Darktide queue: Expect short wait times on launch day

(Image credit: Fatshark)

Yesterday I was watching my colleagues queue up for World of Warcraft's new Dragonflight expansion with a bit of schadenfreude. Good thing I wasn't trying to play a massively multiplayer game on launch day, I thought. Everyone knows servers can only handle so much strain, and the only way for developers to prevent that strain is to implement a login queue.

This morning I took a big sip of water and pressed the Play button on Warhammer 40K: Darktide and got this. Hoisted.

Fatshark's last two co-op brawlers, Vermintide and Vermintide 2, both ran on peer-to-peer networking. For Darktide, Fatshark has switched to dedicated servers, and aims to make its hub world a more populated space for players to mingle in. That change will hopefully pay off with smoother live play and a more flexible live service model for adding new quests and items to the game. But at least on launch day, it also means a login queue.

From our experience though, the queue hasn't been bad—it took me just shy of 10 minutes to get through 35,000 players.

I did have a momentary panic when I reached the front of the line and was greeted with "BACKEND ERROR: Error signing in" but I was thankfully able to hit close and continue the login process, no problem. My beta character and all progress carried over, and I connected to the server with no issues.

If you're aiming to get online in Darktide today, expect to hit a queue: as of this writing there are 80,246 players on Steam, and that number is likely to rise. But unless the servers take a turn for the worse, you should be able to make it into the game without too long a wait.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).