Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun II, Total War: Warhammer III - Lords of the End Times. It's all coming up Warhammer fans, folks, and while Age of Sigmar might not be getting as much love, we're sure it's time will come. If anything, Warhammer fans are suffering so much from their steak being too juicy and their lobster being too buttery that they'll potentially have two big strategy games to choose from this year in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV and Total War: Warhammer 40,000.
Speaking with PC Gamer, Dawn of War IV senior game designer Elliot Verbiest and game director Jan Theysen spoke about the potential clash between the two games, and said they're not worried. "I have seen a couple of comments online being like 'Oh that doesn't make any sense, wouldn't they eat into each other's market?' But I think it's comparing apples and oranges. They're both real-time strategy games, but they're very different types of RTS," Verbiest said.
"It's the same as how Dawn of War isn't Starcraft, and Starcraft isn't Total War, and so on and so forth," he continued. "So yeah, this is definitely a case of 'Holy shit, it's two cakes!' I'm super thrilled for Creative Assembly that they've got this going on right now. It's a good time to be a Warhammer fan."
While the immediate, knee-jerk reaction could be to see these two as similar experiences, as Verbiest says they are quite different. Dawn of War's narrative is often a centrepiece of the experience, and its base building differs greatly from Total War's established maps and locations you can conquer. One is much more about the battles, while the other lets you skip them entirely if you wish to just auto-resolve everything. We'll see how right we are about that, when Dawn of War IV and Total War: Warhammer 40k launch this year.