I remember once when I was a child, my uncle was visiting and completely unprompted (and kindly) he gave me a copy of one of the Total War games, I think the Rome one, you’ll have to forgive my memory. I’d literally never played a strategy game in my life, but I gave it a go anyway, and quickly found myself thinking, “hey, where are the collectibles? Why’s there no triple jump?” The onboarding process did not help me much, and after a failure of a battle where I lost everything, I soon gave up after. So it’s because of not particularly strategic people like me that makes me understand why developer Creative Assembly want Total War: Warhammer 40,000 “approachable and accessible”.

“There’s no denying [Warhammer 40,000] has become increasingly popular,” battle product owner Dave Petry noted in an interview with our pals over at The Eurogamer. “That’s been incredible to see … and this game coming out within this period of popularity, there’s a huge chance we’ll be seeing a huge wave of new players coming to Total War. We want to make [Total War: Warhammer 40,000] as approachable and accessible as possible.”

But for Petry and the rest of the team, they still want it to be a Total War game, without changing any of the fundamentals. “We want to invite people into this big tent with this grimdark setting,” he said. “So, if there are going to be a lot of new players coming, let’s show them why Total War is awesome.” To help with this, the game has two tutorial campaigns to ease people into it, which features UI gating, i.e. a process through which individual systems are slowly introduced over the course of the campaigns rather than all at once.

On the opposite end, design lead Joy Dey also says that these tutorials are also meant to serve as an introduction to the world of Warhammer 40,000 as a whole. There’ll surely be some strategy fans coming to this who’ve never even heard of a Space Marine, after all. And it’s also just a starting point, as while there are no plans for sequels, Creative Assembly do plan to just keep updating this one as much as they can.