Total War Warhammer 40,000 has opened a Pandora’s box

At The Game Awards 2025, Creative Assembly announced the inevitable Total War Warhammer 40,000. With the success of the Total War Warhammer franchise, which focused on the fantasy side of Games Workshop’s IP, a trip to the dark, dystopian future seems like a no-brainer. 

While this announcement is more than exciting for fans, it is likely even more exciting for Creative Assembly’s publisher, Sega. As well as being a generally excellent Total War game, the Warhammer series was essentially a license to print money, with endless paid DLC offerings. Given this precedent, those looking forward to Total War Warhammer 40k will likely need to come to terms with a game that will never stop releasing.

Unfinished business

When Creative Assembly released the first Total War Warhammer game in 2016, it initially launched with only four factions, five if you include the day-one DLC Chaos Warriors faction, each with multiple leaders.

 All in all, you could play as 11 different Legendary Lords from day one, but these were much simpler times. Now, at the end of 2025, you can play as over 100 different Legendary Lords across 24 different factions, with more on the horizon.

Even with this many playable characters, there are still more to be added. The confirmed End Times expansion is adding four new Lords, including the master of death, Nagash. They’re not even close to being done, with various missing characters and units from the tabletop game still yet to be implemented, and blank parts of the world yet to be unfurled.

So long as there is success, Creative Assembly is unafraid to keep the update train rolling and will likely approach Total War Warhammer 40k in the same fashion. As such, it may well be difficult for fans to justify an early purchase of the title, since we have no idea what sort of proverbial ‘final form’ Total War Warhammer 40k might take. 

Pit of potential

While the series is not quite as old as its fantasy predecessor, Warhammer 40k has just as much lore to draw on. 

At the beginning, Total War Warhammer 40k will offer four different factions: the super-soldier Space Marines, brutish hooligan Orks, ancient and tragic Aeldari, and the army of mere mortals that is the Astra Militarum. However, this is just the tip of the Warhammer 40k iceberg.

Warhammer Dawn of War only ever reached up to nine distinct playable factions, and they were still missing fan-favourites like the xenomorph-inspired Tyranids. 

Creative Assembly has already mentioned adding the forces of Chaos to the roster, and this doesn’t even begin to account for the massive variance within each 40k faction. 

As you might expect from the sprawling 40k universe, each of the Total War Warhammer 40k factions contains plenty of distinct flavours of its own. For instance, even within the Space Marines, the prim and proper Ultramarines are a far cry from the Viking-inspired Space Wolves. 

As such, Creative Assembly is keen to let you choose your army colours and iconography. However, that isn’t to say that all armies will just be cosmetically different. Mechanically different sub-factions seem like a rich seam of DLC opportunities for Creative Assembly.

The final frontier

In theory, the fantasy-based Total War Warhammer should have an end. As it is set on a single world, eventually Creative Assembly will simply run out of space. There are only so many places to put things. 

Warhammer 40k has no such restrictions. 

If Creative Assembly wanted to make the combat-ridden galaxy bigger, then the only thing stopping them is the screams of players’ computers as they struggle to keep up with the processing requirements. 

As is the case with most Warhammer 40k games, it will take place in some pocket of the vast universe, where they can play with the lore and factions just the way they like. New maps, star systems, and sub-factions can be invented and added ad infinitum. 

This compounds when you stop to consider the Tolkien-like depth on offer in the wider Warhammer 40k universe. The galaxy canonically contains trillions of worlds and a wide range of alien species not covered by the central alien factions represented by Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k tabletop game. 

Ever heard of the Hrud? What about the Slanni? If Creative Assembly plays its cards right, we may have no choice but to contend with more deep cuts than Jack the Ripper.  

The devastating cost of Total War

Much like Total War Warhammer, Total War Warhammer 40k could be an endless cash cow for Creative Assembly to keep updating. 

While on the surface this seems like excellent news to any Warhammer 40k fan eager for a strategy game finally able to represent the scale of the 40k universe, they will likely have to pay through the nose for the privilege.

Without a sale, if you want to own the Total War Warhammer series and its DLC, you’re looking at a hefty $525 (£410) just for the right to play as every faction in the game. 

Total War Warhammer 40k will likely be a live-service game by any other name, falling prey to the same trend.  

This means we will likely have all the Warhammer 40k we could ever want. However,  given Creative Assembly’s track record and the especially wide potential for expansions in Total War Warhammer 40k, we could easily end up with another piecemeal product. 

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