Creative Assembly has released a brand new trailer showcase for Total War: Warhammer 40k, and it is – not to put too fine a point on it – absolutely sick. With massive tanks, vast infantry formations, apocalyptic explosions, and destructible terrain, the upcoming game promises to melt CPUs and burn out RAM like it’s a burst of scrap-code unleashed by the Dark Mechanicum. If you’re raring to pit your rig against the beast you will have a chance later this year, as sign ups are now open for the game’s closed beta.
The latest Total War: Warhammer 40k trailer, part of PC Gamer’s PC Gaming Show 2026, has some glorious additional detail – in particular, the battles on display here have a lot more units active at once than we saw in the game’s reveal trailer. That first trailer drew comparisons to Dawn of War IV, but seeing a larger battle play out with hundreds of infantry and dozens of tanks, it’s obvious that the classic Total War scale is present and correct.
The Total War: Warhammer 40k release date still hasn’t been announced. If you want to sign up to the Beta, you can do so at the game’s website.
The trailer gives new information about the game’s grand strategy map, and interstellar conflict seems to make this more granular than in traditional Total War. Rather than fighting over a single world map divided into provinces and regions, here you’ll move your void fleets between planetary systems, picking which planets to deploy to, and then fighting for individual zones of those planets.
The story will apparently give you thematically appropriate rewards, depending on which Warhammer 40k faction you’re playing as. The trailer gives the example of Astra Militarum forces getting better access to tanks if they control a manufacturing facility, while Orks will be able to build their colossal Stompa walkers far faster if they target a world rich in scrap rather than an agri world.
The planet-creation system for the game can separate out the planetary biome from the type of planet – so a mining world or industrial hive world could also be choked with ice or blanketed with ash deserts. While those examples are easy to understand, I wonder how agri worlds will work: high density grain farms shouldn’t really pop up on an ice world or a desert.
The video goes into more detail about how battles on uber-industrialized hive worlds will work. These are planets dominated by mountain-like hive cities, with surfaces so polluted it’s utterly inimical to life. While some battles on hive worlds will be dense urban conflicts similar to the sieges from TWW3 – which should thoroughly test the new terrain destruction system, not to mention your CPU – others will take place in more open areas.
As was hinted at during the Warhammer Skulls presentation last month, the campaign’s story is building towards a fight on Armageddon, with arch-adversaries Ghazghkull Thraka and Comissar Yarrick featuring. But before we get there, we’ll be on the trail of the Inquisitorial vessel Sagacity and its mysterious high value cargo.
The Sagacity is lost somewhere in the Tallow Stars. This region is new to 40k lore; perhaps it’s a sub-sector dominated by Tallow Worlds, planets whose entire industry is based around rendering down animal fats to make the drippy candles that show up everywhere in 40k artwork.
The trailer has left me equally excited and concerned that my gaming PC – long neglected thanks to crypto mining and then AI datacenters pushing up the price of components – is going to splutter and die during the first big fight. How optimistic that your rig can handle the game? Come and join us in the Wargamer Discord community and, if you’ve got a goated machine, make us all jealous.
Source: Wargamer
