Total War: Warhammer will DX12 look pretty amazing

The Game Room
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“Blessed are the strategy gamers, for 2016 is their bounty.” - Jesus of Nazareth.

These are the actual words that appear in the original Aramaic verse, but the words were cast aside at Nicaea as the priests didn’t quite understand what Jesus was trying to say.

Seriously. XCom2, Stellaris, MoO 2016, Endless Space 2, Deserts of Kharack, Battlefield Gothic Armada, Darkest Dungeon, Ashes of a Singularity, Frozen Synapse 2, and Totla War: Warhammer - it’s an orgasmic feast of strategy games, and it looks like this will continue into 2017 too.

Now I’ve been back and forth on this particular title. I have zero investment in the Warhammer universe, and know next to nothing bout it (though I did enjoy some of the RTS games based on 40K), but Total War is probably one of my most played strategy series, I’m a big fan. Some of the early news and CA’s choices concerning DLC put me off the title a bit, but man, seeing some of the latest preview videos, the game just looks amazing and sounds like a significant and interesting departure form standard Total War fare.

Here’s a cool battle showing off how the spell system works, and talking a bit about the quest system: Total War: WARHAMMER Gameplay Video - Azhag's Quest Battle Let's Play - YouTube

And here’s the newly released in-game trailer (looks AMAZING) revealing the vampire faction in the game: Total War: WARHAMMER | Vampire Counts | Cinematic Trailer - YouTube

They’ve also announced that the engine will be 64 bit, for the first time in the series, AND it will support DX12. Not sure to what extent the renderer will be taking advantage of DX12 - I can certainly see huge improvements over DX11 given the nature of the game (lots of draw calls here), but we’ll have to wait and see - and on that note, they’ve delayed the game by a month, which I hope means they are really making damn sure this won’t be a ROME2 debacle.

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I’m not much of a pre orderer but i did for this. It looks amazing.

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One aspect of this interests me, and it isn’t the game part. The old Warhammer setting was retired by Games Workshop. They killed the setting and replaced it with Age of Sigmar. But it seems the new setting hasn’t been rocketing up the sales charts. This seems especially interesting in the development of this game, which would itself promote the old rules and setting.

I hope this will be a return to form for Creative Assembly, but my budget doesn’t include the new game. Still, I may find room for next Total War installment.

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That’s really weird, I guess they wanted to capitalize on nostalgia? Don’t really know anything about Warhammer Lore, is the new stuff bad?

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How long has the AoS stuff been out? It could be that W:TW had been in development for long before AoS came out, or perhaps AoS was so tentative and/or secret that the teams could not coordinate and/or keep up with the latest changes to AoS, and so went ahead with the old WH rules because it would take too long to update otherwise.

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It’s possible that the video game began development before Age of Sigmar was even planned. However, assuming that it took two years for the book development, both would have begun around the same timeframe. It’s rumored that sales of the “new” tabletop game have been weak, and this wouldn’t necessarily help the changeover effort. Additionally, Games Workshop is famously controlling about its IP.

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Lately they’ve been tossing out licences left and right. I think they aren’t as controlling these days as they used to be. Of course a number of the newer GW-based games have been fairly good - Vermintide has been a success and Mordheim has gotten decent reviews. Hopefully Battlefleet Gothic is good too.

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I think it takes quite a bit more than two years to finish a triple A game, and they couldn’t have started at the same time anyways since you sorta need the rules for the game you are making beforehand.