Total War: Warhammer will deliver giant battles with thousands of soldiers

Above: Steam tank in Total War: Warhammer.

Image Credit: Sega

GamesBeat: Are there things that you definitely want to change or do differently because this is a fantasy world?

Roxburgh: What we really want to do is make sure that when you play a game and choose one of the races, the feature set makes sense for that race. If you’re playing the greenskins, it doesn’t make sense for you to tax your population of orcs or manage your economy. We want to make sure that the feature set for orcs is more about getting your armies out and fighting and keeping momentum going.

There’s a concept in the Warhammer universe, the Waaagh! A big warboss goes and pillages enough cities and beats up enough armies to get a reputation. Orcs and goblins come from far and wide to join his army and he gets this mass of momentum up. We’ve modeled that in the game as well. When you play as greenskins, you can get your momentum going and gain a Waaagh!

The other thing greenskins have is animosity. These orcs and goblins are so violent, if they have nobody else to fight, they just fight each other. If you have an army on the campaign map that’s not doing much, they’ll start tearing themselves apart. That whole mechanic isn’t there if you play as the Empire, though. They have different things. They might manage an economy a bit more. We take in the flavor of the races from the Warhammer universe and translate it into the feature set of a Total War game. Playing as a different race is like an entirely different Total War game.

Above: Greatsword in Total War: Warhammer.

Image Credit: Sega

GamesBeat: How many individual soldiers can appear on the battlefield?

Roxburgh: You have units of 200 entities within one unit, and you can have 20 of them, so in a multiplayer battle you could have, whatever, 4,000? In the context of the campaign game they average around 3,000 troops in a battle. It’s a similar scale that you’d expect from previous Total War games, but we do have massive units now as well. A unit of goblins might be between 160 and 200. It’s quite a big scale still.

GamesBeat: Was this an interesting idea for the team to embrace? You’ve been doing history for so long.

Roxburgh: There’s a lot of history buffs in the studio, for obvious reasons, but we’ve wanted to make a fantasy game for years. Over the last three or four years we’ve been recruiting heavily to beef up our skill set and train people up so that we have the ability to have two Total War teams working in parallel with each other. We can carry on making our history games and also do a Warhammer game without impacting the schedule for either.

Imagine what it’s like for artists and animators and designers. Even the coders — just playing with these things is genuine excitement. We love our history games, but this is something completely different. It’s a real fresh start.

GamesBeat: The only issue with Warhammer is that there are a lot of games out there. A lot of games have been done. They’ve embraced games for a while now. How do you want to distinguish or differentiate this game from other Warhammer games?

Roxburgh: To be honest, just the fact that it’s still a Total War game is quite enough to differentiate it already. You’d never see another Warhammer game with thousands of troops in one battle. Also, the campaign side of things — as you know, it’s a very rich, detailed strategy game. When you look at the amount of depth we go into with each race, how many unit types they have, there’s no other game at all that compares to the way we’re doing the Warhammer universe.

Just think of the environments themselves. That’s Blackfire Pass there, a well-known place in the Warhammer world. It’s the only way through this mountain range for the greenskins to go pillage the Empire. It’s not easy to get another game that can display that in the context of a massive battle, the way a Total War game can. It’s unique by the nature of it being Total War.

GamesBeat: Is the fiction big enough to have a big campaign map, an Attila-sized map?

Roxburgh: They have volumes and volumes of stuff. They have novels about parts of the world. We’ve recruited people who, for 15 years, wrote books and stuff on the Warhammer lore. There’s a massive depth of storyline and narrative that we can go into.

Our first game will have four playable races, but we’ve already announced that we’ll be doing a trilogy. We’ll have another installment with another chunk of campaign map and new races. It’ll be a stand-alone game, but if you own this first game as well you can bolt them together and have an even bigger map. Then we’ll have another installment after that. By the time we finish the trilogy, you’ll have the biggest Total War map and game you’ve ever seen.

Above: Dogfight in Total War: Warhammer.

Image Credit: Sega