TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III
RELEASE February 17, 2022 | DEV Creative Assembly | PUB Sega | LINK totalwar.com
After two glorious Total War:Warhammer
games and a cavalcade of DLC featuring most noteworthy factions from Games Workshop’s universe, many of us were left asking what could possibly be next for the third and final game in the trilogy? Of course, there are many Warhammer factions whose units and lore aren’t as well documented, as well as the semiabstract realms of those colourful Chaos Gods, but would Creative Assembly really venture into this strange new territory?
Why but of course it would! And it’s doing it with the exponentially growing confidence of a studio that’s been intertwined with the world of Warhammer for a good seven years now. The new factions are a motley mix of the rough (Ogre Kingdoms), the regal (Kislev and Cathay), and the otherworldly, with the Daemons of Chaos divided into separate Nurgle, Tzeentch, Slaanesh, and Khorne armies.
That confidence has been palpable in all the TotalWar:WarhammerIII battle footage we’ve seen throughout 2021. Cathay using dragons and hot air balloons to defend a great wall against the neon-firing hordes of the Lord of Change, the Ice Queen of the Slavicinspired Kislev taking her winged lancers and War Bear Riders to the gates of hell against Khorne, and even an all-Chaos showdown in a realm of rot between the Plaguebearers of Nurgle and horny hedonists of Slaanesh.
It really is spectacular stuff – a firework ending to a trilogy that, by the end of the third game’s DLC run, will have been in almost non-stop development for the best part of a decade. But beyond the bright lights and dazzle of the battlefield, it’s impressive to see how Creative Assembly is digging ever-deeper into making each faction’s campaigns feel distinct. Where the first TotalWar: Warhammer played things relatively safe, the second really mixed things up, and the success of that experiment has propelled Creative Assembly to go all out in weird and wonderful campaign mechanics for the third game.
As you might imagine, Chaos factions aren’t too keen on cramming themselves into human settlements, so their focus is very much on spreading their respective god’s kinks throughout the mortal realms. Nurgle turns human settlements into foetid fields, while Tzeentch, God of Change, can mess with the campaign map like a cheating child with a board game – tracking armies, messing with enemy turns, and even transferring control of settlement between different factions.
GODS DAMN IT
The campaign map looks set to be more alive than ever, constantly changing to reflect the advances and schemings of the Chaos Gods, while Cathay and Kislev attempt to keep them at bay.
Then there are the little things, like tiered cities and the ability to build barricades in them, giving depth to the urban combat that’s been oddly lacking throughout the 20-plus year history of the TotalWar series.
Nurgle only knows how this most out-there of entries in an already out-there series will merge into the Mortal Empires campaign, which will eventually contain the maps and factions from all three games in the series. However it ends up looking, in a series that has so far answered all questions with the force of a Mournfang Cavalry charge, we have no reason to doubt they’ll do it right.
AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, CHAOS FACTIONS AREN’T TOO KEEN ON CRAMMING THEMSELVES INTO HUMAN SETTLEMENTS