Where this mechanic stands
The publisher’s description of the game, read on its official store listing on 4 September 2026, offers a choice: step into battle with renowned sub-factions and warlords from the Warhammer 40,000 universe, or forge your own custom army. The word renowned promises named ones. As of today not a single sub-faction and not a single warlord has been named by the publisher. The press has named some: the two characters reported from a presentation, Commissar Yarrick and Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka; the Ultramarines, played on a preview build at Gamescom; and, on 2 September 2026, PC Gamer writes that the studio has been teasing other Space Marine chapters and xenos threats, naming the Space Wolves and Genestealer cults. That last sentence is worth reading twice: the naming is the journalist’s, describing what he takes the studio to have hinted at, and a hint reported second-hand is the weakest evidence this site accepts. This is the largest gap between what has been promised and what has been specified anywhere in the game.
What the tabletop establishes
The word sub-faction has a precise meaning in this series and an even more precise one in this setting, and they are not the same. In the Warhammer trilogy, a sub-faction is a Legendary Lord: a named character with a start position, a unique campaign mechanic, a modified roster and, usually, a reason to play the whole game differently. It is the unit of content the series sells. In Warhammer 40,000, a sub-faction is a Chapter, a Regiment, a Clan or a Craftworld — Ultramarines, Blood Angels, Cadians, Goffs, Ulthwé — and the setting contains hundreds, each with an established colour scheme, doctrine and following that has existed for decades.
The publisher’s description of the game offers a choice: step into battle with renowned sub-factions and warlords from the Warhammer 40,000 universe, or forge your own custom army. The word renowned promises named ones. Which ones has never been published. On the tabletop a sub-faction is a Chapter, a Regiment, a Clan or a Craftworld, each with its own rules and its own following, and the setting contains hundreds of them.
Tabletop identity, as established by Games Workshop. It says nothing about the video game.What has actually been shown
The sentence puts the named sub-factions and the custom army on either side of an or, which is worth noticing: it presents them as alternatives rather than as layers. That could mean a player picks a real Chapter or invents one, and both routes lead to the same campaign. It could also mean the named ones carry things an invented one cannot have. Nothing published distinguishes them. What can be said with certainty is that the promise is in the publisher’s own words, and that eight months after the announcement it remains entirely unspecified.
What to watch next
The open question is which named ones ship, and for a large part of the audience it is the only question that matters. A person with an army in a cupboard wants to know whether their army is in the game — not whether Space Marines are, but whether their Chapter is. The setting makes that a harder promise to keep than it looks: four factions with a handful of sub-factions each is a normal amount of launch content and a rounding error against what the setting contains, and every Chapter left out is a group of people told their army does not exist yet. The trilogy handled the same pressure by selling sub-factions over six years, which is exactly the structure this game has reportedly declined to repeat. How those two commitments fit together has not been addressed by anyone. Information correct as of 4 September 2026.
What is not known
These questions have no published answer as of 2 September 2026. They are listed because an absence of information is information — and because we would rather name the gap than fill it.