Total War: Warhammer 3 Devs Officially Introduce Immortal Empires, Here’s What’s New
The excitement is palpable as devs show off their official first look at what’s in in Total War: Warhammer 3’s Immortal Empires.
Immortal Empires casts a long shadow over the Total War: Warhammer trilogy. This one update promises to unite the world map of Warhammer 1, 2, and 3. Making for the biggest campaign map Creative Assembly has rolled out.
And in a new update today, the devs shared what’s new in Immortal Empires. The game has arrived. The excitement is palpable.
Total War: Warhammer 3 – What’s New In Immortal Empires
First of all, this is the update that the community has been waiting for. It’s clear, it’s to the point. It paints a picture of the exciting features you can expect to see in the new campaign. But, it’s more than that. It turns out that Immortal Empires promises so much more than just mashing all the content together.
Here’s a look:
- Access all 86 Legendary Lords from all three Total War: WARHAMMER titles.
- Be’Lakor is now a Legendary Lord with his own faction.
- Dedicated factions for a number of the older Legendary Lords, including: Grombrindal, Helman Ghorst, and Volkmar the Grim.
- New starting locations for 29 of the older Legendary Lords.
- Improved personal faction mechanics for a selection of the older Legendary Lords (such as Volkmar the Grim).
- A new ‘Sea Lanes’ feature, which allow you to move armies between distant lands and continents—from one side of the map to the other—without leapfrogging them all the way across the map.
- New dynamic end-game scenarios: randomised mid- to late-game challenges we’re introducing to challenge the late-game steamroll—where the player is so powerful that there’s little-to-no challenge left and less of a reason to complete the campaign. Think Greenskin invasions or resurgences of the undead, as a few examples…
- Revamped victory conditions. Most players don’t end up finishing campaigns, and we want to give them better reasons—and a greater level of satisfaction—for doing so. As such, we’ve simplified the victory requirements into more meaningful objectives while avoiding any arbitrary playstyle requirements.
- Corruption rework. Players will have new tools for spreading (or reducing) corruption through more active usage of their armies. Small amounts of natural reduction will also be available to uncorrupted factions.
- 8-player multiplayer campaigns. And as a bonus, only the host of an Immortal Empires multiplayer campaign needs to own all three games. Friends who only own WARHAMMER III will still be able to join the campaign, though their Legendary Lord choices will (naturally) be limited to the ones they own.
The Road Ahead
All of that’s exciting enough as it stands. Every legendary lord so far? New dedicated factions for your favorite lord? Sign me up. But then there’s so much more.
Sea Lanes will make managing your empire even smoother, though you’ll have to watch out for the Vampire Coast even more. And they’ve worked on new end-game scenarios to keep the game exciting each time.
Even Khorne approved eight-player multiplayer campaigns will be here. But, when IE releases it’ll just be a ‘beta’ at first.
The team at CA was pretty clear about why:
In order to create the game mode, the development team had to collect and combine the content, features, mechanics, systems, and code from three different codebases into a single mega-campaign. Now, taking big chunks of content, data, and code from one game and porting them into another is always a challenge—speaking from experience in this regard—and takes a significant amount of time and tailoring to get all the pieces to play nice with each other and work properly. Even after the technical implementations are done, there are still bugs to find and fix, as well as a significant amount of playtesting to ensure that (as an example) one race isn’t ridiculously under- or over-powered or that each race’s unique features and mechanics are working as intended.
In short: Immortal Empires isn’t just a “port” of content from one game to another; it’s a mountain of phenomenally change-sensitive, technical work.
They’re still working on implementing advanced lighting, UI parity, and corruption, just to name a few.
But, the team is aiming at being “content complete” on day one. In other words, it won’t be a slow roll out of factions or legendary lords. But a full sandbox campaign right at the beginning. With improvements and adjustments to follow.
What faction will you play first? Should we summon the elector-counts?
