Total War: Warhammer 40,000 Devs Show Off Massive Battle Maps, Planets, and Regional Scale

Creative Assembly has shared new details about its highly anticipated strategy game Total War: Warhammer 40,000, focusing on the immense scale of its battle maps and planets. During a livestream, battle product owner David Petry and art director Kevin McDowell discussed the regional scale and visual design of planets before unveiling fresh battle maps.

The Warhammer 40,000 segment kicked off with a first look at a hive waste world, giving players a sense of what a planet will look and feel like. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hive planets are densely packed with Imperium citizens, most of whom endure miserable lives supporting the war effort and worshipping the Emperor. These are grim places, and the hive waste world shown is even more desolate. Fog of war adds to the challenge.

Each planet features a biome that defines its terrain. Four biomes were mentioned: arid, temperate, ice, and waste. Additionally, different civilizational types (such as frontier or civilized) determine density, offering plenty of variety.

In terms of scale, Petry explained that players will fight region by region across continents, aiming to capture key areas or locations within them. Conflicts will vary in density. "It gives a really cool opportunity for you to encounter more desolate wasteland places," he said. "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 specific number. "It’s not going to be dozens and dozens of planets in a system," McDowell emphasized.

Moving to battle maps, the stream revisited the Upper Hive Plateau map from the initial reveal and showcased two new maps, highlighting 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."

Destruction plays a key role in Total War: Warhammer 40,000, significantly altering gameplay. Players can destroy forests or other obstacles to change the battlefield. "They're absolutely honking," Petry said as the camera panned across a map, with guardsmen visible to emphasize scale.

"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.'"

Creative Assembly noted this represents the biggest mental shift for players: many buildings can be destroyed, allowing you to turn a dense map into a sparse one by blowing things up. Not everything is destructible, but you can bring down buildings on enemies in cover or call in orbital bombardments for even more destruction.

As a Warhammer 40,000 fan, everything Creative Assembly has shown so far looks hugely promising. The developer signed off by saying more of the game will be shown by the end of June. No release date has been announced yet.