With Total War: Warhammer, Creative Assembly designed a trio of games, each with their own bespoke campaigns, but the core of the series quickly became the mode now known as Immortal Empires—every single faction and lord in one massive sandbox. And that's been a big inspiration for Total War: Warhammer 40,000.
At Gamescom 2026, battle product owner Dave Petry told me that the plan was to make the initial release of Total War 40k the "bedrock" upon which Creative Assembly will continue to build, rather than splitting it up into a trilogy.
"We're going to have major releases," he told me, "we're going to update this game with some significant stuff in varying sizes, but we're looking at what Total War is and looking at things like Immortal Empires. Like the true experience is the sandbox. That's what we want to build, and that's what we want to continue building on, and bringing that into one place so that there are so many different ways that players could enter and still get to experience the whole thing without being siphoned off and only getting to experience a part of it.
"We just felt that was super super important, and it also puts us in a position to build better together, and to work on the same thing in the same space with the same problems, and just keep making it better together with everyone. So yeah, it felt like the right thing to do, and it's just such a huge galaxy to fill. So it made sense to treat this as sort of like that bedrock to start building a new future."
Creative Assembly has already been teasing what might be added to the sandbox after launch, too.
Initially, we'll have four customisable factions: Space Marines, Astra Militarum, Aeldari and Ork. Compared to fantasy Warhammer, that's a pretty tiny number, but we can expect other Space Marine chapters to come down the line. Space Wolves are already confirmed, which is all I really needed to hear. But Genestealer cults are also on the table, and of course Chaos is always waiting in the wings.
Total War 40k is due in 2027, and from the hour I played at Gamescom, it's shaping up to be something pretty special.
