Each time Warhammer 40k launches a new edition these days, we get a fancy CGI cinematic to go with it. 11th edition’s arrived weeks ago: a very traditional Space Marines vs. Orks fight vid, for the Armageddon launch box. But GW has now treated us to a second, longer “official cinematic trailer” dramatizing the entire setting for the new, high production value age. As you’d expect, it’s frigging badass – please watch it below. But there’s something unexpected buried at the end: a conscious, deliberate call-back to the ancient past, when 40k was an anti-war, anti-fascist satire.
Over three and a half minutes, the trailer reads through the famous introduction text printed in the first couple pages of every Warhammer 40k publication, alongside a montage of spectacularly grimdark CGI scenes showing the horrific depravity of the Emperor and his empire, alongside a slideshow of the aliens it fights.
You know that opening scrawl: the one that says things like “carrion lord of the Imperium” and “There is no peace among the stars” and “the most bloody regime imaginable”. The foundational text that’s supposed to teach us that the Imperium of Man isn’t remotely heroic – but has increasingly been drowned out by the overwhelming amount of material actively programming fans to feel and think the opposite.
A lot of the early responses to this (objectively fantastic) trailer have focused on how much it depicts the Emperor of Mankind, and speculated that re-centering the story on Emps might mean that, after years of teasing, he’s finally going to wake up in some way.
I’m calling it now: it doesn’t mean that. If anything, this video reinforces how firmly committed the 40k setting is to him remaining in perpetual limbo; his eternal half-deadness mirrors and anchors the endless war and jeopardy that fuels 40k’s entire vibe. I don’t think Big E. is getting back up anytime soon.
This trailer does contain something of a bombshell message, though -about Warhammer’s overall tone and meaning, rather than its plot – and it comes right at the end. Instead of ending with “the laughter of thirsting gods” as we’re used to, the narration adds a meaningful extra sentence, delivered as a dramatic hammer-blow over a shot of a thoroughly un-romanticized dead guardsman:
“But the universe is a big place, and whatever happens, you will not be missed.”
I admit, I immediately assumed that was a new invention. I’ve loved 40k since about 2000, been actively into the hobby since 2017, read over 100 Warhammer 40k books (not counting codexes), read the “It is the 41st millennium” spiel hundreds of times in its various, changing forms, and never encountered that sentence.
But, as older fans than me already know, it’s not new at all. This passage was part of the original version of 40k’s opening scrawl, way back in the game’s very first edition, Rogue Trader, in 1987. It’s why GW signed off with “you will not be missed” in its famous, if understated “Warhammer is for everyone” anti-hate statement in 2020: the firm likes to say real world things using its in-universe lore wordings wherever possible.
That sentence doesn’t appear in the version of the scrawl printed in the new 11th Edition core rulebook, or the newcomer-focused Combat Patrol companion. Its inclusion here – in a free video that’s already been viewed by 1.4 million people and will be seen by many more in coming years – is absolutely a deliberate move.
In one sense, choosing to close the trailer with the key phrase “you will not be missed” feels like a thinly veiled promise to engaged fans that that social post’s sentiment is still baked into GW’s view of its own setting. In other words, that GW is still committed to ejecting people guilty of “prejudice, hatred, or abuse” from the hobby. That’d be good, but forgive me if I remain cynical on that point.
More straightforward, though, is the choice to open this whole edition with a long excised lore phrase that’s explicitly anti-heroic. As anyone who’s ever watched a movie knows, endings are important because they set the tone by which you’ll remember and understand all the scenes before them. GW knows this, and chose its ending carefully.
Where previous sexy CGI trailers decided to leave us with the sense that we’re roleplaying mighty superhuman heroes against despicable enemies, this one says the exact opposite, very loudly. We see a pitiful human corpse, bloody, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, locked in the pathetic terror of the moment he died.
And as we see that, the narration speaks directly to us and tells us we’re meaningless, tiny specks in an uncaring universe, we’re going to die just like him, and nobody will care or remember. The very last shots? Horror movie jump scares of the Emperor’s hideous, barely human face, not giving a shit.
As our personal surrogate in this fictional world, we’re being invited to empathize not with a noble, grim faced Space Marine making kills, but with a nameless, immediately forgotten soldier among millions, and all we know about him is he was scared when he died. As shifts in tone go, it’s a biggie. Conveying it using words from Rogue Trader is a conscious reference to a time where 40k was both a wargame and a relatively punchy, satirical piece of anti-war, anti-militarist art (as opposed to, er, just a wargame). It’s hard for me not to be encouraged by that.
It’s hardly an earthquake, mind. Like the “Warhammer is for everyone” post, this in itself is a minor, performative gesture, in my view. For misguided, self appointed ‘gatekeepers’ who stan the Imperium because it aligns with their real-world authoritarian politics, it won’t move the needle. For people turned off from 40k by the presence of those ‘gatekeepers’, and by the feeling that its grimdark militarism is being made for those people, it’s a hopeful signal, but nothing more.
And for me? Well, at minimum, it’s a brilliant cinematic tour through the dark, sci-fi setting I love most, that feels like it could herald a welcome turn towards more nuanced, intelligent storytelling and less gung-ho Astartes hero worship. As to whether GW delivers on that promise – we’ll have to wait and see over the next three years of 11th Edition madness.
What do you reckon to this trailer? Am I over-analyzing with that closing shot, and the reintroduction of Rogue Trader’s anti-war sentiment – or am I onto something? What would you love to see crop up more (or less) in 40k stories this edition? Come join the free Wargamer Discord community and take part in the D I S C O U R S E!
Source: Wargamer
