Total War: Warhammer 3's first update of the year has made a big change to its Immortal Empires campaign. Launched in beta, Immortal Empires has, up to now, only been available to players who own all three Total Warhammer games. But now Creative Assembly is peeling that beta tag off, and making the campaign freely available to anyone and everyone who owns plain old Warhammer 3.
That means, so long as you own the game, you can now play the Immortal Empires campaign with the base races and Lords. Those are the Demons of Chaos, Grand Cathay, Khorne, Kislev, Nurgle, Slaanesh, Tzeentch, and the Warriors of Chaos. You'll still need the first and second games to get access to their base races and Lords, though, and you'll need the relevant DLC to access the factions associated with them.
However, if you really, desperately want to play a race associated with a DLC for 1 or 2, you won't need the game it's tied to in order to buy it. The example Creative Assembly gives is that you could, for example, buy Total War: Warhammer 2's Rise of the Tomb Kings DLC without owning Warhammer 2, which would give you access to such wonderful names as Settra the Imperishable and Grand Hierophant Khatep in the third game's Immortal Empires campaign. That sounds like a pretty niche consumer demand for Creative Assembly to cater to, but it's always good to give players more options.
- Total War: Warhammer 3's next patch will overhaul its Kislev faction, which Creative Assembly has 'identified as the most in need of a deep review and rethink'
- Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero
PCG strategy czar Fraser Brown had a great time with the Immortal Empires campaign when he got stuck into it, praising it as a "messy masterpiece" and a "strong contender for the greatest Total War campaign". It's good news, then, that the devs are swinging the campaign's doors wide to let everyone get a shot at it.
The change to Immortal Empires was the weightiest change of the 2.4.0 update, but it's not the only one. I've listed Creative Assembly's own self-selected highlights from the update in a pleasingly bullet-pointed list below:
- Karak Eight Peaks is now a ten-slot settlement for the Skaven
- Malus’s quest battle for the Warpstone of Khaine is now in the Chaos Wastes, closer to his starting position.
- Fixed a variety of visual/graphical glitches such as clipping capes, snapping models and broken animations.
- Garrisons are no longer reinforcements and now enter the battle from the start.
- Fixed a multiplayer desync that could occur when an Empire player chose to Summon the Elector Counts.
- Coedill will no longer immediately enter the battle instead of reinforcing once the Waystones are destroyed in Drycha’s quest battle.
- Interrogating Grom the Paunch in Athel Tamarha as Eltharion now correctly gives Mistwalker units the ability to mirror Grom’s Big Waaagh ability.
- Fixed an issue where Boris Ursus wouldn’t gain supporters while the Invocation of Dazh is active.
Beyond that, well, there's all sorts of little tweaks and fixes to various parts of the game. You can find a full set of patch notes here, and if you're confused about the changes to Immortal Empires in particular, the studio has put together an FAQ to set you straight.
