3 Warhammer 40,000 sickos share their strongest held beliefs—and you can vote on them

Warhammer 40,000! It's absolutely everywhere. You can't leave the house without almost stepping on an ork (which hurts even worse than stepping on Lego) these days. It's on your table, in your book shops, even on the TV, but the place you're most likely to encounter 40k is on your PC.

Since PC Gamer is, humbly, the global authority on PC games, we naturally have some thoughts on 40k. So I've gathered my fellow 40k freaks, Jody and Sean, to share our strongest held beliefs about Warhammer 40,000 and its PC game adaptations. And you can express your agreement or outrage by voting "good and pure" or "heretical" underneath each opinion.

Warhammer 40k is silly but the videogames take it way too seriously

Warhammer is deeply rooted in satire and parody. It's incredibly silly. This might be a touch more overt in the fantasy universe, but 40k certainly isn't meant to be taken seriously. We are talking about a setting where humanity is ruled by the corpse of psychic Jesus, and where space fascists fight space elves and frequently annihilate entire planets.

It is incredibly, wonderfully dumb.

But often it's presented with a straight face. It can sometimes seem like we're meant to just find all this edgelord stuff incredibly cool, rather enjoying it for the absurdity. And this has largely been promoted by Games Workshop, but I would love for the adaptations to embrace this seemingly forgotten side of 40k—to acknowledge the silliness or use the setting to say something, to dig back down to its satirical roots, even if it's just so we can have a good laugh. I mean, c'mon, the first ever inquisitor depicted in 40k was called Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.

The Space Marine games kinda suck

When my former colleague Robin Valentine gave Space Marine 2 a score of 60% in his review last year, he got a lot of shit for it. Allow me to humbly offer an alternative perspective: he was actually incredibly generous.

I will never understand the love for either Space Marine game—because they're bad. Sure, they look great, perfectly capturing both the 40k aesthetic and the hefty feel of the tank-like Space Marines. But they are a chore to play. With the campaigns being as short and linear as they are, there's just no excuse for the endless repetition. It turns out there is a limit to how many times you can execute a tyranid or an ork before it becomes rote. If you've played either game for 30 minutes, you've seen everything.

These are dreary, po-faced games that, in a sane universe, would at best be considered briefly fun diversions that never actually go anywhere. And it's wild to see Wolverine—the punching bag of the moment—getting so much flak for being only a bit more rudimentary than Space Marine 2, a game that is inexplicably loved.

We need more 40k RPGs and fewer strategy games

Please put down the lasguns. Look, I'm a strategy boy. I love Dawn of War, I love Mechanicus, and Total War: Warhammer 40k looks like it might be the best thing Creative Assembly has ever made. I don't want any of them to go away. But I have played so many 40k strategy games, both on my PC and my tabletop. Now I want something different.

I blame the Black Library. I only started reading 40k novels a few years ago, but nearly every book has made me think, "Damn, this would be a cool RPG." Not a strategy game.

Rogue Trader may have been rough at launch, but after putting around 150 hours into it since then, I can safely say that it's one of my favourite CRPGs. Thank goodness Dark Heresy is on its way. But being the greedy lad that I am, I want more! 40k may have started as a strategy game, but it's the setting that's given it this incredible staying power, and an RPG might just be the best way to experience it.

Games Workshop needs to give Wolf Guard Terminators their thunder hammers back

My Wolf Guard Terminators are my pride and joy. My big, burly vikings stride into battle with thunder hammers and storm shields, and have done for years. But no more. Thunder hammers are out. The new WGT models might as well be a completely different unit, and my OG termies are now heretical. And I know what Games Workshop is planning: "We'll just sell them Wolf Guard Assault Terminators later and they'll lap it all up." It suuuuucks. Just give us back our thunder hammers, you dorks.

We need more 30k videogames

If 40k is the depressing state of the Imperium after enlightenment went to shit, 30k is the powder keg moment that set it on that irrevocable course. Despite the book bloat, the Horus Heresy is such a fascinating period, like watching a car crash in slow motion as the Emperor's meticulously laid plans collide with the unrestrained ambitions of the Primarchs.

There's something so 'original sin' about the heresy, such a sense of grief as you witness what was lost forever for the sake of arrogance. 30k is also a period between periods. Unlike 40k, where most of the Imperium's xenos have been eradicated, the Great Crusade has humanity encountering (albeit murdering) all sorts of weird and wonderful aliens as it tries to unite the disparate human worlds cut off during old night.

It's just such a bloody good story, and frankly, perfect fodder for any number of videogame adaptations. It's the boiling point of thousands of years of human ambition coming to a head, but also hints of a distant past you rarely get to witness in 40k games. Shadowy cabals of now extinct xenos, Perpetuals, Thunder Warriors, where the Emperor came from; how the Imperium came to be and what it was like before eternal war overtook the galaxy.

The first Warhammer 40k TV show should be Gaunt's Ghosts, not Eisenhorn

There's been all sorts of buzz the past few years about Henry Cavill's 40k TV show with Amazon. I'm cautiously optimistic. 40k is a tough setting to adapt, but if done right, this could lead to a veritable renaissance of grimdark media where we see many of our favorite Black Library books adapted for TV—the audience is certainly there.

