Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters update gives wounded Grey Knights more grit

Image for Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters update gives wounded Grey Knights more grit
(Image credit: Frontier)

While Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters certainly seems to have given players the XCOM-but-with-space-marines experience they were looking for, those players have been critical of its performance, even on quite high-end rigs. They've also complained about how long your Grey Knight marines can stay wounded for. An unlucky start can lead to a death spiral as you're forced to send suboptimal squads on missions, who then get wounded themselves and join the lengthening infirmary queue.

Daemonhunters' latest patch, Update V, should alleviate some of those issues. It includes an optimization pass on the ship's HUD and all the ornate technogothic objects on display in its various rooms, as well as the combat HUD. Draw distances have been reduced and debris pool loading updated, and with luck all that should help you squeeze out a few extra frames per second.

Balance changes include Grey Knights being "more resilient to becoming wounded in the early stages of the game on all difficulties" as well as recovering to full health after a Purgation Ritual. The cost of the apothecary's healing ability has also been reduced to 2 willpower points. That'll make it easier to keep them standing, and on the lower two difficulties the size of enemy reinforcement groups has been dropped as well.

There are plenty of other fixes and tweaks in the update, including "Helbrutes will no longer do an ungraceful slide when performing a rush attack after a stun." Good for them. Check the patch notes for details of all the changes. A few people are experiencing crashes after this update, so if you're one of them go to Properties > Local Files > Verify Integrity of Game Files in Steam and that should sort it out. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.