Only a few minutes into the tutorial mission, my gruff squad of four Grey Knights are shoulder-barging through blast doors and into a demonic lair in slow motion. A group of underlings linger in the corner, so I issue the command to hurl a frag grenade at their feet. The top-down tactical view suddenly and slickly zooms in on the projectile, the camera admiring the grenade’s contours for a split second, before doing a bullet time spin and zooming back out for a devastating overlook. On the same turn, I tell a second knight to slam into a pillar, thereby toppling it over and wrecking another congregation of enemies.
In my long campaign against the forces of Chaos, I witnessed these door breaching, grenade-throwing, and pillar-knocking animations countless times, and yet, after 40 long hours, I still haven’t gotten tired of seeing them play out. I haven’t gotten tired of watching my fully decked-out squad teleporting down to a planet in a flash of fibrous lightning. Nor have I…