Warhammer 40,000: Darktide's next update will add skill trees to all four classes

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide features fun, grisly, co-op combat, but at launch was criticised for live service cruft - from an incomplete crafting system to meagre progression rewards. Some criticism also fell upon its four classes, who lacked the 'career' subclasses of its developer's previous game, Vermintide 2.

Darktide's classes will therefore get an overhaul October 4th, when an update will introduce skill trees for each class.

Here's a teaser trailer:

"Each class will have 1 talent tree featuring 3 main paths. Each path will feature many nodes and several additional abilities, allowing players to tinker with their playstyle and create different builds for their characters," says the announcement on Steam.

PC Gamer got a look at some of the new skills, which included a new shield ability for Psyker which can be upgraded, and a new "Force Lightning-esque" smite ability.

Darktide's rough response at launch prompted developers Fatshark to admit they'd missed the mark and to pause plans for seasonal content. Instead they would "focus on delivering a complete crafting system, a more rewarding progression loop, and continue to work on game stability and performance optimization." Some of that work was delivered via an update back in February.

The skill trees are apparently a feature Fatshark experimented with before launch, but that they didn't reach the quality necessary for it to be included. "That is part of why we still felt that we need to do this. Everyone on the team wanted to do this. We felt this would improve the game a lot," game director Anders De Geer told PC Gamer.

The update, called Patch #13 - Class Overhaul, will be released on October 4th.