We sat down with a couple of the Total War Warhammer 40k developers to find out just how the hell you squeeze all that lore into one game.
The food analogies are strong with the Total War: Warhammer 40k devs this year. We sat down for a chat with Joy Dey, Lead Designer, and Dave Petry, Battle Products Owner, to talk about the scale of 40k, how you build a good Warhammer sauce, and if we're going to see Necrons any time soon.
"The scale is bananas," Petry begins, "we made the whole world that Warhammer Fantasy Battles takes place in, and that is one whole world … And we kind of looked at the scale that we would need to approach Warhammer 40,000 at, and we went, well, it's not going to feel right to approach it as this is the galaxy."
Petry talks about finding the middle ground between scale and immersion: "We need to find the right sort of feeling that makes it feel close, close to the world, sort of immersive, without creating too much of an abstract sense of like, we're too far away."
Part of onboarding a new audience to what is essentially an entire universe, Dey says, is the tutorial: "We were looking at the game, right, and how complex it is, and we were like, okay, how do we dissect this into bite-sized chunks so we can take the player on a journey?" Utilizing the "poster children" of the 40k universe, the Space Marines, was, apparently, the ideal soft-launch into the wider landscape.
"At the moment, we're going to be focusing on Armageddon, and that's going to be the sort of grimdark cherry at the end of this, you know, terrifying cake of death." Petry sees the campaign as the ideal scope for tackling the sometimes unwieldy depth of the 40k universe.
"To be able to let you have your own experience and weave your own sort of emergent narrative through these bigger arcing moments in the galaxy, and it kind of sets the stage for us to build on some of the great successes that we had with Warhammer." Hinting that there may be an Immortal Empires-esque sandbox equivalent for Warhammer 40k at some point in the future.
"We're talking about cooking. It's like, you know, it's the right base, it's the right sauce." The best dishes are nothing without a good base, and treating the Space Marines like a sofrito feels like as good a method as any. "There's so much there; it's representing that in the right way, making sure that it comes through in the game and that those elements are coming to life."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pcgamesn.com/total-war-warhammer-40k/gamescom-cake
