Warhammer 40,000: Darktide will celebrate its first birthday with a new mission and zone

What is a birthday but a celebration that, despite all your struggles, you survived? It has been almost a year since the release of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, meaning it’s been now a full year of apologies, paused expansions, and transformative patches. And yet it lives.

The co-op shooter now seems on firmer ground, and to celebrate it’s getting a two-part update called The Traitor Curse. Part one will add a new zone and mission, among other updates.

The new zone is called The Carnival, in which players will “strike at the heart of the Moebian 6th operations and fend off hordes of enemies in Mercantile,” according to the announcement. There will also be an update to the Veteran Talent tree, the ability to inspect loadouts in The Mourningstar, and a new cinematic to explain the motivations of the Moebian 6th in the new zone.

Part one of the update will arrive this month, while part two – its contents as yet unannounced – will arrive “before the winter holidays.”

Darktide really has gone through a transformation over the past year, amending crafting, progression, adding skill trees, and a lot else. Its most recent reviews on Steam are now 82% positive, a big increase from the 57% positive it had last December. That’s a happy journey for a game that had a lot to like about it even at launch.