“Hope”, mind. Not certainty. Definitely not confirmation. But, with Games Workshop reviving the Warhammer Fantasy setting (upon which Total War: Warhammer is based) with a new tabletop game, and Grand Cathay getting a full army in Total War: Warhammer 3, fans have wondered for a while whether other overlooked nations would get similar treatment.
Asked on the Warhammer Instagram whether “you would do Ind or Nippon?”, the response from the official account was: “we may well see more regions of the Old World in future, we'll just have to wait and see.”
As the top-voted reply on the related Reddit thread says, this is Games Workshop keeping its options open rather than actually promising anything. With Warhammer: The Old World – Warhammer Fantasy's relaunch – still yet to release and clearly focusing on the titular continent that's always been the core of the game, it'll surely be years before we see anything new of more distant nations like Nippon or Ind. But until very recently, you could've said the same of Cathay, and Games Workshop didn't have to say anything in response to this query.
I see this, therefore, as Games Workshop opening a pathway to introducing these nations at some point in the future, assuming The Old World, and a likely Cathay expansion to it, does well. That’s something Warhammer Fantasy players could never have expected before.
And should it happen, it’s a safe bet we can expect these nations to then be introduced into Total War: Warhammer III via DLC. Creative Assembly has many times reiterated its desire to make a complete version of the fiction and that its next strategy game will dwarf the rest of the trilogy in scale. Consider the astonishing support Warhammer II has received over the last four years, and the commercial success of this series, and it’s safe to assume that CA will want to incorporate almost anything Games Workshop makes in this setting.
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The Warhammer world is an analogue of our own (a similarity explained in the lore by the conceit that the Old Ones, who designed many worlds, liked routine), so if you’ve been confused by all these names, Nippon and Ind are the Warhammer versions of Japan and India respectively. Previous versions of the game have neglected the people and conflicts of the east, so while Nippon, Ind, and Khuresh (Thailand and southeast Asia) have been mentioned in the lore, they’ve received very, very little in the way of official rules or models, let alone an army book.
Until now, Cathay had largely been treated the same, which is why its coming inclusion in Warhammer III is such a significant extension of the setting’s fiction, and why the possibility of more ‘new’ stuff to come – however vaporous and distant it may be – is so exciting.