Total War: Warhammer vs Attila

Total War: Warhammer has been live on Steam for a number of days and it has been doing quite well. It has been rated amongst the best strategy games and Creative Assembly has stated that the game has broken all records in terms of sales and concurrent users, as compared to the previous games released in the Total War series. Total War: Warhammer is the 10th title in the series and it is an inarguable fact that the seventh title in the series-Total War Shogun 2 (released on 2011) was the best the developers ever made.

The two titles after - Rome 2 and Attila were flat-out disappointments. Rome 2 was a complete disaster and received limitless complaints regarding its numerous bugs , it's uninspiring storyline and basically its inability to recapture the greatness of Shogun 2. A critic had stated, “Rome wasn’t built in a turn, but it certainly was destroyed in one.”

The next title in the series was Attila and it was almost evident that the game had been developed just to calm the hate Rome 2 was receiving. It was too close to Rome 2 in its design and the developers had only just fixed some of Rome's most hated issues.

The most hated issue of all definitely being the AI, and the crazy things the AI did. So they got that aspect of the game working and got them to be less crazy. Everything else felt the same and the game still had a lot of performance issues which infuriated fans. All in all, the game just lacked a sense of charm.

The best Total War game yet?

So how does Total War: Warhammer compare to Attila? No need to even guess - Warhammer destroys Attila in every aspect possible. First and foremost, the fusion with Warhammer removes the constraints of the game revolving around boring history with humans, rifles, spears, archers etc. Total War: Warhammer, in contrast, introduces war hungry orcs, undead armies, dwarves, magic and of course, dragons! How can anyone not like dragons?

Warhammer is refreshing not just to Total War fans but to the developers as well. Earlier all they were allowed to design were various real-world locales and suddenly now they’re allowed to run berserk with fantasy creations such as towering cliffs flanked by lava waterfalls, enormous dwarven doorways, and the like.

Performance wise too, Warhammer does a much better job than Atilla. Many gamers stated that Attila performed badly even at lowest options with frame rates dropping to 10 fps and sometimes lower when doing big battles.

Warhammer runs really smooth on an i5-2500k with an R9 270x and can handle high settings with some settings like texture, unit detail and a few other things on Ultra. The frame rate is around 35-40 fps with unnoticeable drops even while doing large battles with a huge number of units. Also, NVIDIA has been working with Creative Assembly and are yet to issue the optimum driver to run the game.

Total War: Warhammer is already better than Atilla in almost every (if not all) aspect. Also, Sega had previously announced that Total War: Warhammer will deliver "hundreds of hours" of gameplay and two additional expansions will follow.

Total War: Warhammer is just the first in a three-part trilogy, that will include two standalone further instalments, as well as DLC packs. So you can expect a lot from the game in the coming days.

If you were a Total War fan but have severed yourself from the series due to its lousy titles before, then Warhammer is the game to get you right back on the Total War horse and also amaze you like you haven’t been before.