Games Workshop has finally given Warhammer 40,000 fans the news they’ve craved for years: a release date for animated series Astartes 2.
In a post on Warhammer Community, Games Workshop said Astartes 2 is set to drop this December. Via a new promo video, we also have two new shots of Astartes 2, which you can see in the slideshow below. Don’t expect a huge amount from the images though, they don’t give away much. And there’s still much we don’t know about Astartes 2 itself. How many episodes will it be? How long will the episodes be? Will it even be divided up into episodes this time?
For the uninitiated, the original Astartes was created by superfan Syama Pedersen, who was subsequently brought into the fold to make the official sequel. In November last year, Games Workshop revealed animation work on a monitor screen via the promo video below, showing a squad of Terminators appearing to protect an unnamed human soldier. This is the Inquisition-led Deathwatch Terminator squad from the debut Astartes 2 teaser in incomplete form, but we know from their pauldron chapter symbols that they’re the same as before (Retributors, Mortifactors, Scythes of The Emperor, Sons of Medusa, and Angels Vermilion).
Astartes is widely accepted as the greatest Warhammer 40,000 animation ever made, official or unofficial, with only Amazon’s excellent Space Marine 2 animation for the Secret Level anthology series competing with it in quality terms. Indeed, Astartes was so good that it inspired Saber Interactive’s hugely successful Space Marine 2 in terms of the look and feel of the Space Marines themselves.
Fans hadn’t heard a peep out of Games Workshop on Astartes 2 for years, leading some to wonder whether the company had quietly cancelled it. But in January last year Games Workshop released a teaser trailer alongside a 2026 release window, and now we know it will be out this December. GW managed to get it in before the end of the year just in time!
Last year’s teaser suggested an animation on a scale and quality never-before-seen from Warhammer 40,000, with melee combat, shooting, vehicle combat, and even spaceship battles all showcased. It showed a number of Space Marine chapters in battle across varied environments, and multiple enemy races, including Tyranids, Orks, and Tau.
But it turned out that nothing in the teaser is actually in the Astartes 2 animation itself. According to a post on the Warhammer Community website: “This teaser trailer is not actually clips from the new animation, instead showing a compilation of shots that represent the former lives of the characters that will appear in the show. There’s a pretty unsubtle hint at the end as to the nature of the final story… We’ll leave you to speculate and start putting the pieces together yourselves.”
Astartes 2 will be available via Games Workshop’s streaming service, Warhammer TV.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
