Total War: Warhammer III
The epic trilogy ends with its largest war yet
“WE’VE BUILT THIS INCREDIBLY CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH GAMES WORKSHOP”
After leaving us guessing for a couple of years, Creative Assembly has spilled the beans on Total War: Warhammer III, and it’s going to be a big ’un, featuring a war of “unprecedented scale” spread across the Realm of Chaos and the Lands of the East.
“In campaign map terms, it’s big… roughly twice the size of WarhammerII’s Eye of the Vortex map,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “And it needs to be, as this is the part of the Warhammer world that gives way to the Realms of Chaos, which take up a significant area in their own right. But I suppose more than anything, you can apply the term ‘unprecedented scale’ to our ambition for the game. We’re aiming to conclude the trilogy in a big way – from the narrative, to the playable races, to the wealth of new features.”
The armies of Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Tzeentch are Total War: Warhammer’s first daemonic factions, fielding monsters like the gruesome Bloodletters and hulking Bloodthirsters. The introduction of these factions also creates new wrinkles, because it’s not like a bunch of Chaos-loving daemons are going to be into stuff like diplomacy, which has become an increasingly significant part of the Total War franchise.
ICE TO MEET YOU
Not quite as extra are the pair of human races, Cathay and Kislev, though they could be just as interesting. Cathay, Warhammer’s analogue for China, exists in the tabletop game just as lore, so there’s no army for Creative Assembly to work with. The shape the faction will take, then, is a bit of a mystery.
“We’ve built this incredibly close working relationship with Games Workshop over the years, and Cathay’s realisation in WarhammerIII is testament to that,” says Roxburgh. “Their design team led the way in defining what Cathay would look like as a fully-fledged faction, and we’ve fed that design through the Total War lens, so in the final game you’ll see a playable race as complete and as storied as any other.”
Kislev should also provide some surprises. Like Cathay, the Russianinspired faction doesn’t have an official army in the current version of the tabletop game, though with the upcoming resurrection of the Old World, Games Workshop is currently designing one.
The previous games featured two major events that they hung on: the Chaos invasion in WarhammerI and the fight over the Vortex in WarhammerII. The final game will also feature some kind of big objective or crisis, though Creative Assembly’s keeping that in its back pocket for now. Roxburgh does say, however, that the team’s learned a lot about designing Warhammer campaigns, and that experience coupled with player feedback means it’s got something “appropriately epic” in mind for the trilogy’s conclusion.
All this talk of massive-scale campaigns would have left me a little bit worried about performance a few years ago, but Creative Assembly’s made great strides in that regard. You no longer have enough time to make a cup of tea and start a book after you hit ‘End Turn’. These improvements bode well for Warhammer III, and Roxburgh says that “performance is always foremost in our minds”. The work to optimise this behemoth continues.
Even with a lot still under wraps, I’m incredibly excited. WarhammerII has grown into my favourite TotalWar( see p110), and it seems like WarhammerIII will be even more unusual and experimental. There’s no release date yet, but Creative Assembly is aiming to get us back into the war this year.