Total War: Warhamer 40,000 could be best game in franchise—if CA learns from these mistakes

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 was officially announced at last night’s The Game Awards show, and I for one absolutely love what we saw. I’ve been anticipating a 40K Total War game for years now, and CA is on the verge of delivering everything I could have asked for.

But that only stands if CA learned from its mistakes and is willing to up the ante over its previous titles in every way possible. Of course, the 40K setting certainly forces the company to rethink its approach to Total War. The scale is beyond anything the franchise has had before, and from what we saw in the trailer, the campaign is probably going to encompass the entire galaxy, with wars waged equally among the stars and planets.

The planetary warfare that was briefly displayed indicated massive scale and epic combat where one has no idea what’s going on, which tracks for any 40K battle. However, there are many, many downsides to how CA has done new Total War games for a long time, which chiefly corresponds to the arbitrary 20-unit cap.

Though the trailer gave off strong Dawn of War and RTS vibes in its UI, it didn’t really show us much in terms of unit behavior or what the unit cap will be. I hope CA does away with the 20-unit cap completely, and introduces varying faction-based unit caps, whereby Space Marines are limited by their charters on how many units (and people within them) can be deployed in a given situation.

Having every nation and army suffer under the same arbitrary rules has ruined variation between battles, especially in games like Total War: Warhammer (the fantasy ones). Additionally, requiring units to have a lord to be recruited is also dumb and boring and makes zero sense.

In previous Total War games, and even in Warhammer, whenever a lonesome garrison is fought against one of the units is randomly assigned as the “general” or “leader,” which is only natural. This should be true for recruiting itself as well, whereby players could raise troops without having to also procure a lord.

Why does every battle have to have this massive, super-powerful guy leading the charge all the time? Most times we even see Space Marines in promotional videos and other games is them, in their squads, doing the deed, without the need of a singled out general that isn’t part of the group itself.

Why wouldn’t then the players be allowed to, say, recruit additional Space Marines to reinforce another army that already has a commander? It opens up more natural gameplay and makes recruiting a tactical and strategic maneuver instead of a mechanic that forces you to take your main lord, pull him out of a zone, recruit more units only tied to him, and then bring him back into the fold.

On the other hand, I would love to see better diplomacy. Yeah, you’ve bashed me in the comments before when I spoke of diplomacy in TW: Warhammer before, but I absolutely adore the diplomatic game, especially after having played Three Kingdoms. The depth and breadth of mechanics and tactics tied to diplomacy in that game is exceptional, and I don’t see why that wouldn’t translate into 40K.

Even so, 40K truly is the universe of constant war, so diplomacy could take the backseat and I wouldn’t be so mad, but I’d love to see improvements on that end nevertheless.

Settlement development, reconstruction, and expansion, I hope, will also be much more deep and interesting than they were thus far. I love how in Shogun 2 an enemy can raid your territories and burn and pillage different parts of your realm, whereas in Warhammer there are only settlements that have to be sieged (even then, uninterestingly so). We need segmented development that lets a nation ruin another without properly sieging its planets, or ways to hurt a planet without invading it, thereby lowering its value.

Speaking of sieges, they’re going to be so wildly different to anything we’ve seen that whatever they come up with is going to feel fresh and innovative, so I have no comments on that until I see some footage.

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Last night’s The Game Awards show wasn’t the greatest of all time, but it sure did give us a glimpse of some potentially awesome games. One title in particular, however, stood out for a wrong reason: being similar—too similar—to CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077.

And that would be No Law, developed by Neon Giant of The Ascent fame, and published by the self-proclaimed AI-first pioneers, Krafton. Neon Giant’s track record is genuinely great, with The Ascent being one of the most visually striking games I’ve ever seen and played. It’s also set in a cyberpunk environment, one that delves deep into the realm of science fiction, making its cyberpunk vibes more of an artistic choice than an actual setting.

Even so, the studio has established itself as a proper sci-fi and cyberpunk-oriented team of creatives, which naturally led into a more ambitious, larger-scale game such as No Law is supposed to be. And that’d be all fine if the game didn’t bear so much similarity, eerie similarity, to CDPR’s 2020 title, Cyberpunk 2077.

While watching the TGA show last night, seeing No Law made me think it was something Cyberpunk 2077-related. The first-person perspective, the animations, the way the combat unfolds, all reminded me of CDPR’s game, not to mention the segment that showcases a certain location that is exceptionally difficult to tell apart from Cyberpunk 2077‘s Afterlife.

Now I get a first-person cyberpunk title is bound to bear some semblance to what was already made, but I for the life of me couldn’t tell you this wasn’t Cyberpunk 2077 if you didn’t tell me. That brings me to my biggest fear regarding Neon Giant’s upcoming title: it could fall into the same situation that Tencent has caught itself in with Lights of Motiram.

Sony sued the company for ripping off its assets, ideas, and style, and is currently embroiled in a massive legal battle that saw Light of Motiram grind development to a halt. If No Law doesn’t showcase more unique elements in the near future, I have a feeling CDPR might not like what the studio has done here, and could pursue legal action much in the same way as Sony.

This could eventually result in a potentially good game being bogged down by a lawsuit because it decided to pursue established styles instead of developing a new one, even if derivative of the one CDPR itself had made.

No Law posits an interesting setting and story, such as its Port Desire city that is an anarcho-corporatist hellscape, but how it executes things brings it way too close to an existing game, so much that telling them apart becomes a real headache.

We’ll have to wait and see how the game develops further and how its style evolves and translates into actual gameplay. But so far, its future seems to be hanging by a thread, one that CDPR could decide to slash at any moment.

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