Total War: Warhammer 3's first hotfix should arrive this week

Ku'Gath Plaguefather, greater daemon of Nurgle
(Image credit: Sega)

Total War: Warhammer 3 released last week to a generally positive reception, though there have been some quibbles over its performance and stability. (The gods of Chaos really don't like when players alt-tab, it seems.) As Creative Assembly announced today, a series of hotfixes for various issues are on the way and the first is scheduled for this week, though with the caps-heavy caveat, "NOTE THAT THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE based on NUMEROUS factors—some of which are out of our control".

The current plan is for this initial hotfix to deal with problems players running DirectX 12 have had, framerate issues connected to Intel CPUs, and a problem with multiplayer lobbies, which refresh so quickly it's difficult to actually select one before the list refreshes again.

Performance issues are a high priority for the run of hotfixes Creative Assembly has planned, as "Beyond the crashes and other critical issues we're working to solve, we very much understand—as gamers ourselves—that the game's performance is a cornerstone of your ability to enjoy it."

Rather than wait to put together a large patch that solves numerous problems, the plan is to "take a surgical approach to address them: deploying smaller hotfixes at a faster rate rather than waiting to compile fixes into a large update that smashes multiple issues at once." One reason for that is to ensure fixes are fully tested and don't cause further stability issues before they're bundled together, and also because "The more fixes in a build, the more risk that it can cause problems with other elements in the game or with the platforms where the game is released."

Later updates will apparently make more significant changes, once this run of smaller hotfixes are out of the way. "When we have solid dates for the current, next, and next-next hotfixes, we'll let you know so you can look forward to them", Creative Assembly says.

In the meantime, running Warhammer 3 in windowed mode has reduced the number of crashes for me, though I had to quit out then restart after changing that option to make the game properly line up with my actual screen.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.