The Warhammer tabletop game and strategy video games have a long, sometimes fruitful, sometimes damaging relationship, and another crossover is on the way.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, a “modernized take on the classic RTS,” was announced during the Warhammer Skulls showcase on Thursday. Frontier Developments, the team behind Elite: Dangerous, Jurassic world evolutionAnd roller coaster designer, has partnered with Age of Sigmar And Warhammer 40,000 creator Games Workshop to bring the game to Windows PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X “soon”.
Kingdoms of Ruin will take place in the kingdom of Ghur, otherwise known as the kingdom of beasts. It is a “wild and savage” plane of existence that appeared after the destruction of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle table war game in 2015. His story is written in collaboration with Gavin Thorpe, a longtime Games Workshop designer and author of a handful of books in the Black Library’s novels and graphic novels collection.
As in “classic” RTS games like Starcraft, Command and conquerAnd age of empires, Kingdoms of Ruin places a heavy emphasis on controlling key map locations, gathering resources, and attacking enemy command posts from a bird’s eye view.
Frontier has four factions slated for release, only two of which have been revealed: the superhuman Stormcast Eternals and the cunning Orruk Kruleboyz. During a recent closed-door presentation, Polygon watched part of the game’s second campaign mission, in which a battle unfolded between the two factions. The player, commanding the Eternals, had access to the heroes Sigrun, Iden, and Demechrios, as well as a varied roster of superhuman units.
By capturing “Arcane Conduits”, the player progressed through the Eternals tech tree, unlocking increasingly powerful units (including the Annihilators, Prosecutors, and Stormdrake Guard) and defeated the Kruleboyz on the map. The battle seemed intense, if a little slow. Recent real-time strategy games have included a “tactical pause” option to increase accessibility without sacrificing intensity, but it remains to be seen if Kingdoms of Ruin will follow.
Frontier has yet to announce a release date for Kingdoms of Ruin, or the dates of the planned multiplayer betas. This will mark the studio’s first foray into the real-time strategy space, which, despite its waning popularity since the mainstays’ “golden age” of the early 2000s, has enjoyed a good streak in recent years. Kingdoms of Ruin will be the first video game set in the Age of Sigmar universe since 2021 Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Grounda solid but forgettable XCOM.
