‘Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin’ preview: big thinkin’

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the opening moments of Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin, we’re introduced to the savage realm of Ghurr — a land of violence, disconnected from the usual Old World or 40K settings we’re used to seeing from Warhammer games. Yet, the game’s opening moments look largely familiar: a plucky group of humans battle endless waves of Greenskin goblins, and scenes of death play out across every inch of the battlefield. Ah, Warhammer — never change.

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As a real-time strategy game, Realms Of Ruin takes a birds-eye view of the carnage. In our preview of its campaign, Stormcast Eternals — immortal human warriors clad in golden armour — fight to secure a foothold for humanity on Ghurr, where swamp-dwelling Greenskins named Kruleboyz call home. This slice of the campaign largely serves as a tutorial, which means we don’t get to see much of the story play out  — but we do witness the power dynamic between Realms Of Ruin‘s Stormcast and Kruleboyz.

Sandro Sammarco, the game’s principal designer, tells NME that the Stormcast are god-like “special forces,” who are incredibly powerful but few in number. Meanwhile, the Kruleboyz are numerous, but far weaker until they have a chance to unleash their stronger monsters. During our hands-on with both factions in multiplayer, their strengths and weaknesses felt completely different — something Sammarco says was an intentional goal for the team.

“There was a conscious decision to have a level of asymmetry, but overall retain relatively equitable forces. That’s been a really interesting challenge — it’s kind of like the Holy Grail, really,” says the designer, who notes that the game is undergoing constant balance tweaks to make its asymmetrical factions work.

“We’ve got this concept called balancing high. You make everything cool, then you just start dragging some units to be even cooler,” he adds. “Every unit needs a time to shine, or a moment in the sun, even if they’re not the most powerful unit.”

In the three multiplayer matches we got to preview — two as Stormcast, one with the Kruleboyz — this philosophy bled through, with everything from hulking trolls to a fire-breathing drake wading in to fight. The goal is to capture and defend the victory points littering the map, until your opponent’s score bleeds down to zero — and although real-time strategy games like Starcraft and Age Of Empires have traditionally been difficult for newcomers to crack, this felt far easier to jump into.

Where you would traditionally micro-manage a host of buildings to recruit soldiers, here a simple menu — opened from anywhere on the map — lets you bring new fighters into the fray, while slower pacing means there’s more time to consider and revise your strategy. This means there’s more emphasis on tactical thinking than fast fingers, which opens the door to more creative strategies than just mashing two armies together: such as Kruleboyz mounting a sneak attack on an unguarded resource point, or Stormcast routing Greenskin by plunging a fire-breathing drake into their archers.

As someone that struggled with learning Company Of Heroes 3‘s fantastic multiplayer earlier in the year, Realms Of Ruin‘s simplicity was welcome — and instead of making the game feel like a dumbed-down RTS, it made each match’s strategic layer feel significantly richer.

Sammarco says the team didn’t want to make a game “so fast that it’s a blur except for the tiny elite players who can cope with that,” and wanted to make an RTS that was generally easier for newcomers to access.

“Our goal is to make an entertaining game for as many people as possible,” Sammarco explained. “It’s a fine-tuned balance, because we’re not saying we’ll dumb it down — it would be like having a beat ’em up game with one button for all the combos. Instead, we’re looking at what an RTS is and saying…how do we get all of that without taking anything away, and make it as accessible as possible? You can’t please every single person — there’s always a cost to taking any one path — but fundamentally our focus, first and foremost, has been on making it play as you would expect an RTS to play.”

It’s not the only thing Realms Of Ruin shakes up. In the past, a number of RTS games have used their single-player campaigns as thinly-veiled tutorials that prepare players for stepping into multiplayer. While Sammarco acknowledges the importance of tutorials in RTS games and says their campaign puts “a lot of time and effort” into teaching players the game, Frontier Developments wanted to think outside the box for its single-player segments.

“We want these to fun, we’re not afraid to violate some of the rules and go…no, this level has a puzzle element to it. We do things a little bit differently because to entertain people, you need an amount of wonder that you need to get in there. In other words, we just want to tell a cool story.”

In the world of Warhammer, that “cool story” can take many forms. 40K is often used to tell tales of unfathomably large-scale war across the cosmos, while last year’s strategy Total War: Warhammer 3 transformed the Old World into a gory battlefield for the fantasy branch’s heroes and villains. In Realms Of Ruin, prolific Warhammer author Gav Thorpe teamed up with Frontier to create a more character-driven story in the Age Of Sigmar universe.

“We wanted to tell a story that’s not a gigantic, bombastic Lord Of The Rings special,” says Sammarco. “There’s room for that, and Age Of Sigmar does that very well, but we wanted to do a little bit more of a character study. For myself, the motivations of characters — who they are, what drives them — is very compelling.”

Sammarco points to the campaign’s protagonists, a band of Stormcast Eternals — superhuman warriors whose souls are brutally reforged into another body when they die. “It’s a terrible, really horrific experience, and each time there’s a little bit of your humanity getting chipped away,” he points out. “What does that mean?”

“At the heart of it, it’s about this story about heroes and villains — what are the qualities that define that, and how do those qualities drag people toward their fates?”

Like Warhammer‘s Stormcast Eternals, Realms Of Ruin has taken the RTS genre away for a makeover. Some elements, such as its bulky micromanagement systems, have been trimmed away. Others have been fleshed out — almost every unit has its own ability to use if the situation arises, while the Kruleboyz and Stormcast each bring distinctive rosters to the field.

From a campaign mission and three multiplayer matches, Realms Of Ruin feels fantastic to play, but time will tell how deep these refinements run. Two more factions and the rest of the campaign remain to be seen, but already, Frontier’s next strategy

An open beta for Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin will run from July 7-10, and will be playable on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

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