On Wednesday the Creative Assembly team revealed Total War: Warhammer 3, what publisher Sega calls “the epic culmination of the Total War: Warhammer Trilogy.” No release date or price was mentioned in the press release, but we know a little bit about the factions and the scenario. Fans of the old school board game will be thrilled to hear that the developers will be returning to the classic Old World scene – as well as the board game itself, after a five-year courtship with the Sigmar Era.
Total War: Warhammer is an elaborate turn-based strategy series, filled with intimate battles in real time. It is based on Creative Assembly’s own pausable real-time combat style, which dates back to the release of more than 20 years. Shogun: Total War. And the series is based on the rich history of Games Workshop’s popular table miniature game, first released in 1983.
The first entry in the series, Total War: Warhammer, was released in 2016. The sequence, Total War: Warhammer 2, was released just a year later. The two games combined narratively and literally to tell an extensive story from multiple perspectives on a huge world map. The developers say that this time the players will be fighting in a really unknown territory – the nightmare Chaos Realm.
In the Warhammer tradition, the Kingdom of Chaos – also known as The Aethyr – is a dimension of pure magic. The cinematic trailer shows Kislev warriors, a fictional human faction that comes from Polish and Russian military history, fighting against Khorne’s demonic forces. The battlefield itself is an impassable frozen landscape with teeth-like mountains rising in the distance. The images recall some of the most fantastic battle landscapes from previous entries in the series, which included huge underground caves and other supernatural environments.
Today’s press release confirms the Kislev and Cathay armies as playable factions alongside the Chaos agents – Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh and Tzeentch. Fans of the Warhammer 40,000 scenario will recognize these gods, who are shared between the two game systems. Today’s press release also suggests “iconic new races for the World of Warhammer Fantasy Battles system”. Expect more information about these factions, along with details about a launch window, in the coming months.