Games Workshop earned £25 million from videogames in 2021, so don't expect it to stop licensing out its properties any time soon. Not all of those games will come to PC of course, with a handful of mobile games coming up. Still, even if you're only looking at the ones on PC there are enough that keeping track of them can be a hassle.
The advantage of the high number of Warhammer games being green-lit at the moment is that they're going to span a variety of genres. We're finally getting a Warhammer CRPG, and the first RTS in a long while. We can only hope a city-builder and an immersive sim aren't far off.
It's great to have Warhammer games covering so many bases. Whether you're into real-time chaos or turn-based thinkyplans, deep character-building or multiplayer mania, there might be a Warhammer game for you. These are the ones I'm most excited about.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
- Beta from June, 2023. No release date.
Owlcat knows how to make a CRPG, having released Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Expect complicated character progression and combat, endless hours of playtime, and an expanding cast of characters so deep it should come with some kind of warning sign for divers.
Rogue Trader will cast us as the captain of a gigantic voidship on the edge of the Imperium, heir to a dynastic tradition of settlers and traders. We'll be able to explore uncharted worlds, find relics of lost civilizations, and bring new worlds into the Emperor's light—or more likely fall into heresy.
It's drawing inspiration from a tabletop RPG published in 2009, though hopefully not too much inspiration. Pen-and-paper Rogue Trader was kind of a mess—the spaceship rules in particular. Fortunately, while the Pathfinder videogames used roughly the same rules as the tabletop game they were based on, Owlcat's community manager has said Rogue Trader "won't be a direct transfer from tabletop to a videogame". It will have purely turn-based combat though, which is probably a good thing given how chaotic Pathfinder's real-time-with-pause option made every fight.
One concern remains, and that's what kind of state Rogue Trader will launch in. Owlcat's previous games arrived with plenty of bugs and balance issues, and though patches rectified the biggest, it would be nice if the studio's next game was easier to recommend on arrival.
Rick Lane got to play the alpha, and said Rogue Trader is shaping up to be a stellar CRPG. He was particularly impressed by how it emphasized the setting's weirdness: "During one warp-jump, my Rogue Trader's nightmares literally came to life, forcing him to fight them off in his bedroom as his party rushed in to help. In another instance, I was asked to have a quiet chat with one of my party members because she was being lethally odd, and her attempts to socialise with the voidship's crew were driving them to suicide."
Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks
- No release date.
A car combat game with orks is one of those obvious ideas we've been waiting for someone to fully realize for years. A game called Gorkamorka by Ripcord was in the works at one point, but never got past the prototype stage with just a CG trailer to show for it.
Speed Freeks is a take on Twisted Metal where two teams of ork hoons in buggies and tanks blast each other while racing to take and hold checkpoints, then bolt to the finish line. Though the alpha version tested on Steam had this one mode and was described as "a bit scrappy, ramshackle and bolted together – just like the Orks that drive in it" by its developers, I found it held together surprisingly well and looked pretty schmick too.
Speed Freeks fills about half of each team with bots who are easy to wreck as a way of making sure you get into matches, which I prefer over either having to wait for ages, or playing against the kind of excessively sweaty no-lifers who dominate almost every multiplayer game in time.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
- No release date.
We'd given up on ever seeing a follow-up to Relic's 2011 third-person action game, and then a sequel was announced out of the blue in December of 2021. Get it, "out of the blue" because it's about Ultramarines… I'll get my coat.
The licence was picked up by Saber Interactive, developer of World War Z: Aftermath and Evil Dead: The Game. The studio has a lot to live up to. The original Space Marine was a bombastic hack-and-shooter with a mechanic that gave health back for performing melee takedowns which now seems ahead of its time. It also had an excellent jump pack.
Space Marine 2 will pick up the adventures of Ultramarine Captain Titus after he's ascended to become one of the Primaris. A relatively recent addition to Warhammer 40,000, this new generation of space marines are even beefier than the vanilla variety, who have been retroactively dubbed the Firstborn. Titus will need all that extra strength and speed, since he'll apparently be facing "thousands of tyranids", as seen swarming impressively in the latest trailer. Even after taking on a clan of orks and the forces of Chaos in the first game, the massive amount of enemies the Saber Swarm Engine can throw around should prove a challenge.
Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin
- No release date.
The RTS genre has been good for Warhammer games, with the first two entries in the Dawn of War series still held up as classics. Realms of Ruin promises to turn Age of Sigmar into an RTS with a full singleplayer campaign as well as pacey multiplayer. Developer Frontier has said it'll have four factions, with the first two revealed as the "what if Chaos Warriors were good guys" Stormcast Eternals and the swamp-dwelling Orruk Kruleboyz.
Robin Valentine managed to score an exclusive first look at Realms of Ruin, saying that, "Frontier is aiming for a fast and super accessible take on the genre. For example, though you can build pivotal defensive structures on certain captured points, and upgrade your HQ, there's otherwise no base-building in the game, and multiplayer matches are designed to take no longer than 30 minutes."
Here are all the other upcoming Warhammer games on PC
- Warpforge (2023). Free-to-play collectible card game pitting 40K's various factions against each other.
- Untitled Age of Sigmar game (???). Not much is known, except it'll be published by Nexon and feature PvE multiplayer in a "virtual world".
