Two settings, one screen

Auroch keeps describing arenas more clearly than they name them. The store text gives you two pictures and then stops. One is the open, ashen plains of Aqshy. The other is the tight corridors of an abandoned Space Hulk. Same game, opposite problems.

On Aqshy you have room to keep the circle, until a faction trait removes the room you thought you had. A red Ork screen fills that open ground with extra bodies. A synapse creature in the middle of a gaunt swarm does the same job with fewer sprites and worse news. In a Space Hulk corridor you do not get the circle. A Ratling Gunner's hazard lane, or a Bloodcrusher charge down a straight hall, is the whole fight. The run notes are written for that difference. Open ground forgives a late Melta-bomb. A corridor does not.

Grenades on one side, spells on the other

Pickups follow the universe you are standing in. Auroch's August post says most of them are unique even when two look alike, and they spawn by faction-themed lights.

40k is ordnance. Frag Grenade, Melta-bomb with a delay you are meant to kite into, Blast Template as a huge clear that some enemies simply resist, Hellfire Ammo as a temporary bump to every ranged hit plus Poisoned. That ammo is the Sternguard toy. It is also the sentence where Malum Caedo gets named, which tells you whose fantasy that pickup is serving.

Age of Sigmar is endless spells, and they are ruder to the person holding them. The Purple Sun of Shyish cooks anything in the light, you included, then wanders off. Ravenak's Gnashing Jaws bite whatever is near you and set it Burning, allies-of-convenience not required because you do not have allies. Suffocating Gravetide stuns a pack and then makes them flee, which in a corridor is sometimes the only way the hall empties.

The boss they bothered to name

The store text says you face the worst of both settings, and then it names one: the Great Unclean One. Extremis bosses are described as a step above a normal survivors elite. No health bar, no phase list. Troggoths show up in the 6 October Gloomspite reveal as the towering things behind the grots. That reads as an enemy class standing in a legion, not as a second named stage boss. Squigs come with them. The art team already spent a paragraph on the Bomb Squig's animation, which is a hint that at least one of those is a moving problem, not scenery.

The 27 August art blog promised a follow-up on warzones and then talked, in that same piece, about what they were willing to cut when a miniature became a sprite. Hair, armour marks, the one thing you recognise at eight pixels. Ohm liked the Skaven, and the Rat Ogor in particular, because the stomp still reads when the infantry around it is a smear. Dom, who collects Tyranids, was pleased the bugs and their stages made it in, and pleased about Yarrick, Gotrek, and Knight-Commander Pask as playable names. Those three are full-game champions in that blog, not a map list.

So the practical split, until a warzone post actually arrives, is this. Open ash is Aqshy, and you lose it when the screen goes red or a synapse walks in. Corridors are the hulk, and you lose them when a gunner paints the floor or a crusher takes the straight line. The Great Unclean One is the boss they were willing to print. Everything else with a pretty wiki name can wait until Auroch prints it too.

Keep browsing

All guides10

Field notes

How a run actually goes

Field notes

Demo now, November later

Launch

Release date and price

Demo

Demo champions and rules

Start

Beginner survival loop

Roster

Champions and start kits

Arsenal

Weapons and evolutions

Hordes

Faction traits and enemy skills

Items

Pick-ups by universe

Maps

Stages, bosses and Extremis