- Creative Assembly says Total War: Warhammer 40,000‘s new Warcore engine improves almost every aspect of the game
- From rendering and animation to “the sheer volume of projectiles” that can be handled on screen at once
- The studio says the scale has been upgraded, creating “a bigger play area for all the planets, all the solar systems, the whole galaxy”
Creative Assembly has shared just how much its new Warcore engine has enabled it to improve almost every aspect of Total War: Warhammer 40,000.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Gamescom 2026, lead designer Joy Dey and battle product owner Dave Petry discussed the upcoming strategy game and offered insight into how the updated Warcore engine delivers a bigger and better scale than previous Total War games.
“One thing the engine has allowed us to do is take the Total War into space, because we now need a bigger play area for all the planets, all the solar systems, the whole galaxy, really,” Dey said. “And I think that’s the biggest, biggest thing for the campaign.”
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Petry added that the engine has also let the studio easily manipulate assets in the game’s 3D space and improve other features like rendering and animations, explaining that it was a “required engineering” for the team’s vision.
“The rendering of things, being able to improve how we render things and the quality that we are rendering things at, the animation system, our ability to sort of build modular animations in a more modern way, and the retooling of all of that, so that we can build faster and better,” Petry said.
“Just frankly, almost everything, and just in how we build and how we tool to be able to make our games a higher quality and at a better rate, right?”
The battle system also sounds amazing, with Petry mentioning the game’s Havoc system and saying the engine manages to deal with physical explosions “much better” when it comes to destroying the environment, as well as the number of projectiles on screen.
“So you know, being able to bring in these these tools to be able to solve these new problems that get brought up by these really awesome games is something that we felt we absolutely had to do,” he continued, “and it extends to model changes, like being able to just handle the sheer volume of projectiles that we are now spitting out of seemingly absolutely every orifice when it comes to this game.
Petry added, “It was just absolutely necessary to build that new foundation to work from.”
Total War: Warhammer 40,000 launches sometime in 2027 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC.
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