With Darktide coming soon, and playing a lot of a Chaos Campaign in Total Warhammer 3 lately, something has been on my mind.
Game developers need to be a little braver and expand their thinking when it comes to which Chaos Gods they choose to build their game around.
For Fatshark in particular, they've only really done Nurgle across 2 games now: Vermintide 2 and now Darktide. The Chaos Wastes expansion showcased all four gods and their various takes on their themes, but by and large they've lavished their attention on Nurgle.
And I get it. In my mind Nurgle is the safe, low-hanging fruit when it comes to building a faction or theme around the Chaos Gods into your game.
1. They're undeniable bad. All the Chaos Gods are in their own little particular realm, but Nurgle telegraphs stuff every person gets on a visceral level: disease, rot, zombies, corruption, gross stuff. Nurgle shows up and "ooo there's a plague!" It's physical and obvious, and it doesn't require the kind of understanding that Tzeentch or Slaanesh requires. The only other Chaos god that telegraphs as clearly what they're about is Khorne, which I'll get to.
2. They're easy to create workable designs and themes around. Same story for designers as for the audience they're designing for. Take your garden variety medieval or sci-fi scene. Now, cover it in goo, green/yellow mist and some tumorous looking plants. Nurgle (and Khorne) don't require as much creativity from the art team to create a good foundation for the visuals of a game. Consider what the design notes look like for the creative team when talking about Tzeentch vs. Nurgle.
3. Nurgle isn't completely one note, unlike Khorne. Nurgle can cover a few bases and ideas pretty easily where as you have to work harder to come up with something for Khorne beyond SKULLS and BRONZE and CHAINS and SPIKES and KILL. Nurgles' themes are transformative, additive. You take something and then add X, Y and Z to it, to change what it is. Khorne on the other hand is often subtractive. His themes are still transformative but in a way that tends to leave a thing as less than what it originally was. It's fair, that's part of destruction, but from a design standpoint it's harder to work around and gets repetitious much faster. You either set something on fire or blow it to bits....or just add SKULLS everywhere. Skull pillars, skull doors. Maybe some chains.
(As an aside, I think you could go deeper on Khorne's themes but then it starts to exceed the (ha?) just shy of R rating 40k tends to stick to. Khorne's themes would focus on the absolute psychotic brutality of war. Mutilated, not just dead, bodies everywhere. Not just bodies, but red meat. Impalement galore. Savagery on an mind-shattering scale. But as I said, that gets problematically dark with a lot of people quickly. Slaanesh is the only other one IMO that creates problems by its very nature when you get too deep into their themes.)
I'd like to see more stuff based around Tzeentch and Slaanesh, is what I'm saying. I think they're the two Chaos Gods that are harder to create for. Slaanesh for obvious reasons, knowing how far you can push the boundaries on taste. (Ironically being the exact thing Slaanesh is about.) And really finding the tone and voice of it. Tzeentch can go so many different directions and has the highest threshold for creativity that having a tone and theme that works can be tough. In Fantasy the solution has always been easier. You go with color-coded bad guys, cartoonishly evil dialog, lean heavily on your motifs (like birds for Tzeentch) and you have a serviceable product. In 40k though, I feel like the bar is often higher (while still acknowledging these are all GWS products and everything that fantasy leans into, 40k does as well) and there's more room to expand on themes and how they're executed. It's why I've always found 40k more interesting, because Sci-fi is about exploring ideas and themes where as fantasy is usually more about celebrating them.
Like for me, Tzeentch is actually one of the scarier Chaos Gods when it comes to themes. If Khorne is about murder unending and losing yourself to bloodlust, and Nurgle is about body horror and corruption and Slaanesh is about depravity and obliterating your moral compass.....Tzeentch I think is about powerlessness and loss of control. Hear me out. The power of the Warp is built on the theme of like the 40s and 50s Sci-fi ideas about radiation. It seeps into things, taints them, it's an invisible, creeping danger that forever changes you that you can't do anything about except run away from it. Tzeentch's theme of unending change and warping and twisting things randomly goes along with that, is tied particularly closely to that idea of a danger that you can't really prevent or combat, where you eventually lose control of everything. Your body and mind being changed by Chaos against your will is analogous to the idea of being swept up in one of Tzeentch's plots and you're powerless to stop it, just another gnat caught in the web. And it goes along with the Fantasy theme of Tzeentch's mastery of magic, this all powerful force that can do things you don't have any ability to stop. Add in some David Cronenberg style body horror (separate and distinct from Nurgle's style of body horror) and I think you have one of the scarier Chaos gods. That's why the Fires of Changes are so scary, because they hit you and you just change, forever. But with having all that potential, Tzeentch asks for more than the Chaos Gods in terms of how to design and present it. You can rattle off a hundred isolated ideas about what Tzeentch's themes actually look and sound like and they'd be good, but creating a good cohesive framework for describing them (to inform creatives who make things) can be a lot harder. At a surface level Tzeentch gets stuff like "pink and blue!" and "floating stuff" and "wings and eyes" and the occasional "uncontrolled mutation!" But how does one execute on the secrets, the plots, the schemes and the wonderment?
TLDR: I hope 40k and Fantasy devs stop playing it so safe when it comes to the Chaos Gods. Pick some of the ones that ask for and challenge a little bit more.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.