First Look at Total War: Warhammer campaign map

Total War: Warhammer is going to launch in April 2016, which is less than in five months – and yet this extremely promising strategy game from Creative Assembly still holds many mysteries. Thankfully, the developers recently revealed the game’s biggest secret – the campaign map. During the last couple of months we watched lots of spectacular battles between Dwarves, Greenskins, and the Empire of Man, but now we got a peek into the other fundamental gameplay layer – turn-based kingdom management. Although we didn’t get a chance to actually have our hands on the game, take command of armies and agents, expand cities, develop technologies, and so on, a half an hour long presentation was enough to get a first impression. What made the demonstration even more exciting was the fact that it featured a very interesting race in terms of gameplay – the Greenskins.

Let’s start by briefly summarizing overall gameplay mechanics. Just as in previous Total War games, you get to look at the world from two perspectives: a small-scale 2D map of the entire game area and a close-up 3D view prevailing in battles. Warhammer is still in its Alpha, so in terms of technology, the game looks similar to what we saw in Rome II, but the overall impression is that Warhammer is much more enchanting. This is because of the transition into a fantasy universe. The Old World is filled with breathtaking landscapes and details that build up great atmosphere: dwarven fortresses raised in the mountains, wastelands dotted by bonfires and skewed orkish banners, Winds of Magic floating here and there, occasional ruins, as well as heroes and beasts of different races. More importantly, the game area is vast and really diverse. As expected, Creative Assembly is going to offer almost the entire Old World right from the start – from the icy Norsca and Chaos Wastes in the north across to Tilea and desolate Badlands in the south, and from the green coasts of Estalia and Bretonnia in the west to the soaring World’s Edge Mountains in the east.

Creative Assembly still hasn’t shared too many materials on Men, Dwarves, and Greenskins, or even the forces of Chaos, but they revealed almost nothing about the undead Sylvani, commanded by the Vampire Lords. The campaign map presentation didn’t change much on the matter, however - in the overview of the Old World we could see some representatives of that race as well as a strip of land defiled by the undead.

First thing you do when you start playing is choosing the leader of your faction – a so-called Legendary Lord. Each faction will most likely have three leaders; as for the Greenskins, the two revealed so far are Grmigor Ironhide and Azhag the Slaughterer. Both gentlemen are orkish leaders with unique skills. These differences between them become more evident in time as the heroes complete their own mission trees and unlock several unique assets – artifacts, mounts, etc (all this is described in the character progression menu). For instance, Azhag, the one chosen for the presentation, can come into possession of a magic crown that unlocks a whole new skill tree of dark magic. He can also obtain a dreadful wyvern and gain the ability to fly around the campaign map (which obviously creates a whole lot of new tactical possibilities). The creators also showed us a final part of a quest for a powerful weapon – interestingly, the struggle to get the artifact is concluded with a battle against humans in the Black Fire Pass (the one showed off in the first gameplay video released a couple of months ago), analogically to the Emperor Karl Franz’s missions, whose goal is to obtain a legendary war hammer Ghal Maraz.