Total War: Warhammer 40,000 dev says controller support for RTS 'really does work'

Creative Assembly is bringing Total War: Warhammer 40,000 to consoles, and battle product owner Dave Petry is confident the studio has cracked controller support for the RTS genre. Speaking to TechRadar at Gamescom, he called the idea that controllers can't work for RTS a "myth" and said the team has "landed something that really does work."

Petry pointed to Creative Assembly's co-development work on Halo Wars 2 as proof that a strong controller implementation is possible in the genre, though he acknowledged that game benefits from its relative simplicity. He framed controller support as an accessibility and player-choice issue rather than a compromise: "It's just an input method. It's how you want to play or how you would like to play, and so we've always wanted to be able to bring that experience to people who want to use a gamepad." He added that the studio is "quite proud" of where things stand on the technical side and sees it as something to keep evolving post-launch.

The RTS genre has historically been hostile to controllers — Age of Empires 2 on Xbox, for example, had to introduce automated villagers to handle resource gathering and farm construction because that level of micromanagement is genuinely awkward with twin sticks. Total War has a structural advantage here: building and tech trees live on the turn-based campaign map, so real-time controller input only needs to handle battlefield command rather than the full RTS workload. That's a meaningfully smaller ask than managing a base-building economy in real time.

Petry's comments suggest the console version is progressing well, with the team treating it as an ongoing project rather than a one-and-done port. No release date has been confirmed, but the Gamescom showing signals Creative Assembly is serious about making the console experience stand on its own.