Total War: Warhammer 40k’s new trailer all but confirms my second favorite commissar and his long-time ork nemesis as playable characters

It was a pretty stacked year for Warhammer Skulls. Instead of the usual plethora of mobile game ads, we got tonnes of good stuff: a new Skaven game called Deathmaster, the long-requested Skitarii class for Darktide, release dates and betas for Rogue Trader’s Trazyn DLC and Dark Heresy, plus a new Chaosgate sequel announcement.

That’s not even mentioning the games that were also released yesterday, like Mechanicus 2 and the Bhashiva character pack DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3. Most interesting for me, though, was a relatively brief new trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40k, perhaps one of my most anticipated games ever.

In the trailer, a gruff-voiced character, revealed to be “old man” Commissar Yarrick by the end, talks about, what is presumably, the fourth war for Armageddon and defeating his long-standing ork megaboss rival, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka. It left me with a lot of questions, but there’s one thing I’m feeling pretty certain on, both Yarrick and Ghazghkull will be playable characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k for their respective races.

Since the early reveal of the generic Space Marine commander, I’ve long-wondered as to the position of named characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k and how any of them were going to slot in. But when you think about it, having a generic Space Marine leader in a faction that’s supposed to be highly customisable (letting us design our own chapter) makes sense, whereas that doesn’t matter as much with either the Astra Militarum, the orks, or the Eldar.

With the new edition of Warhammer 40k focusing itself around the planet of Armageddon, which Yarrick and Ghazghkull have fought over for the past three wars, it makes sense that they would both feature. In case you’re not familiar with either character, Yarrick is essentially an Imperial hero, an aged commissar who’s famous for, among other things, defending Hades Hive against Ghazghkull during the second war for Armageddon.

Yarrick faced an ork warboss called Ugulhard, losing an arm, but as if killing Ugulhard wasn’t enough, he proceeded to chop off the ork’s giant power klaw and attach it to himself. It’s hard to overstate how difficult it would be for a lone unaugmented human to kill an ork warboss—few other humans have earned such respect and infamy among the orks. He even speaks orkish.

By comparison, Ghazghkull is the most influential warboss and prophet among all the orks, amassing and martialling gigantic waaaghs (effectively huge ork warhosts) with his strategic smarts and craftiness.

My real question is: in a planet-hopping, system-conquering game like Total War: Warhammer 40k, how are we going to have a significant conflict on a single planet? I guess Armaggeddon could feature in a similar way to The Lost God campaign for Total War: Warhammer 3, which acts as a standalone introduction, prologue, and tutorial for the game.

We could also see a wider conflict in which Yarrick and Ghazghkull are hunting each other across the stars, which would also make sense considering their rivalry. Either way, this is a development I wasn’t expecting, but I’m glad it seems like we’re going to get actual named characters in Total War: Warhammer 40k versus the generic faction leaders and commanders we’ve seen so far.