The Creative Assembly team unveiled Wednesday Total War: Warhammer 3, which publisher Sega calls the ‘epic climax of the total war: Warhammer trilogy’. No release date or price was mentioned in the press release, but we do know a bit about the factions and the environment. Fans of the old school tabletop game will be excited to hear that developers will return to the classic Old World environment – just like the tabletop game itself, after a five-year departure with the Age of Sigmar.
Total War: Warhammer is an extensive strategy series that in turn is based on intimate, real-time battles. It builds on Creative’s own style of intermittent real-time combat, dating back more than 20 years to the release of Shogun: total war. And the series takes advantage of the rich history of Games Workshop’s hugely popular tabletop miniature game, first released in 1983.
The first entry in the series, Total War: Warhammer, was released in 2016. The sequel, Total War: Warhammer 2, was released just one year later. The two games combined both the story and literally to tell an expansive story from multiple perspectives on a massive world map. Developers say players will be fighting in a truly unknown territory this time around – the nightmare Chaos Realm.
In the history of Warhammer, the Realm of Chaos – also known as The Aethyr – is a dimension of pure magic. The film preview shows Kislev warriors, a fictional human faction that draws from Polish and Russian military history and fights against the demonic forces of Khorne. The battlefield itself is an impassable frozen landscape with toothy mountains rising in the distance. The images are reminiscent of some of the more fantastic battlefields of previous entries in the series, which include massive underground caves and other unearthly environments.
Today’s press release confirms both the Kislev and Cathay armies as playable factions along with the agents of Chaos – Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. Fans of the Warhammer 40,000 environment will recognize the gods shared by both game systems. Today’s news release also points to ‘iconic new races from the World of Warhammer Fantasy Battles system’. Expect more information about the factions to emerge over the next few months, as well as details about a release window.