And speaking of favorite series, most people are convinced Eisenhorn should be first, but I think Gaunt's Ghosts would make for a far better TV show. I love the Eisenhorn books, particularly the follow-up Ravenor series, and like most fans, I'm still reeling from the cliffhanger at the end of Penitent as I anxiously await Dan Abnett getting time to write the third book in the Bequin trilogy.

Eisenhorn is a great little bit of sci-fi noir, as the eponymous inquisitor travels across the Imperium with his band of operators, but by comparison, Gaunt's Ghosts and its story of the Tanith regiment is far more human and relatable, and also fits the whole 'death march' structure that's become so popular in modern TV.

I'm not the first to point out Gaunt's Ghosts is effectively Sharpe set in 40k (as someone who's read all of both I can tell you it's an apt comparison), and the Sharpe books already made for an excellent TV series back in the '90s with Sean Bean. Gaunt's Ghosts has some properly fantastic twists and turns, intimate character moments, but also more action than Eisenhorn, especially in terms of big battles, which are a vital part of 40k—it's the perfect TV show package.

You don't need to read the Horus Heresy

The Horus Heresy is framed as one of those must-read book series for 40k, but a large portion of it is extremely missable, if not straight-up bad. Don't get me wrong, some of its novels are excellent, but for each of those, there are at least two samey short story collections and one adjacent book that does nothing to move the series' overarching narrative, or is actively retconned later (see: The Outcast Dead or Damnation of Pythos).

It's no wonder Games Workshop decided to leave the bloated series after 54 novels and start the Siege of Terra, in what can only be described as an attempt to get on with it. But here's the thing: you don't need to understand the entirety of 30k, the Great Crusade, and the Horus Heresy to understand 40k. The key events of the heresy are easily summarised and 40k is fundamentally more of a tone than it is some rigid narrative construct, one which you can experience in all sorts of different games and books set in the period.

I think the real wonder of this setting is found in hopping around like a tourist, playing games and following your curiosity, versus trying to frontload the history of the Imperium to your brain, which is definitely a mistake I made when I first got into 40k. If you're going to, read the first three to five novels, and then pick and choose, browse some summaries, and follow the narrative threads you're curious about, but there's really no need to read it all unless you're obsessed with all things 40k.

Space Marine (the first one) is great actually

I'm glad we've got games about the Adeptus Mechanicus and ork fighter pilots now, but it's Space Marines who move units and if we're going to have games about them I'm glad we've got decent ones. Relic's original really understood the assignment from the word go, with an over-the-top introduction that lets you be impossibly badass, leaping onto an ork ship from orbit to kill its pirate captain then crash it into the ground and walk away like a boss.

That's soon followed by a quieter scene where you meet the ordinary troopers trying to hold the planet and they treat you like some kind of angelic herald in power armor, a real evocative bit of worldbuilding. The combat, throwing away all the era's rules about cover-shooters to reward you for executions instead of hiding behind waist-high walls, is great fun and basically created everything that's good about the Doom reboot.

I'm less hot on Space Marine 2, which focuses on co-op to its detriment. Too many objectives feel like they'd be a lot of fun with friends to split the tasks ("You look after that, I'll cover you!") but are a chore with NPCs. It's still a fun romp though, and the bit where you raise the banner is properly rousing stuff. Would I play a Phoenix Wright-style game about necrons in petty claims court? Yes. But I will also play games about stompy lads with boltguns, because if I didn't think the cover of Space Crusade looked badass I would never have gotten into Warhammer 40,000 in the first place.

The tau are boring

40k got a few new armies in third edition. The necrons ended up becoming central to the setting, and the dark eldar had been hinted at previously so it was a no-brainer to add them. The tau were initially a rougher fit, and still are. Though the initial concept was a sci-fi equivalent to Warhammer Fantasy's lizardmen, they ended up being retooled to fairly blatantly try to cash in on the popularity of mecha anime. They've never really found a niche in a setting that owes more to Dune and 2000 AD than it does to Macross.

Writers like Simon Spurrier tried to give the tau some depth (in his books Xenology and the adaptation of the videogame Fire Warrior), but whether they're actually goody two-shoes or secretly mind-controlling jerks who just pretend to be goody two-shoes, they remain a bit bland compared to the more baroque and weird factions. They did give us one good thing, and that's the introduction to Fire Warrior voiced by Tom Baker (above), which remains a brilliant way to be introduced to 40k.

Owlcat's implementation of the Rogue Trader rules is unforgivably awful

I can't think of another RPG where I've felt more disconnect between how much I enjoyed the storytelling and how much I hated the systems than Owlcat's Rogue Trader. Even as a diehard turn-based tactics enjoyer I find the combat boring, and I've never been less happy to level up in an RPG than I was in Rogue Trader, knowing that it meant I'd have to fiddle with a bunch of nothingy upgrades for every single member of my party.

I hope Dark Heresy is better, but I'm not sure the people who thought the way Rogue Trader played was OK can be trusted with it. Even if they do buck the trend and release a game that isn't a mess of bugs at launch, which I have doubts about as well, I suspect the system side of Dark Heresy will be a chore I suffer through for the sake of the writing and characters.