Blizzard may have no public plans for another Warcraft real time strategy game, but fortunately for those of us looking to get a fix of large-scale, orc-on-human battles, we have Total War: Warhammer scheduled for 2016. Sega and Creative Assembly have released ten minutes of in-game footage for the upcoming strategy game, along with developer commentary to illuminate the action.
The scripted campaign Battle of Black Fire Pass shows a clash between the human army of the Empire, led by Emperor Karl Franz, and a Greenskin horde of orcs, goblins, trolls, and giants, led by Orc Warboss Grimgor Ironhide. While previous games in the long-running Total War series have all been based on historical warfare from various periods and regions of the world, Warhammer is the British studio’s first foray into the fantastical.
The varying scale of units — from squat little goblins launched kamikaze-style by ballistas, up through towering giants snatching humans from the field to eat — makes the battlefield much more varied than the previous entries’ symmetrical lines of human infantry and cavalry.
Orcs leap into the air and humans brace themselves for impact as lines of soldiers clash. The squads look both dynamic and individuated, and the developers plan on making them more so. The commentary mentions their intention to give special focus on making the impacts of clashing lines more explosive and physical, especially with cavalry.
Set for release on Windows, Mac, and Linux in 2016, Total War: Warhammer is the ninth game in Creative Assembly’s Total War series of real-time strategy games. It fuses the large scale battle mechanics of Total War with the classic fantasy setting of Games Workshop’s Warhammer universe. First introduced in a 1983 tabletop miniatures wargame, Warhammer has grown into a massive, multimedia franchise, also spinning off the popular Warhammer 40,000 sci-fi/fantasy fusion spin-off.
