Are we in the golden age of Warhammer video games?

Is this the grim dark future fans have been waiting for?

My guest for this issue of Multiplier is the award-nominated and Melbourne-based writer Jam Walker. You can find their work on Gameshub and you can follow them on Twitter and Bluesky.

Fergus: For almost as long as people have been playing with Warhammer miniatures, crafty coders have been trying to translate that experience from the world of tabletop gaming to its digital equivalent.

For reference, Games Workshop’s Warhammer empire is almost forty years old at this point. While I couldn’t afford to get into “the world’s most popular tabletop wargame” when I was younger, its many video game adaptations proved a more than adequate alternative in the meantime. I doubt I’m the only one who had this experience. I have many fond memories of playing Relic’s Dawn of War games with friends back in the day, but it’s easy to forget that there were just as many good Warhammer video games as bad ones.

Adaptation is always something of a dice roll. Recent years have brought ambitious adaptations like Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer and Owlcat Games’ Rogue Trader to the fore alongside weirder fare like Auroch Digital’s Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. Not every Warhammer adaptation has been a winner though, with attempts to capture the appeal of Age of Sigmar in particular proving easier said than done.

Still, it’s worth asking some questions about the golden era of Warhammer video games we appear to be in. What separates good from bad? What role do video games play in the broader world of tabletop wargaming? To what degree do they complement their source material versus act as a substitute for it?

Jam: Warhammer right now is undeniably bigger than it's ever been. Most Warhammer 40,000 model sets sell out online the instant they go on sale, and Games Workshop has been struggling to meet demand so badly that they're now building a fourth factory.

I think the success of the video games has played a gigantic part in all of this, probably even more so than GW's own efforts to market and expand the audience has. The Warhammer Fantasy Battles games and miniatures line was dead and buried but the Total War trilogy was so successful that this year GW brought it back. I think the rising tide has lifted all boats also, as more miniatures lines and games than ever seem to be operating successfully right now.

There have been a lot of fantastic Warhammer-universe video games, but I don't think we've had a single one that's been great at capturing the real magic of the hobby. Space Marine 2, Realms of Ruin, Dawn of War... All of these feature decent enough customization suites to make your forces your own. What Warhammer video games are crying out for though is something at the level of WWE 2K's creation tools as a core foundation underpinning them. It's pretty well established that a LOT more people engage with the modeling and painting side of the hobby than they do the actual tabletop gaming, and I sorely wish that were better represented.

I think a lot of the frustration I have with even the 'good' Warhammer video games comes from this, as well being a result of the awkward tension GW holds their IP in.

With Warhammer 40,000, they built a universe that's hideously ugly and relentlessly grim, where human beings exist merely as grist for a religio-fascists totalitarian war machine ruled by a council of oligarchs. At the same time they need Space Marines to be able to appeal to kids. In designing the Stormcast specifically to be fantasy Space Marines, they kind of damned Age of Sigmar to suffer the same 'we'd prefer if you don't think too closely about how much fun you're having roleplaying as a murder-happy xenophobe' problem.

I don't envy any video game studio who has to build something within those deeply weird confines.

Fergus: You have to imagine that, at some point in the past, some executive at Games Workshop expressed real concern that a video game version of Warhammer that offers a comparable level of customisation to the hobby could represent a threat to their core business.

That fear hasn’t panned out but even today I think this specific anxiety is reflected in the kinds of Warhammer projects that get greenlit. As someone who thinks that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a genuine competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s ambitions to move into the VTT (virtual tabletop) simulation space, I don’t expect to see a Warhammer equivalent anytime soon. Most Warhammer video games tend to zoom in on one specific aspect of the Games Workshop universe at the exclusion of the rest and then leverage that in a way that complements the overall experience.

The exceptions are usually reserved for more niche titles like Bloodbowl or Battlefleet Gothic. Sometimes, this tunnel vision can also draw the underlying tension between the gameplay and the source material to the surface. What’s happening just out of frame? Why are we fighting these aliens? Don’t worry about it. If the like of Starbreeze’s Syndicate first-person shooter is any indication, unvarnished nihilism is rarely conducive to commercial success.

Still, decades of AAA blockbusters with somewhat-sympathetic antiheroes like God of Wars’ Kratos, Call of Duty’s Captain Price or Hitman’s Agent 47 have probably primed audiences to compartmentalize and avoid thinking too critically about the wider context.

For what it’s worth, I think Rogue Trader does a decent-ish job of unpacking some of the nightmarish implications that come with someone in a position of privilege in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Most games don’t have the space to do that work that the CRPG subgenre offers though. For almost every other studio that gets the chance to work with the Warhammer universe, there’s usually minimal upside in pulling on that thread. “Just stay within the magic circle and everything will be fine.”

Being attached to the Warhammer license isn’t necessarily going to guarantee a sales hit, but it does significantly increase the profile of any project it gets bestowed upon. The entire point of getting entangled with Games Workshop at all is to reach that larger potential audience of players and as soon as you start being critical in a way that fans of the fiction aren’t accustomed to you’re basically drafting yourself into a flame war.

Jam: Oh yeah, as generous as Games Workshop are with licensing out their properties, they're also notoriously picky and precise about how they get depicted.

Slight tangent, but if the Amazon Warhammer 40,000 series with Henry Cavill does even end up getting made, I think it's inevitable that it ends up another production disaster exactly like Netflix's The Witcher. Each of the Warhammer universes are so broad but also so tonally specific that making games which laser-in on a single niche of them just tends to work better I feel.

I think Rogue Trader did great at exploring the upper-echelons of Imperial society, and conversely I think Darktide goes underappreciated for how well it depicts the nightmare that is life in the Imperium for the average person. Its roguelike design is just such a natural fit for a portrayal of endless and completely futile warfare. Speed Freeks wholeheartedly embraces the violent silliness of 40,000's Orks, and the car-combat genre is a bizarrely perfect match for that. Mechanicus's number-crunching XCOM-like design is the perfect fit for a game focusing on the tech-priests of Mars.

I think I'm just ready for the next Space Marine game to copy Gears of War: Tactics instead of Gears itself.

Fergus: If any Warhammer faction is crying out for a good tactics game though, it’s gotta be the Tau. That said, perhaps the note-behind-the-note here is that what I'm really asking for here is a good digital counterpart to or adaptation of Kill Team.

Given the strong response that the new edition of Games Workshop’s smaller sci-fi skirmish game has gotten over the past few months, I can’t help but wonder if it’s only a matter of time. It’s as easy to imagine a tactical shooter version of the concept akin to Counter-Strike or Valorant as it is a more tactical experience on-par with something like Gloomhaven or Frozen Synapse.

But for as many cool pairings of gaming genre and grist from the world of Warhammer are out there, my heart still yearns for Games Workshop to take a leaf out of Hasbro’s playbook and make a Warhammer equivalent to the likes of Magic: The Gathering Arena.