Creative Assembly has finally put years of fan speculation and rumors to rest - Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is real - now begins the agonizing wait to find out if it's one of the best Warhammer 40k games ever made, or one of the bad Total War games. The studio revealed the game via a storming trailer at the Game Awards on December 11: here's everything you need to know about the upcoming sci-fi grand strategy game.
American actor David Harbour introduced the Total War: Warhammer 40k game trailer, letting us know that he's got a voice role in the game. Can he possibly match Mark Strong's gravelly Lieutenant Titus?
Creative Assembly provides more detail about the game on its website, but there is no release date or release window yet. Four Warhammer 40k factions will ship in the base game: the iconic Space Marines, squishy human Astra Militarum, ramshackle Orks, and elfin Aeldari. We have no doubt that many, many, many more will be coming as DLC.
For the first time in a Total War game, you'll have huge amounts of control over how your faction looks and plays. That means you can customise "The faction's title, heraldry, iconography and arcane wargear", and "Define their traits, sharpen their tactics, and unleash a signature style of destruction". We love the army painter tool in the Dawn of War series, so this is welcome news.
Rather than the single planet of traditional Total War, you'll fight over a "Galactic sandbox - capturing planets, upgrading fleets, and managing your war economy". You'll be able to "Conquer worlds, bombard enemies from orbit, and command cinematic real-time battles over planetary strongholds".
And the ultimate sanction is in the game - Exterminatus. If things go badly, you'll have the option to "Unleash apocalyptic weaponry to eradicate entire planets". Ladies and gentlemen, prepare your Inquisition memes.
We don't yet know know if Total War: Warhammer 40k will run on a new engine, or the same one as all the other contemporary Total War games - which fans may find a little concerning given the recent game breaking bugs in Total War: Warhammer 3. Creative Assembly revealed a programme of works to its game engine at its recent 25th Anniversary livestream, including better pathfinding and dynamic scenery destruction. Getting those right will be essential to handle the dense urban warfare common in Warhammer 40k.
Total War: Warhammer 40k was always the front runner for Creative Assembly's next non-historical game, thanks to the studio's fifteen year long working relationship with Games Workshop, and the massive popularity of Warhammer 40k compared to GW's other big property, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar.
In fact, rumors that the game was in development have been around for so long that we already have a guide speculating on what the game might contain. If you want to see how our predictions squared up against the reveals, check it out now before we update the page.
Warhammer 40k is a futuristic setting, but it's more science-fantasy than sci-fi, with the same Chaos gods as Warhammer and psychic powers taking the place of magic. Despite the prevalence of fully automatic weapons and lasers, combat in 40k novels is inspired by historical mass battles rather than speculating about future warfighting: there's trench warfare straight out of WW1 or the Boer War; tank battles like WW2's North African campaign; hand to hand combat between massed infantry formations that's essentially medieval; and a balance of warfare between mobile linebreakers, static guns, and large infantry units that's effectively Napoleonic.
Are you excited for Total War: Warhammer 40k? Worried about how the engine will adapt to a game that's focused on firepower more than any previous Total War title? Come and join us in the Wargamer Discord community and share your thoughts. To keep up to date with the best stories from Wargamer every week, make sure you sign up to our newsletter.