Get ready for one very big fantasy throwdown, as Total War: Warhammer III Immortal Empires, the upcoming sandbox expansion for Creative Assembly’s realtime strategy franchise, has now locked in an August release date. The expansion’s devs also sat down to answer some questions, touching on changes to factions, new victory conditions, and future content. You can check out the full Q&A, below.
Creative Assembly has also released a new look at the Immortal Empires map, with a number of starting locations marked (click the image for full resolution).
Still not sure what exactly Total War: Warhammer III Immortal Empires is? Here’s an official overview:
The combined battlefield of Immortal Empires brings everything we’ve built throughout the Total War: Warhammer series into Warhammer III: including the Races, factions, units, and Legendary Lords, all of which will find their home on a massive battlefield that spans the Warhammer world. But Immortal Empires is much more than the sum of each game’s content smashed together into a larger map. Rather, the new game mode offers a variety of new features and approaches to the combined battlefield:
- 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 and selection of 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.
Total War: Warhammer III Immortal Empires launches on PC on August 23. The expansion will be free for all current owners of the game.
