How does a 10-foot mound of rotting flesh wrapped in a large mouthful of chipped teeth and rancid pustules work? What kind of sound does it make as it moves? Does its second bark lick its lips where its belly is?
It’s not something many Warhammer fans think about when looking at a Miniature Beast of Nurgle on the table, but these are the kinds of questions that Creative Assembly has to wrestle with to bring the world of Warhammer to life. in Total War: Warhammer 3.
The latest and most ambitious entry in the grand-strategy series, Warhammer 3 not only takes fans to places they’ve never been in a Total War game, but places where even the lore of Warhammer rarely dare. Entire regions of the campaign map had to be created from scratch, and the factions that inhabited them became fully playable armies.
In the original Warhammer tabletop game, the Imperial China-inspired Cathay only received a passing mention, and didn’t have any proper miniatures of its own. In Warhammer 3, however, it is the largest faction on the map.
“We don’t create much [Cathay]because we work at Games Workshop [the studio behind the Warhammer franchise] as they do it,” said director Ian Roxburgh. “We were part of that process from the beginning, and they were very open to saying, ‘If you know the kind of things that will benefit you because because it’s in a Total War game, let us know’.”
Kislev, another little-known tabletop wargame army, has been rewritten to keep the entire faction in Total War. Its inclusion is a strange choice given the difficulty of the Viking-esque army, but of the four Chaos factions – Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, and Tzeentch – already in the game, and Cathay is the only one to oppose. of them, Creative Assembly considers it necessary. another human army for balance. “We need more things in the world,” said Roxburgh, “because it’s like: if you don’t like chaos, what do you do?”.
Just as the Warhammer world had to be modified to adapt it for Total War, so did video games.
This is a kind of freedom that the studio does not usually have when developing Total War games. For the series’ historical titles, the countries and factions on the campaign map are set in stone. The Creative Assembly’s job is to work around the historical tableau, adjusting any imbalances or quirks it may have.
“Ultimately, the way we treat history in our historical games, and our IPs when we’re working on IPs, we just want to be completely authentic,” Roxburgh said. Historical accuracy comes in the forms of geographic, political, and military accuracy, but making a game that fits well with Warhammer lore involves filling in its gaps. Sometimes that means asking Games Workshop to create an entire faction from scratch, and other times figuring out how a plastic two-inch figurine of rotting flesh in the mouth will perform when blown up to 60 times its size.
In the name of lore
It cuts both ways. Just as the Warhammer world had to be modified to adapt it for Total War, so did video games. “The Vampire Counts from Warhammer One don’t have any ranged weapons,” Roxburgh said. “In a Total War paper-stone-scissors context, we usually look for a throwaway reference to an archer unit for vampires, so we can bring a balanced army. But no, we want to embrace this asymmetry, because that’s part of the juice of what makes the tabletop army fun. We want to embrace that.”
Orc’s Doom Diver Catapult is another step up from the usual RTS fare in Total War. An artillery unit that flings goblins across the map to crush enemy ranks, it uses a strange dice-rolling tabletop game system that allows players to maneuver the screaming cargo as it falls.
Total War: Warhammer replicates this by switching to an over-the-shoulder view of the goblin hurtling through the air, allowing you to control its flight to take down as many enemies as possible. It’s not as important as the introduction of asymmetrical armies, but it points to a big change in tone, which the series leans more towards in each game.
“I really enjoy throwing a few curveballs here and there,” said DLC director Rich Aldridge. “Vampire Coast is a good example of that, something people might not expect.”
The swashbuckling undead faction – think zombie pirates, ghost cavalry, and monstrous crustaceans – was added via DLC in Total War: Warhammer 2, when the developers started to think about the more unusual aspects of the game world. “We probably wouldn’t have been given that opportunity earlier,” Aldridge said. “We need to build the game itself, and add core races.”
All the additions culminate in Immortal Empires, a massive game mode for Total War: Warhammer 3 that connects every map, every faction, and every Legendary Lord game from the trilogy into one humongous free for all. It covers the entire Warhammer Fantasy world, showing the richness of the fictional world, as well as why it should be made into a Total War game.
“If you look at what IP is at a high level, it’s a lot of different types that are very different from each other, in a perpetual state of war,” Roxburgh said. “We couldn’t get better settings for a Total War game.”