Through the release of Warhammer II and this year’s Warhammer III, Creative Assembly just kept building upon the initial concept-new races, new factions, new Legendary Lords, new continents and gameplay mechanics, in a constant flow of novelty. Players didn’t know it at the time, but Total War: Warhammer was just barely getting started, and what seemed like a fairly generous single player campaign was only a miniscule fraction of the sandbox strategy experience that was to come. That success, though, was only the tip of the iceberg. The result was an unqualified success, one boasting a richly detailed single player campaign and a wide variety of playable factions and high fantasy races.
And yet, the fit was immediately both comfortably familiar and creatively liberating, retaining the core elements of Total War-style gameplay but opening up the real-time combat in particular with the inclusion of systems such as magic and rampaging, giant monsters. To upend that system by tackling Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles setting-a precursor to the arguably more famous Warhammer 40,000-was no doubt considered anathema by some of the historical die-hards. Players were used to a certain academic flair to the series, a bookishness that enriched real-time military strategy combat set in time periods such as Sengoku period Japan, medieval Europe, Republican-era Rome, or the Napoleonic Wars. Since the release of the first, influential Shogun: Total War in 2000, the sprawling, turn-based strategy series had become the flagship of the company, rooting itself around a foundation of historical realism in its various depictions of ancient warfare. When videogame studio Creative Assembly first released Total War: Warhammer in mid-2016, it was a significant departure from the formula that had built the company into a major player, one founded all the way back in the late 1980s and grown to further prominence after an acquisition by Sega in 2005.
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