Creative Assembly has revealed more on its hotly anticipated strategy game, Total War: Warhammer 40,000, touching on the sheer scale of its battle maps and planets.
In a livestream, David Petry, battle product owner, and Kevin McDowell, art director on Total War: Warhammer 40,000, ran through the region scale and visuals of planets, before showing off new battle maps.
The Warhammer 40,000 section of the livestream began with a first look at what a planet is going to look and feel like via a hive waste world. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hive planets are jam packed with the people of the Imperium, most of whom eke out an existence that amounts to little more than war effort support and blind devotion to the Emperor. These are awful, awful places, and the hive world we saw in the livestream is even worse because it’s a hive waste planet. Talk about fog of war.
In the game, a planet has a biome on it to determine its terrain. Four were mentioned: arid; temperate, ice, and waste. On top of that are different civilizational types (frontier, civilized, etc) that determine density. So, you can have plenty of planet variety.
In terms of scale, Petry said players will fight region to region on these continents with the aim of capturing a key region or a key location within it. And across those conflicts, players will encounter different scales of density.
“It gives a really cool opportunity for you to encounter more desolate wasteland places,” he explained. “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.”
Petry and McDowell indicated there will be a “handful” of planets per system, without confirming a hard number. “It’s not going to be dozens and dozens of planets in a system,” McDowell stressed.
Moving on to battle maps, and we got another look at the Upper Hive Plateau map revealed alongside the game itself. But we saw two new battle maps, each offering a look at the variety available.
“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.”
It’s important to note that Total War: Warhammer 40,000 has destruction, which changes the game considerably. You can simply get rid of a forest if you don’t like it by destroying it. This is Warhammer 40,000 after all — the whole point is destroying things.
At this point we got a decent look at the grand scale of the maps. “They’re absolutely honking,” Petry said, as the camera panned around the environment. And, to hammer home the point, we could see guardsmen dotted about the map, helping us get a sense of the relative scale of the battlefield.
“One thing that we found with this universe is that everything is such an incredible scale,” he continued. “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.’”
This makes for the biggest mental shift in playing Total War: Warhammer 40,000, because a lot of buildings can simply be destroyed, Creative Aseembly said. In this way, you can make a map low density just by blowing everything up. Well not quite everything; the pair pointed out not all objects on the battlefield are destructible. But the point is you start to think differently than in previous Total War games; you could bring a building down on enemies in cover, for example, or, if you have your fleet in orbit, call on bombardments, causing even more destruction.
As a Warhammer 40,000 fan, everything Creative Assembly has shown off so far about Total War: Warhammer 40,000 looks hugely promising. The developer signed off by saying that by the end of June, we’ll have seen more of the game. There’s no word on a release date yet.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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