Why Total War Warhammer 3 feels like a sad farewell

Total War Warhammer 3 is a real-time strategy triumph, a beefed up capstone to Creative Assembly’s genre-defining trilogy. Although there’s bound to be plenty of DLC in the coming months (and maybe even years) the game’s launch is also a bittersweet moment for Warhammer fans. Specifically, fans of Warhammer Fantasy.

Games Workshop’s landmark tabletop will hit forty next year, but it has slipped further and further from the spotlight over the past decade. Why? Due to declining sales of its Warhammer Fantasy miniatures range, Games Workshop made the tough decision to pull the plug. Not only did model kits and rulebooks vanish from the company’s stores, they also destroyed the Warhammer world in a cataclysmic story campaign known as The End Times.

From its ashes rose Warhammer: Age of Sigmar in 2015. This presented a huge opportunity for Games Workshop, allowing them to create an entirely new battle game system that shrugged off some of those arcane Fantasy concepts. It also let them sculpt a new universe, introducing a legion of otherworldly factions while weaving in some legacy armies.

Age of Sigmar is now in its third edition and enjoys a fairly strong following. However, there are many – like myself – who simply have zero interest in this change of direction, undoubtedly tainted by my now nostalgic fondness of Warhammer Fantasy. From the skirmishing style of play and smaller battle forces to its lacklustre lore, it’s simply not for me.

So, where does Total War Warhammer 3 factor into this? If we zoom out, there’s now a clear push for more video games set in the Age of Sigmar, with fewer focusing on the classic Fantasy setting. Amid a growing number of mobile titles, there has been Storm Ground and Tempestfall, with a big MMO in the works, as well as a strategy game coming from Frontier. This makes sense if you’re Games Workshop – the more eyes you get on Age of Sigmar, the better chance you have of flogging overpriced plastic miniatures. As a knock-on effect, there’s most interest in novels, audiobooks, and potential films, helping to fuel big Warhammer’s multimedia push.

Thankfully, Fantasy fans have gotten their fill over the past few years. It took a long time, but we finally got a great action game in the form of Vermintide, and then there’s Total War, of course. Since the first Total War Warhammer launched back in 2016, developer Creative Assembly has gone about virtualising The Old World, allowing players to command their favourite factions in epic campaigns and online battles. With Warhammer Fantasy miniatures incredibly costly and increasingly hard to find, Total War is becoming one of the few ways for fans to explore this rich setting. A setting that gone on to inspire so many other video games and media.

Total War Warhammer 3 goes beyond simply recreating the Warhammer Fantasy we know. It fleshes out lesser-known forces such as the Ogre Kingdoms and Kislev while building another, Grand Cathay, from scraps of lore collected from four decades of Warhammer sourcebooks.

In one way, this game feels like a farewell to Warhammer Fantasy. At the same time, it also alludes to what the future may have in store for this much-loved tabletop battle game. It has been confirmed that Games Workshop plans to release Warhammer: The Old World, a throwback that will restore Fantasy’s setting and play system. As part of that, Grand Cathay has been coincidentally mapped by Games Workshop at the same time that Warhammer 3 launched. Clearly, there’s a demand for more adventures and epic clashes in this universe, and hopefully that will result in more video game adaptations.

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• Source: https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2022/03/08/why-total-war-warhammer-3-fantasy-the-old-world/