Total War : Warhammer 2

Chaos in the New World.

- Tom Hatfield

The Creative Assembly’s definitive take on Warhammer Fantasy returns with part two of its planned trilogy, which includes bondage pirates, dinosaurs riding dinosaurs and a bold new plan to fix Total War’s ‘endgame fatigue’.

Warhammer Fantasy and Total War always seemed like a perfect match, so much so that every Total War game ever made has a Warhammer mod. Last year’s Total War: Warhammer was the culmination of geek fantasies everywhere. The Creative Assembly wants its trilogy to cover every part of Games Workshop’s beloved low fantasy world, and the setting this time around is the New World, the Americas to the original game’s fantasy Europe – at least if America had an island full of snobby Elves living off the coast. The campaign set on this map is entirely new, and features some of Games Workshop’s more characterful races, fighting for control of a magical contraption known as the Great Vortex.

The Vortex is The Creative Assembly’s solution to a persistent problem for Total War: according to the developer’s metrics, most people don’t actually finish a game. Game director Ian Roxburgh says they tend to reach a point where they’re dominating and think, “OK, I own half the world and I’ve won the game, I’ll just start a new campaign.” It’s not the first strategy developer to run into this problem – Paradox’s Stellaris attempted its own solution last year by introducing an off-map crisis. CA is approaching it by centring victory conditions not on territory, but on the Vortex.