We’ll be waiting another month to convene our warbands and set out to conquer the world of Warhammer. Total War’s foray into Games Workshop’s fantasy lands isn’t coming out April 28th as currently planned, instead taking a longer route to our hard drives, getting here on May 24th. The same press release has revealed the system requirements for minimum, recommended and ‘super’ settings (60fps with everything on Ultra, to you and me).
Time for one of the best strategy games ever made then.
The reasoning for the delay, as you might expect, is to make the game better. Mike Simpson, creative director for the whole of Total War, tells us that “This could be the best Total War game we’ve ever made. We don’t want to rush it.” The press is also mentioned, Simpson saying that due to size, Creative Assembly “also want to make absolutely sure reviewers have enough time to play it thoroughly before launch.” He also issues his thanks to those who have pre-ordered and promises they’re “pulling out all the stops.”
Meanwhile, on the system specs front, here’s what you’ll need for minimum settings, which CA define as “Around 15-25 FPS on campaign map and in a 1v1, 20 units vs 20 units battle, default graphics preset set to ‘Low'”:
- Operating System: Windows 7 64Bit
- Processor: Intel Core 2
- RAM: 3GB
- Hard Drive: 35 GB
- Video Card: (DirectX 11) AMD Radeon HD 5770 1024MB | NVIDIA GTS 450 1024MB | Intel HD4000
Fairly friendly, though those settings don’t sound very fun to play with. Moving up to Recommended, which should allow you to run at “around 45-55 FPS on campaign map and in a 1v1, 20 units vs 20 units battle, defaultgraphics preset set to ‘High'”:
- Operating System: Windows 7/8.1/10 64Bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4570 3.20GHz
- RAM: 8 GB
- Hard Drive: 35 GB
- Video Card: (DirectX 11) AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2048MB
Meanwhile, the Super settings are for “60+ FPS on campaign map and in a 1v1, 20 units vs 20 units battle, default graphics preset set to ‘Ultra'”:
- Operating System: Windows 7/8.1/10 64Bit
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K 4.0 GHz
- RAM: 8
- Hard Drive: 35 GB
- Video Card: (DirectX 11) AMD Fury X or Nvidia GTX 980 @1080P
Nothing too surprising in any of these, though they do scale a bit further down than I was expecting, though I suppose it depends on what your definition of playable is. 15 FPS is not in mine. CA also point out that your exact experience may vary on specifics, and that these tests were done on clean installs of Windows with no major background processes. WIth an extra month of dev time they’ll also get a lot of optimisation time in, so these could change, though likely only for the better. More information should be available on the official Wiki.
Here’s the latest footage from the game, shown off at the PCG Weekend a scant few days ago, starting at around 34:10 into this archive: