Creative Assembly has been hard at work on its next major strategy game—Total War: Warhammer 40,000. During a recent livestream, battle product owner David Petry and art director Kevin McDowell revealed a few new details about the highly anticipated title, along with giving us our first look at the in-game depiction of a hive waste world from the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
A key aspect of the game described by the duo is the sheer sense of scale. The planet showcased, for example, will have one of four biomes that have been confirmed for the game so far—arid, temperate, ice, and waste. Each planet will also have its own type of civilization, from sparsely populated frontier planets to fully civilized hive worlds. Players will take on battles from region to region on the continents of these planets, and each star system will have a “handful” of planets. Without going into specifics, McDowell noted that “It’s going to be dozens and dozens of planets in a system.”
“It gives a really cool opportunity for you to encounter more desolate wasteland places,” explained Petry. “You can imagine when you end up fighting on the perimeters of these hives, you’re going to have these wasteland battles effectively that are pretty much empty. Like some bits punctuating things, but largely it’s pretty desolate out there, bar a few points of interest. And then of course, when you work your way towards and into an actual hive, you’re going to be fighting these much more dense, much more choke point-oriented battles.”
We also get a look at a battle map from the Hive World, dubbed the Upper Hive Plateau. “There’s going to be a really, really wide variety of spaces that you can fight in this game,” Petry said. “You’re going to be able to fight in much more dense environments and much more sparse ones.”
Throwing another wrench into the in-game worlds will be the fact that players will get to leave their marks on the battlefield. This means structures and geographical features can be affected. For example, forests offering cover to enemy soldiers can be destroyed.
“One thing that we found with this universe is that everything is on such an incredible scale,” said Petry. “That even these intense spaces, when you get down into actually looking at them, are absolutely huge. There are these massive areas that you can conduct combat within, so even when you’re dealing with these intense spaces, often, actually, the spaces you can work through are still pretty sizable.”
“You can fit a sizable army in a lot of these spaces. And then in many of those spaces where things do get tight, there are opportunities to remove buildings, make it a little bit bigger if that’s your playstyle. If you’ve got an army that really values line of sight, then that can really, really help you there because, ‘I don’t want those. Get rid of them.’”
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. It doesn’t yet have a release date, however.
