I have a theory. See, I don't think that the Wardens of Ultramar were meant to be led by Captain Titus. I think this was supposed to be the grand return of Cato Sicarius, and I'll tell you why. Strap in, this is a long one.
It's no secret that GW sits on minis, sometimes for years at a time waiting to release them. The ur-example was the Eldar jetbike update of 2013, renders of which had been spotted at Games Days as early as 2009, and was rumored clear back to 2007.
Even when they're not actively withholding a product, the development lifecycle for any given release is three to five years from concept to store shelves. While you are buying the brand new Warhammer 40,000 starter set, the studio has been rolling dice with the edition after that for at least a year. In a best-case scenario, if every approval gets a green light and there are no delays, this can be condensed down to a year, year-and-half, if they're pulling out the stops – but they almost never do because their project planning has release windows blocked out years in advance in order to hit that three-year release cadence for each of their core games.
So with this in mind, the customary end-of-edition campaign would have been planned out well in advance of Leviathan's launch in 2023 – and while it's certainly possible that Space Marine 2 was intended to synergize with the tabletop when it was announced in 2021, I don't think it's terribly likely given the kind of relationships Games Workshop has traditionally has with it's licensing partners.
Obviously, GW would love if all of their extremely deep bench of licensed properties sell well, but I don't think they expected Space Marine 2 to slap quite as hard as it did. As a license, Space Marine had been neglected for years – maybe undeservedly so, it did well but not gangbusters when it was released in 2011, and the first game's development is its own saga. The reviews are fair to middling, and in my own personal opinion it started off strong but dropped off quickly after the vertical slice game journos were expected to play. It didn't result in a huge surge in hobby interest like Dawn of War did.
And if you cast your mind back to those heady days, the market was flooded with other third person cover shooters and Relic's attempt to market Space Marine as the anti-Gears of War didn't help it much against the categorical dominance of the Gears threequel released just two weeks later.
Some post-release content extended the multiplayer but, for the most part, Space Marine was one and done. Anecdotally, action games were never really Relic's bag and the rumor had been that they were brought in to rescue the project from the absolute travesty it was shaping up to be under its original development team. Go ahead and search YouTube for the leaked alpha footage, it's still out there and it's embarrassing. Bolters that stun enemies for clumsy melee takedowns. Awful.
Meanwhile in the tabletop, Sicarius had been consistently depicted as the 2nd Company Captain since his first incarnation as a limited edition Ultramarines Captain with Lightning Claws in the Fall of Medusa V campaign (his first appearance is actually in the 3rd edition Space Marines Codex as Captain of the 5th, since retconned, but he never had a model and that order of battle still reflected the Ultramarines as they stood prior to the Battle for Macragge and 2nd Company Captain Agemman's ascension to 1st, replacing the slain Captain Invictus).
He would subsequently get a complete redesign for fifth edition, ditching the gnarly facial scar and mohawk in favor of the stentorian affect we all know and love (TTS and its consequences have been a disaster for Warhammer lore), a look which remains broadly unchanged in his recent Primaris glowup.
So with a return to tradition and updates of all the classic miniatures people remember from their childhoods twenty years ago now underway, it's no surprise that Sicarius should return to lead the 2nd Company... but then something unexpected happened and Space Marine 2 became a big hit and a major onboarding point to the brand, and suddenly Titus was the face of Warhammer 40,000 for a whole new cohort of hobbyists picking up their first Space Marines; which represents a problem for brand synergy because the gold-trim Ultramarines 2nd Company are the poster boys and they already have a Captain, and a new miniature was already on its way to tooling.
(Although, honestly, before Space Marine 2 I had completely forgotten that Acheran had been Captain since Shadowspear because nobody remembers Shadowspear)
Now, you may or may not subscribe to the belief that Games Workshop intended to nuke the setting with Gathering Storm and 8th edition in exactly the same way they blew up Warhammer Fantasy Battle with the Endtimes, but what we actually wound up getting is incontrovertible – a huge number of named characters with Firstborn minis didn't make the cut, and a bunch of new characters were released instead. This has notably been corrected, and Sicarius was recently released alongside another update of Marneus Calgar and his Victrix Guard, but not as an element of the Victrix Guard kit as one might expect from that formation's Captain.
So it's my belief that 500 World: Titus, originally concepted four or five years ago, after the pivot back to the classic Space Marine designs had begun with the failure of Shadowspear but before Space Marine 2 hit and reintroduced Demetrian Titus to mainstream audiences, was meant to bring back Cato Sicarius after being sidelined in the narrative and discontinued in the range for two editions.
Which is why the now orphan Sicarius model gets a solo release alongside another wave of mid-2000s nostalgia resculpts and Titus gets promoted to Captain off-screen in order to synergize a brand new sculpt with an extremely successful licensed game and well reviewed animated anthology episode, which fits into the absolute minimum eighteen month turnaround that the studio is capable of if they absolutely have to get a product out.
As for the rest of the squad, the ancient and veteran sergeant could have been literally anyone, it's not hard to swap a head sculpt out before you commit to tooling; and aside from facial features, neither of them look particularly like their counterparts from the game or Secret Level short – although if I had to guess, Metaurus was already designed for the Wardens of Ultramar kit and got introduced in Secret Level as a dictate from on high, he's a pretty generic looking Bladeguard Veteran otherwise.
Now, obviously this is all based on vibes and sentiment but the timing makes a lot of sense to me and it would be consistent with GW's apparent brand strategy in the wake of second wave Primarisization's lukewarm reception. At the very least, dots have been connected and they form a very interesting line.
