Darkswarm Development Team Talks Creating Fully Expendable Protagonists

Immediately upon booting up the top-down tactical alien shooter DarkSwarm, players are introduced to their completely anonymous protagonists. Helmeted faces, near-identical armor differentiated only by color, and referred to by class designation rather than by name, DarkSwarm’s player characters are bio-printed mercenaries created for one reason alone: because they’re cheap and expendable. It creates a fascinating world where endlessly replaceable characters serve as fodder for the sinister, ever-evolving alien Swarm.

Game Rant spoke with Bitfire Games CEO Hans Oxmond and DarkSwarm Game Director Jonas Raagard about the lore behind their new shooter, which draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including The Thing, Helldivers, and Alien Swarm. Oxmond and Raagard explained that making the protagonists replaceable mercenaries was a deliberate decision: it emphasizes the all-consuming power of the Swarm and how little can truly be done to fight it.

Bio-Printed Humans Are Cheap, Expendable, Fuel For The Swarm

While playing through one of DarkSwarm’s procedurally generated missions, Raagard and Oxmond gave a deep dive into the lore of the game’s world. Bio-printing technology allows for the mass production of fully functional humans, and it has become common practice. Raagard explained how the world came to rely on bio-printed humans above all:

“Bio-printed people are much more efficient. Robots are good for robot stuff, but not as good for this. So [companies] have just been printing people to keep those wheels running.”

However, Raagard clarified, there is a downside to the omnipresence of bio-printed humanity. The titular DarkSwarm, the parasitic alien menace that serves as the game’s villain, feeds on and mutates human flesh. By endlessly creating bio-printed mercenaries and sending them out to take on the Swarm, humanity has actually been feeding and strengthening their foes.

DarkSwarm Effectively And Constantly Reminds Players That Death Is Cheap

Players in DarkSwarm take on the role of bio-printed mercenaries who work for a company called Death on Demand and have no purpose but to complete various missions and endlessly kill the alien Swarm. Even the company’s name emphasizes its goal, Oxmond pointed out — they don’t promise victory, or riches, or even survival. Only death. The game’s official Web page succinctly sums up Death on Demand’s philosophy crisply and cruelly: “Your employer doesn’t care how many of you make it back. Only that the job gets done.”

Throughout the game, design decisions remind players how expendable they are. DarkSwarm features a late-joining system that lets new players enter multiplayer missions at any time, representing how Death on Demand can simply print more mercenaries and send them off to the latest mission. The mission control is cold and distant, haranguing players to get their mission done as quickly as possible and calling them “abominations to their species” should they all perish and fail an objective.

The most effective reminder of DarkSwarm’s characters’ status as replaceable is that missions are counted as successful if even one player survives. In a brilliant design choice, players who successfully escape are forced to watch as the comrades they left behind are defeated, devoured, and assimilated by the Swarm. Plus, players who fail the mission are still given EXP, allowing them to rank up their class and unlock new guns, sidearms, and melee weapons — because, even though they may have died, they can simply jump to a new bio-printed body for the next mission.

The lore and world of DarkSwarm effectively sets it apart from other tactical top-down shooters where players face down aliens. Not only are the enemies they take down an endlessly re-spawning horde, but the players themselves are in a similar situation. Both sides of the conflict are a swarm, and one feeds the other — a truly horrifying concept to consider.