The Warhammer Skulls 2026 showcase delivered a major surprise in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Deathwatch. This title serves as the follow-up to the highly praised strategy adventure Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. I found the previous game to be a solid depiction of two factions I favour within the setting, specifically the Grey Knights and the Death Guard.
Deathwatch expands on this foundation by going bigger and harder in nearly every aspect. The title itself indicates the focus is on the Deathwatch, a Space Marines mashup faction within Warhammer 40,000 that combines units from various chapters into a single Xenos-killing force. There are now six enemy factions to confront, which includes the Orks and the T’au. A larger threat requires larger firepower to defeat them. The game features completely new units, such as the iconic Leman Russ tank alongside Astra Militarum and Inquisition units, allowing players to push back against the Xenos.
Equipped with a lore book full of questions, I spoke with lead game designer Peter Schnabl and producer Iain Stenhouse of Complex Games to learn as much as possible about how Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Deathwatch will actually play. While I failed to uncover evidence of heresy, I did discover much to whet the appetite.
Interviewer: Why go with Deathwatch for this game? Why switch things up?
Schnabl:
One thing that the Deathwatch really lets us do, it’s one of the only places in the Warhammer 40,000 universe where you can have different chapters of Space Marines that all get brought together. And it lets us include that variety of units both on a tactical level, but also representing their different perspectives, their different approaches to combat. And it lets us reflect all of that within the units of the game, which we thought was a really special opportunity that we wanted to take advantage of.
Interviewer: In terms of the story, does this continue on from the first game in any way or is it a completely separate story that is happening somewhere else in another time?
Schnabl:
I can’t go into too many details about the story, but I’ll say it’s not a direct continuation taking up where the previous game left off. But there is some connection between the two.
Interviewer: I’ve seen there are many new units that weren’t in the first game. Can you talk a little bit about those and what we can expect to see that’s significantly different this time around?
Stenhouse:
Sure. We actually don’t have any of the same units that we had in the first game. They’re new Deathwatch with new chapters. Off the top of my head I don’t know the number of playable units, but there are three factions to play from: the Deathwatch, the Astra Militarum, and Inquisition units.
Schnabl:
It’s more than 20 playable classes.
Stenhouse:
And it’s a whole large retinue of units that you can customize your squad with and go into battle.
Interviewer: That’s a huge step up, obviously, from the first game. Can you talk about what those classes are?
Stenhouse:
We can take a long time to go through the classes, but there’s a large variety. We have troops with their Lasguns. We have many Deathwatch with their either melee focus or range focus. And we have tanks. The Leman Russ is a fun one to play around with. There’s just a lot of variety there for the player to play around with and defeat the Xenos.
Interviewer: In the first game there were moments when you could control the Inquisition character, but it sounds like it’s much more involved this time around. How will it work with those three factions? Can you mingle them at any point?
Schnabl:
You can absolutely mingle them! We have a lot of variety within the Deathwatch, but we wanted to take it even a step farther. And the linchpin that lets us do that is that in this game you play as an Inquisitor, a kind of newly minted Inquisitor. And that Inquisitor is allied with the Deathwatch, but also can bring other units into the mix. And that explains why they all can be working together. And you can mix essentially as you like with a new squad deployment system that gives a lot more flexibility than we had in Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. We think it’ll be really exciting. You have a lot of control to customize your play experience with it.
Interviewer: Are you expanding the scope of the gameplay in terms of the number of units you have in your squad? Are you keeping it the same as before? It was quite tight in the first game, but now you’ve got so many different options, I wonder if that’s something you looked at.
Schnabl:
I wouldn’t exactly say it’s expanded, but it’s more flexible. So one of the challenges, but an interesting one with this unit variety, is they’re very much not all equal to each other. We didn’t want to try to hammer everybody to be equivalent because that didn’t really feel true to the lore. So you have a choice between taking a smaller number of more powerful units or a larger number of weaker units. And it can also vary mission by mission, like how much scope you have. So there will be cases where if you want to, you will be able to field eight units at a time. But conversely, there are missions where you’ll probably be taking far fewer.
Interviewer: So how have the gameplay mechanics been switched up to accommodate all of this in a way that wasn’t possible before? If you’re bringing a Leman Russ to the battlefield, you need some space to do so, I imagine?
Schnabl:
We need to make sure that all of our maps are a good experience with the Leman Russ, but the system basically just accommodates whatever mix you bring into it, and it works essentially the same way. You fight the same mission, you could just take radically different tactical approaches to it.
Interviewer: So the tank will fit!
Stenhouse:
The Leman Russ will make sure it fits!
Interviewer: Let’s talk about the enemy factions, the Xenos. There are a lot of enemy factions this time around.
Schnabl:
Six or seven, depending how you count them.
Interviewer: That again is a big change from the first game. What was the thinking there behind adding so many different enemy factions, where in the first game you had a focus on the Death Guard.
Schnabl:
It really comes down to making the game feel bigger and having a variety of tactical experiences. The different factions play very differently from each other. One of our goals is to keep the game fresh over an entire campaign run and we think this is a great way to do it.
Interviewer: Are they all in the mix as you’re playing?
Stenhouse:
Throughout the campaign, you’ll be coming across all of the factions and you’ll be able to experience all of their interesting details.
Interviewer: Are you expanding with multiplayer in any way?
Schnabl:
It’s a single-player experience. We wanted to keep our focus on that and make it as good an experience as we could.
Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the lessons you might have learned from the experience of the first game, which was pretty well received?
Schnabl:
Some of the core pillars that we wanted to maintain from Daemonhunters are the low luck combat. So like in Daemonhunters, in this game you don’t really miss your shots. When you take a shot, you’ll know how much damage you’re going to do. If anything, the role of luck is even less, probably, than it was in Daemonhunters.
Furthermore, we also wanted to retain the somewhat puzzly experience where enemies set up on their turn and then you need to unravel the knot that they’ve placed for you, which we felt was a really satisfying part of the tactical gameplay of Daemonhunters, and it was important to us to retain. In this game, it shows up in different ways across different enemy factions because they play differently from each other. So that was a new challenge, but we wanted to keep that core part of the experience.
The environment destruction was another thing that we felt was important to retain. It lends a feeling of chaos on the battlefield that feels very Warhammer 40,000. When you have walls getting smashed down and part of the map on fire, it’s very satisfying. We think we’ve maintained the legacy of Daemonhunters, and hopefully improved on it even.
Interviewer: Can you talk a bit about the new Skirmish mode?
Schnabl:
That’s a new play mode that wasn’t part of Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. Skirmish mode provides a bite-sized experience, if you want to play a single combat. It’s something that you can use to dip your toe in, or if you want to try out a new strategy without risking your units in the main campaign to see how it goes, it’s kind of an option for that. We think it’ll be a fun addition that lets players mess around.
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Deathwatch is scheduled for release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
