TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER 40,000

Bring war to the stars in this highly anticipated strategy game

- Sean Martin

It’s strange to think it’s been almost ten years since Total War entered the world of Warhammer Fantasy, but three games, 23 expansions, and 95 playable characters later, here we are entering the End Times next summer.

What makes Warhammer 40,000 the perfect place for a Total War game? One word: scale. In the grimdark far future, the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Mankind is beset on all sides by aliens and heretics. The dying Emperor sits silent on his Golden Throne as humanity does its best to survive and stave off enemies from within and without.

As a developer of increasingly big strategy campaigns, as seen with Immortal Empires combining all three Total War: Warhammer games, 40K is really a golden egg for Creative Assembly. It not only has the opportunity to adapt a massively popular setting with decades of lore, units and factions, but it's also the chance to realize a galactic conflict, one that trumps anything it’s ever produced before in terms of pure scale.

SIZE MATTERS

In fact, Warhammer 40,000 is so big that adapting it into a single campaign will be very difficult. The true appeal of the setting, for both game developers and Black Library authors, is that it's kind of unmappable, allowing them to slice off a little corner for themselves. It's what the Dawn of War games did with Kronus and the Kaurava System, it's what Dan Abnett did with his Gaunt’s Ghosts novels, and it sounds like Creative Assembly is taking a similar slice-by-slice approach.