“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Sandro Sammarco, principal designer on Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, tells me as he explains the game to me. But it almost feels like he has. I’m no RTS veteran, but no game I&ꦆrsquo;ve played in the genre is anything like this. From the smooth fighting animations, to the triple-A standard, fully voice acted cutscenes, as well as the intense PvP action based on the tabletop game, Realms of Ruin is RTS in its finest form. Like the Stormcast protagonists who stalk through Ghur, this is the soul of a genre reforged, and a lot of it comes from the characters who bring it to life.
Many people believe the RTS genre can be quite dry, prioritising tactical skirmishes and planet-spanning campaigns over character development and heavy-hitting narrative beats. The same could be said for the Stormcast Eternals, Games Workshop’s poster boys for Age of Sigmar. The largely faceless legion of angels are clad in identical armour, and I dismissed them as boring when they were revealed. It may be Realms of Ruin’s greatest achievement, then, that it gives the Stormcast individual identities𓆉, motivations, and personalities, and it’s on their backs that the game is carried.
“They could all be like an army of walking Captain Picards,” Sammarco says. “They could be Patrick Stewart ad infinitum, but it would be boring. And that's not what they are, it's not true to the lore – the lore is that they are individual people.
“So [we tried to get] some different accents in there. The Vanguard Hunters have a kind of Sean Bean thing going on there. They're rough and ready, as far as Stormcasts go. They're these angry scouts who just do lightning hit and run tactics and they're all about their frenzied attacks, and it just feels like a really good match.”
The accents shone through in the cutscenes that play during the campaign. The graphics look good, but the voices really bring the scenes to life. I was immediately drawn into the world and the story, more so than any RTS I’ve played before. Sammarco calls Realms of Ruin “a bit of a character study” that explores what it means to be a hero or a villain. It’s more than I ever expec♋ted from a Warhammer game, and it’s an immediate draw for a genre so often seen as stuffy and boring. It seems silly to be that excited about a story and cutscenes, but these things elevate Realms of Ruin above the rest of the genre.
“One thing I really enjoyed making this story is that you get to see them as people, you get to see them as characters,” says Sammarco. “They're not just suits of armour mindlessly hacking and slashing. That goes through all of our characters in the story, not just the Stormcast. They're fully realised, they're fleshed out.”
Whether it’s the characters, their abilities, or the Orruks I was obliterating, Sammarco always comes back to the lor🦋e. This is where Games Workshop stepped into development most often, making sure that units aligned with their tabletop counterparts and ability names fitted with their descriptions in other media. The IP spans tabletop, novels, video games, and muc🏅h more, so everything has to fit together to create a homogeneous universe.
Sammarco tells me the extent of Games Workshop’s critical eye, explaining the company asks hundreds of questions about every detail of the game: “Is this correct for the lore? Is this Age of Sigmar? Is this what someone would say, how they would act, how they would fight, what they would do, what decisions they would make? This ability that you're implementing, does it fit with our abilities or does it need to be something new?’”
While a corporate hand in the game could have been restrictive, Sammarco feels it made his life a lot easier, and he enjoyed and felt liberated by Games Workshop’s support with development, explaining that it “kept u👍s on the straight and narrow for authenticity”.
Realms of Ruin takes place entirely in the Realm of Ghur, and four armies will be playable on release. The🀅 Stormcast and Orruks are tꦇhe two that have been revealed so far, and Sammarco remains tight-lipped about any secrets, but he tells me that Ghur may not be exactly as you expect. The maps I saw in my preview were pretty barren – scorched wastelands befitting the Orruks that inhabit them – but we’ll explore more biomes in the full game.
While the campaign might pull you in with its polished graphics and regional accents (there are multiple Stormcast clearly hailing from the north of Azyr), it’s the multiplayer that will kee💯p you playing. My first match was the perfect introduction to the system, an incredibly narrow comeback that ended just eight victory points in my favour, but it was the similarities to the tabletop game that made the PvP mode feel familiar and uncomplicated. This was clearly an intentional choice, and it works well.
“We wanted to make sure that [multiplayer] is as streamlined as possible without removing any of the depth that you get from armies fighting each other,” Sammarco says. “And we wanted to get to the action, so you're fighting pretty much from the off, you're capturing [objectives], you're fighting over territory. That mirrors quite nicely the tabletop game where you're normally fighting over objectives to claim the land.”
I played on mouse and keyboard, but Realms of Ruin apparently also has a revolutionary gamepad layout. The sy⛄stem deliberately avoids “slavishly recreating” a mouse and keyboard, and I’m intrigued to find out more when I next play the game. This seems like a difficult genre to play on a pad, and I’m not sure what the developer could have done to smoothly translate all the clicks a💞nd key presses onto the condensed interface of a DualSense or Elite.
Sammarco and his team are targeting full crossplay for Realms of Ruin, and you’ll be able to use any input on any device. M&K on Xbox? Sure. Controller on PC? You do you. This game aims to be welcoming and engaging in equal measure, and it already looks like it might achieve those goals. A gruff Yorkshire accent will pull you into the world of Age of Sigmar, and the exciting multiplayer will keep you fighting in Ghur for hours. Even if you’ve never played an RTS before and don’t know your wars from your hammers꧂, Realms of Ruin might be the best entry point into both worlds.