In Total War: Warhammer

Greenskin Lord wreaks havoc on the battlefield

Concept art from Total War: Warhammer's dwarves

But how does a developer, whose flagship franchise has refined the art of real-world war over the past 15 years, go about building a title atop a fantasy series that’s ruled the roost of tabletop miniatures for over three decades?Appropriately enough, the answer begins with play.“Games Workshop sent us all the Warhammer models and so we spent a long time playing them off against one another and finding out what makes each army tick,” explains Total War: Warhammer lead campaign designer, James Whitston. “As we were going through that process, it started ringing bells in our heads that [the races] are all very different and so we can’t just take a blanket approach to everything in the game.”This has resulted in Creative Assembly translating a number of the key characteristics of each of the initial four playable races – Empire, Dwarf, Greenskin and Vampire – into central game mechanics. The Dwarfs, for example, have their Book of Grudges, which provides unique quests for that race in the game and must be attended to in order to effectively manage troop morale. Similarly, Greenskins – predominantly a mix of orcs and goblins – have a propensity to enter a frenzied war-like state known simply as Waaagh!, which sees others of their race so inspired by their battle prowess that they’ll join with them on the field of war to swell numbers and build momentum for yet more victories.These headline traits are reflected in the Empire and Vampire counts, too, and reinforced by dozens of smaller unique characteristics picked from the Warhammer lore, with each chosen to highlight the differences between the races and provide four races that all feel different to play. In battle, that can be something as fundamental as the Dwarfs lacking cavalry of any kind or the Vampire Counts being bereft of missile units and understating how to turn that from a potential problem for a Total War game into a key feature.“The temptation was that we could fudge it somewhere,” says Whitston. “[Vampire Counts] used to have skeleton bowmen in the Warhammer Fourth Edition rules, I think it was, so we could give them that but then that feels like riding roughshod over the source material and weakens what you’re putting out there“Instead, it’s an opportunity to again reinforce that variety. So, you’ve got no missile troops, what are you going to do about it? Well, there’s flying troops, spells and you can get flying mounts for your characters. In campaign it’s all about having the races be very different and have the game be replayable and so that’s very satisfying from a design perspective to see that come to fruition.”This doubling down on variety by embracing the distinctions between the races, rather than trying to design workarounds for them, makes for a fitting marriage of the two franchises. Away from the battlefield, work has been done to provide each race with faction infrastructure that makes thematic sense and remains true to Warhammer’s well established treatment of inter-race relations rich with inherent alliances, aversions and animosities. This has seen Creative Assembly hire former Games Workshop employee, Andy Hall, as lead writer and lore master and has been bolstered by the studio’s commitment to a long pre-production phase. Here, it has replaced research of historical civilizations with study of lore books, magic tomes and maps of the Old World, Badlands and Northern Realms.Whitston believes this attention to detail as resulted in a title that doesn’t simply try to make the Warhammer brand fit into a pre-established Total War template, but that takes the most iconic elements of each and combines them into one coherent whole.“We don’t want to warp Games Workshop content to fit what we’re trying to create, we want the two to mesh together because we think it’s then stronger than the sum of its parts,” says the leads campaign designer. “Playing the game you really get an idea of how different things are and how much that affects gameplay.”War; war never changes, so it is said. And yet, in Total War: Warhammer you’ll mow down a unit of Demigryph Knights with an Arachnarok Spider, see off a monstrous Varghulf with a magical vortex and have bombs dropped on your head by a fleet of Dwarfen Gyrobombers. Suffice to say, war looks set to change quite a bit come May 24.