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Total War Warhammer 40k is escalating the grandiosity of Creative Assembly’s longstanding strategy games with the brutal bombast of Games Workshop’s grimdark sci-fi setting. Warhammer 40k fans might boast an above-average willingness to study a rulebook, but easing people into such a vast creation, and ensuring they stick around, still requires work. At Gamescom, we caught up with Lead Designer Joy Dey and Battle Products Owner Dave Petry from CA to discuss the new Total War game’s tutorials, modding potential, and what the team has learned from the Warhammer fantasy trilogy.
Dey oversaw the creation of Total War Warhammer 3’s robust prologue, and she’s once again in charge of helping craft the tutorials that will teach you the fundamentals of Total War Warhammer 40k. “People liked the narrative, people liked that it was doing things step by step,” she recalls of the TWW3 introduction. Those fundamentals have been carried into the Warhammer 40k game, but with some extra substance: “The prologue taught you the basics, but maybe didn’t set you up for an Immortal Empires campaign,” Dey acknowledges. “There was quite a big gap, so we’re trying to close that.”
“What gives anything longevity is such a mix of things,” Petry adds. He gets slightly lost in an admittedly delightful cooking metaphor, before resolving his thoughts: “All of those elements need to come together. It’s care. It’s craft. It’s being incredibly fortunate to be attached to such an incredible universe. It’s the sandbox – the fact you can replay as the same faction twice in Warhammer and get a completely different sort of outcome and endgame. All of those learnings are going into making Warhammer 40k.”
“Immortal Empires is, as we all know, kind of the pinnacle experience of Total War Warhammer, so we’ve learned a lot from it,” Petry continues. “Part of that is treating it as a single experience that we will keep building on; gone are the days of one, two, and three. Warhammer 40,002 would have sounded weird anyway,” he laughs. “We’re going to keep building on this same executable, just adding to the same thing – so it’s all going to be there every time we add something.”
Another huge factor in TWW3’s longevity is the mod scene, and Creative Assembly is very much of the belief that “Total War is synonymous with modding.” Petry reassures us that robust modding support “is definitely something we want to enable, along with the new engine and the new toolset that we’ve built.” He cautions there will naturally be “time needed to make sure that the tools we can provide as a modding set are things that people can use, and are accessible in the right way,” but says CA will “embrace it over time.”
Recent games have also reaffirmed the value of establishing “synchronicity with the player base.” CA is “very keen” to get feedback from the closed beta this year, and it’s keeping designers and testers “looking over people’s shoulders” and taking notes at each big industry show the game is attending around the globe, but that need only grows once the real release date arrives. “Everything we do once the game is out is about listening to and reacting to that player feedback in the same way that we do with Warhammer currently.”
“It’s also going to be a new approach,” Petry remarks, “because it’s listening, it’s hearing what everyone says – it’s how they act, what they actually do as well.” He explains the team tracks various in-game metrics and behaviors: “Where people spend their time, what buttons they click, how many times they click them, what they end up doing.
“It’s a combination of listening to those things and going, ‘Okay, people are saying this, and this many people are interacting with this, and this is what they do,’ and coming up with a solution and communicating that.” He praises the community team for “working through that feedback with people and making sure the communication stays high,” noting that CA is “very committed to trying to be as transparent as possible and as open as possible when it comes to building this experience together.”
It’s an approach that we’re also seeing with Total War Medieval 3, and it certainly inspires confidence that the final product will actually deliver what players want. “Our belief in community is huge.” Before we wrap, there’s time for Petry to sneak in one more cooking metaphor. “Once we are really getting it into the hands of so many people, that’s when we can really start to understand what the soup tastes like, you know?” The Total War Warhammer 40k release date might still not be in sight, but I’m already licking my lips.
Additional reporting by Lauren Bergin for PCGamesN at Gamescom.