alpha Primus easier to really “make your own”, and have them fit several roles in the Inquisitorial party.

The Skitarii also comes with a Servo-Skull that hovers around and aids them as they fight.We will go deeper into this mechanic in a later Feature Highlight, but a small teaser is that you will be able to have different configurations of this, one of them being a Flamethrower! 

“The character creator is quite unique from what we have seen before on Darktide” 

- Juan

The nature of the Skitarii, being enhanced warriors with mechanical limbs and covered in armor, wrapped under their signature robe and cowl, also made us really have to think of the character customization. It is a unique experience compared to the normal process, as you will go through the process of being upgraded to an Alpha Primus. Picking the limbs you want and even being able to use a voice modulation on top of the voice acting! This quickly became one of our favorite things with the class, and it also adds a lot to the customization.

This class has been a labor of love for us. We are such big fans of the Adeptus Mechanicus lore, look and feel in Warhammer 40,000, and we can’t wait for you all to experience this first hand!

That will have to do for today. There is so much we could talk about, but we don’t want to spoil the upcoming Feature Highlights too much.

Next week we will be back with the Feature Highlight for the Visual Design of the class, so stay tuned! In the meantime you can wishlist the Skitarii Alpha Primus now and we hope you are as excited as we are uncovering more about them as we journey towards release on June 23rd! 

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

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

That’s all for today!

We'll see you on the Mourningstar,

The Darktide Team