It’s been a while since we got the Total War: Warhammer 40,000 announcement, and though Creative Assembly has been keeping us up to date with what’s happening, we didn’t really get much information on the game’s, well, actual gameplay. But that changed today because, for some reason, Creative Assembly decided to share its Chinese-audience gameplay reveal with everyone via its YouTube channel. The gameplay shows a battle between the Imperial Guard and the Orks, regaled to us by a Chinese narrator, for the glory of the Chairma—I mean, the God Emperor, of course. And the gameplay is absolute cinema. While the battle is more or less scripted by Creative Assembly for the purposes of the video, we got to see just how epic and massive the game is going to be. Before the battle even starts, we are given a look at how ships can orbit planets and engage with them and how important it is to use your capital ship in particular to attack them. Having your capital ship in orbit while engaging in a siege, which is basically one single point on the planet that you need to capture before moving onto capturing other outposts to claim the whole world, grants you special abilities on the ground, such as using orbital lasers to take down especially powerful enemies. And interactions between the player, their armies, and the worlds themselves seem to be a major point for the whole gameplay loop. Big characters will trample the ground and destroy terrain and possibly create new opportunities of attack. Baiting enemies into swamps can slow them down dramatically and open them up to explosive barrages that can chunk them significantly. Imperial Guardsmen will finally find cover in a building somewhere only to have their own armored allies come and bury them under the rubble. And, depending on the ship in the air, ungodly things can happen to both the enemy and your own troops, from tactical nukes to, as mentioned, orbital lasers. The armies fielded by both sides are as big as you’d expect them to be in Warhammer 40,000, while the theater of battle is only a small portion of a much larger front, and you can see the towering, spiraling hive city that is to be your ultimate goal casting a large shadow over the field. And while the gameplay seems to be awesome, there are evident frame drops in the showcase itself, leading many to fear that they won’t be able to handle the game once it comes out. That’s at least half a year to a year away, though, so I guess more optimization is in order by the time it comes out. Still, I’d expect it to be much more demanding to run than any of the previous Warhammer titles because the scale presented here is, to put it mildly, unprecedented for the series. 0The post Total War: Warhammer 40,000’s new gameplay trailer is absolute cinema appeared first on Destructoid.