Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is real and features Orks, Space Marines, the Aeldari and for some reason, David Harbour

That furious cyborg face in Geoff Keighley’s bottom was telling the truth! Creative Assembly are making Total War: Warhammer 40,000, a new era for Twar that looks to take the Total War strategy map/battle map format and apply it to whole solar systems. They got David Harbour to announce the game at the Geoffies just now. There was a moment of pure, ecstatic terror when I thought they were making Total War: Stranger Things. Harbour wouldn’t have left the stage alive. But no, don’t worry, he’s here because he’s voicing some unit or other. Catch a cinematic intro and just a tiny bit of footage in the announcement trailer, below.

So far, the only factions on show are the Space Marines and the Orks, but they’ve elsewhere confirmed that the swift and psychic Aeldari are joining the party, plus the human tank corps of the Astra Militarum. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the first game in another Total Warhammer-style trilogy, with other factions like the Necrons and Tyranids showing up over the course of a decade, but let us not preoccupy ourselves with such grimdark prospects for the moment. Let us speak of Bolters.

The big question is whether Creative Assembly can handle a strategy game with this many projectiles and vehicles. The trailer embraces the prospect pretty confidently, showing an accelerated food chain of large, armoured entities getting shat on by other, larger, armoured entities. We also see an orbital bombardment, and the suggestion of real-time zooming transitions between planetary surfaces and the galaxy map. I’m still trying to work out which Marine or Ork is David Harbour (who, we should probably note, is embroiled in harassment allegations seemingly lodged and then walked back by Stranger Things co-star Billie Bobby Brown). I assume it wasn’t that wee turret boi who got his face melted.

There’s a little extra on the Steam page about unit customisation. “Tailor your faction’s combat philosophy for both campaign and battle, arming them with your own unique fusion of devastating tactical abilities, signature traits, and arcane wargear,” it reads. Where is my “leave all the figurines unpainted as a form of psychological warfare” option.

There’s a lot of Twar going around at the moment. Creative Assembly’s anniversary showcase last week also saw them revealing Total War: Medieval 3. That one’s currently in early pre-production, and will let you rewrite medieval history with your tactical smarts. Think of those YouTube videos which assess how the fall of Constantinople affected basketball players LeBron James’ legacy, except LeBron’s Richard the Lionheart or Saladin.

Medieval 3 and the new Warhammer 40,000 game will run on Warcore, the latest iteration of Creative Assembly’s engine. There’s the promise of tools “designed to bring the medieval era to life in ways we’ve previously never been able to achieve”. As regards Medieval, we here at RPS expect to be able to tweak all of the individual buboes on the bodies of our soldiers. As regards Warhammer 40,000, we’ll settle for some less kite-suspectible AI. You can’t kite a Terminator – it’s probably blasphemy.

Not to be forgotten, Total War: Warhammer 3 also has some extravagant DLC on the way – dubbed Lords of the End Times. It’ll add in uber-necromancer Nagash and three other legendary lords.

And that’s the totality of Creative Assembly’s warring for the moment. On to more Game Awards things. Alternatively, why not read about Creative Assembly’s big non-strategy project, the sequel to Alien: Isolation.