The other day, my partner, having caught a glimpse of me playing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide in its full vicious flow, felt compelled to join me in my endless fight against the forces of Chaos. She installed the game on PC Game Pass (both of us blissfully unaware that you can’t crossplay between the Steam and Game Pass versions), and jumped into the character creator. She’s the kind of person who can spend half an evening poring over the minutiae of character creation, but within 5 minutes she exclaimed “Why are all the female characters so damn ugly?”
Not having created a female character myself, I went over and sure enough, these women weren’t going to win any beauty contests. My first thought was ‘What do you expect? We play as cannon-fodder prisoners who probably have a history of substance abuse and haven’t showered in a year.’ To paraphrase a classic line from Trainspotting: “We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the karkin’ cosmos!’ Notably, there were a few faces that looked pretty much like a blocky oversized male head plonked onto a woman’s neck, but overall the facial aesthetics seemed fairly appropriate for people on a prison ship 40,000 years into a pretty awful future.
Looking into this further, it turns out that the female faces have been a whole thing in the Darktide community, with the usual spectrum of histrionic responses. These have ranged from accusations of Fatshark imposing ‘woke agenda’ (classic) to several making a declaration that they won’t play the game because of the ugly faces (to which a Fatshark moderator rightly replied ‘Mission Accomplished’).
Like, really, people? You barely even see your own face in this game, and trust me, no one’s standing around looking at your female avatar thinking ‘Yeesh you’re ugly. I’m not going to play with you.’ Darktide is probably the grubbiest game out this year, and if games had a smell, it’d be the worst-smelling too. Don’t get me wrong, I think Scorn would give Darktide a run for its money in the ‘worst-smelling’ category, but the latter’s excess of pustulence and rot-worship and maggot-filled enemies gets it the prize; I imagine it smells like a mix of bloated corpses, sweat, and fermented fish.
Point being: Darktide involves you playing a reprobate prisoner fighting swarms of pustulent plague-worshippers. It’s not exactly a place for eyeliner, botox-inflated lips, and airbrushed skin, is it?
The Warhammer and 40K license ends up in a lot of video game developers’ hands, each of whom is entitled to add some flourish of their own artistic vision. The last 40K game to come out before Darktide was Shootas, Blood & Teef, which converted the beloved 40K Orks into a cartoon paper cutout-type style. It was an artistic choice, and it remained consistent throughout the game, so it worked. I’m yet to hear anyone complaining that the look of the Orks isn’t ‘true to 40K’ just because they went for a different aesthetic.
Now, in all the discussions involving those people apparently boycotting Darktide over its unsightly women (are they really, I wonder), there’s not a single mention of the fact that the men aren’t looking too hot either. Let’s just do the Ogryns a favour and leave them out of the discussion altogether (though even by Ogryn standards, Fatshark made them particularly ugly here), looking at the rest of the faces these are not strapping young men in the primes of their lives–they’re Rejects and they look it, with most of the faces being pockmarked, scarred, and having the rough appearance of ne’er-do-wells who’ve spent however long in prison following lives of hardship and destitution (which is established by the backstories you pick for them). In fact, few of the characters look under the age of 35–the prime of my life, I tell you!--and all look decidedly beaten down by life.
Sure, you can point to the women depicted in official 40K artwork and miniatures looking a bit more comely than the Darktide lot. The Sisters of Battle look to be of better stock, but they’re not exactly sexualised, and their cleaner-cut appearance can easily be explained by them presumably having far better living and nutritional conditions than the Rejects. The Sisters of Silence, meanwhile, are a mean-looking bunch, while the female Catachan Jungle Fighters of the Imperial Guard are there to kick ass, not to be ogled. You’d have to go to Necromunda to find much in the way of overt sexualisation, where several of the various gangs take on a kind of punk-kinkster aesthetic, but that's never much on the peripheries of mainstream 40K. So sure, most of the above-mentioned female units from 40K lore do look better than the Rejects, but, well, that’s because you’re playing a Reject. It's all in the name, people.
Whatever artistic direction a given game decides to take, consistency is important, and Darktide does a great job of evoking the idea of a bunch of wastrel jailbirds on the brink of existence being forced to fight an endless battle. There’s nothing heroic or sexy about it, and to even expect ‘normal-looking’ character creation choices from a game like this is already pushing it. Whatever your character choice in Darktide, they'll have come from a shitty past, wind up in a shitty prison and are now being thrown into shitty endless suicide missions. That narrative foundation gives Fatshark all the reasons in the world to make their characters look as haggard or world-weary as they like. In fact, it’d be strange if they didn’t.
I’m not really sure what I gained from diving into this particular online debate (apart from learning what a ‘coomer’ is, so I guess there’s my new word for the week). Reading rabid demands for female hotness always leave me coming away feeling a bit icky, and the double standards of people being OK with dudes looking grubby and rugged while getting outraged at women looking the same has always baffled me. You want to create doe-eyed female avatars that other players swoon over? Well, there are plenty of Korean MMOs out there for you. Leave the mucky business of Darktide to the rest of us Rejects.