Total War: Warhammer will be very much a Total War take on the formula, rather than a more 'tabletoppy' version of the series we know and (usually) love.
I asked Andy Hall, lead writer on Total War: Warhammer firstly if I would get struck down by the Chaos gods for calling it 'Total Warhammer' (apparently not), and secondly whether Creative Assembly are planning to adapt the Total War ruleset to closer match the tabletop game.
"Fundamentally it's a Total War experience with Warhammer layered on top," Hall told me, "All Warhammer characters have a stat bar, which is very helpful for us—we never had anything telling us the stats of a Roman legionnaire!
"But we're not literally taking stats, weapons skill, ballistic skill and so on into the game; we're using parameters and the paradigm that already exists in Total War, while using the stats that Warhammer gives us and letting that influence everything in the background."
As for the tech backing it all up, it seems the team is pleasantly surprised how Total War: Warhammer handles the shift to fantasy environments, hordes of orcs and, for the first time in a Total War title, flying units: "It's using the Total War engine owned by Creative Assembly," Hall said, "And we're pushing that in ways it probably wasn't designed to go, but it seems to be going there, which is great."
Total War: Warhammer, or Total Warhammer if you prefer, will be released at some point in 2016. You can read our impressions on it from this year's E3 right here.
