In 2009, I was an office drone pretending I gave a toss about insurance premiums, at least by day. By night I was carving up the world, fiddling with firing lines and worrying about getting hundreds of men blown up by cannons. At least when I wasn’t dealing with bugs. I was playing Empire: Total War, now known as Total War: Empire.
Empire was Creative Assembly’s most audacious strategy game, working at a scale the studio had never attempted before. A world at war, split into different theatres, separated by oceans that were just as full of conflict. It also flipped Total War on its head, where the emphasis was on firearms and gunpowder, not swords and spears.
Last week, Creative Assembly announced Total War: Warhammer 40,000, a game with an audacious scope, doing things Creative Assembly has never done before, with a greater focus on ranged battles full of devastating firearms. I am stunned by its apparent scope and all the promise hidden inside it. I’m also reeling from deja vu.
While Creative Assembly hasn’t revealed too much, we do know that planet-destroying fleets will be a part of it; we might even be getting some space combat for the first time, just as Empire gave us our first proper sea battles.
It’s surreal seeing how many of the same boxes it’s attempting to tick.
Now, if this was the early 2010s, I’d be extremely worried. Creative Assembly simply didn’t have the tech or experience to match its ridiculous ambitions. The Creative Assembly of today, however, just might.
Years of advances and a company that’s so much larger, with multiple studios now working away on Total War, puts it in a much stronger position. It’s also important to look at what Creative Assembly has been working on for almost a decade: The epic strategy series Total War: Warhammer.
Total War: Warhammer is undoubtedly closer to Creative Assembly’s core than 40k is, but it was still a big leap. With factions like Kislev we’ve got an abundance of firearms, too, though mechanically they are less dramatically different from archers and the like than they are from the musket infantry of Empire or the Space Marines of 40k, with their oversized plasma guns and bolters.
With Warhammer, Creative Assembly also gave us something intimidatingly massive. With the Mortal Empires campaign—which became Immortal Empires with Warhammer 3—we got a world-sized campaign map featuring hundreds of factions. It fully committed to this massive-scale war, instead of splitting things up into theatres and making countries province-sized.
And it worked! Immortal Empires is Creative Assembly’s greatest achievement. But compared to what the studio will need to do to truly capture warfare in the far-flung, grimdark future of 40k, it’s almost conservative.
It’s hard to imagine Creative Assembly not needing to make significant concessions to try and wrangle the seemingly infinite number of worlds in the Imperium and beyond. Like I said in our Total War: Warhammer 40,000 wishlist, “I want that scale to matter. To be more than set dressing. What I don’t want is for entire worlds, containing billions of lives, to be reduced to a node on a space map, represented by a single battlefield. I want the size of the galaxy to create wrinkles and logistical conundrums.”
But I think there’s a very good chance that whole worlds will be reduced to single provinces, with maybe a single bespoke battlefield at best: the same thing that made Empire’s scale feel like an illusion.
Creative Assembly might be larger and more experienced than it was during Empire’s development, but the last year has shown us that it’s still more than capable of shipping things with game-breaking bugs, too. Not only did Creative Assembly introduce a bug that meant some factions would basically just stay at home instead of, you know, embarking on a total war, it released an update that actually spread it to more factions.
There were issues before then, too. In 2023, the studio had to apologise for the quality of Warhammer 3’s Shadows of Change DLC, while also offering players a bunch of freebies to make up for it. It also fundamentally changed the way it released DLC in light of this.
At the same time, it apologised for Total War: Pharaoh, which was presented as a mainline historical Total War, when everyone pretty much knew it was just one of the company’s Saga spin-offs. These are smaller-scale games focusing on historical flashpoints, developed by Creative Assembly Sofia, rather than the core team.
Pharaoh had all the hallmarks of a Saga, but it was marketed like a regular Total War, and priced that way too. Creative Assembly eventually reduced the price and offered partial refunds.
All this is to say that Creative Assembly has been making a lot of mistakes over these last few years. Not to the point where I’d give up on it, though—it always acknowledges them and puts plans into action to rectify these issues. And after Shadows of Change, there’s been a marked improvement in the quality of its Warhammer DLC. Sofia even made an Immortal Empires-style campaign for Pharoah, effectively turning it into Total War: Bronze Age.
I absolutely believe that Creative Assembly is in a better position to make something as ambitious as Total War: Warhammer 40,000 than it was with Empire. And I desperately want it to succeed. I’m a 40k devotee, so the promise of a game that brings it to life in a way we’ve never seen before has me salivating more than an ork getting ready for a WAAAGH!
But I also thought Empire was going to be a game changer. I’ve been wrong before.