Total War: Warhammer 40,000 Shows Off Orks, Orbital Lasers and a Hive City in New Gameplay

Total War and Warhammer 40,000 is the crossover strategy fans have been asking about for a decade, and this weekend we finally got a proper look at how it plays. Creative Assembly showed a new gameplay video to the crowd at Bilibili World in Shanghai, then published it on the official Total War YouTube channel on July 11. It is a scripted demonstration rather than raw play, the studio is upfront about that, but it is still the clearest picture yet of what the grimdark future looks like inside the Total War formula.

Video: Total War on YouTube

Imperial Guard versus Orks, at full scale

The footage centers on a battle between the Imperial Guard and an Ork horde, and the scale is exactly what you would hope for. Massed ranks of Guardsmen hold lines against waves of greenskins while armor and monstrous units crash through the middle. The showpiece moment belongs to the Orks' Stompa, a towering scrap effigy that wades into the fight and gets erased by an orbital strike called down from above. Behind it all, a spiraling hive city dominates the horizon, framed as the real objective on a front much larger than the battle you are fighting.

Orbit is part of the battlefield now

The most interesting new idea is what happens above the map. Ships can orbit planets and engage with them directly, and your capital ship in particular matters for softening targets before and during battles. During sieges, orbital lasers can delete especially powerful enemies, which is how that Stompa met its end. Total War has always been about the ground layer, so folding a naval style orbital layer into the loop is a genuine evolution of the formula, not just a Warhammer coat of paint.

No date, and some rough edges

There is still no release date. The Steam page lists the game as to be announced, with Creative Assembly developing and SEGA publishing. The footage itself also showed visible frame drops in the bigger moments, which the work in progress label covers for now, but performance is clearly something the studio still has to prove on a game of this scale.

Our take

We think this looks like the right kind of ambitious. The Imperial Guard versus Orks matchup is a smart choice for a first proper battle, since it shows both the disciplined line infantry Total War does best and the chaotic melee swarms that made the fantasy games sing. The orbital layer is the real story though. If ships in orbit meaningfully shape ground battles, this is more than a reskin of the existing formula. Our only caution is the usual one for scripted demos: everything fires perfectly on cue, and real matches never do. With no date announced, there is plenty of time for the frame rate to catch up to the ambition. What we have seen so far earns the wait.