Total War: Warhammer 3 roadmap outlines the next year of DLC and updates

(Image credit: Sega)

Creative Assembly has finally laid out plans for how it's going to make Total War: Warhammer 3 both more total and more Warhammer over the next 12 months. The DLC roadmap details three expansions, each of which will be accompanied by a "free-LC" adding a Legendary Hero for everyone. It also mentions "interim patches" for bug fixes, balance changes, and other additions will come between each DLC.

The first of those interim patches is designed to follow the recent release of Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs. Update 3.1 brings a Chaos Dwarf-themed endgame scenario to the Immortal Empires campaign, seven more mercenary Regiments of Renown, another Legendary Hero, as well as "Multiple crash and performance fixes, bug fixes, gameplay tweaks". It's due in late May.

Shadows of Change is the first DLC on the schedule. Where previous DLCs for existing races have focused on two at a time, we'll get three in this: Tzeentch, Cathay, and Kislev will all get a new Legendary Lord (Changeling, the Monkey King, and Mother Ostankya?), and new units, and one Legendary Hero will be included.

The accompanying freebie available to all will also be a Legendary Hero, "a front-line fighter twisted by the Lord of Change!" Maybe Aekold Helbrass, the former knight gifted with the Breath of Life? At the same time, achievements will finally be added for Immortal Empires, the races in the DLC will be rebalanced, there will be an AI update related to "player bias and campaign AI", further improvements to settlement battles, and more. Expect all that in summer, 2023.

A big gap will follow, with the next DLC, Thrones of Decay, coming in winter. Interestingly, two of the three races it'll focus on are legacy ones introduced in the first game. The Empire and Dwarfs will receive some long-awaited love, alongside Warhammer 3's Nurgle. It'll be the same deal as Shadows of Change, with a new Legendary Lord and units for each, as well as one Legendary Hero. Given the pairing of Nurgle and the Empire, odds are good the new lords will be Tamurkhan the Maggot Lord and Elspeth von Draken, whose infamous rivalry could make for a fun campaign.

The simultaneous update will include freebies like the Nemesis Crown, which is an artifact for factions to fight over "akin to the Sword of Khaine", and another Legendary Hero will, as the blog post puts it, join "the toolbox". Is that a clue pointing at an engineer character, like airship inventor and Slayer Malakai Makaisson or Imperial siege engineer Josef Bazalgette?

Total War: Warhammer 3's DLC roadmap — (Image credit: Sega)

The last item on the roadmap is also the vaguest, with an unnamed third DLC to come in spring of 2024. While it doesn't say which races will be getting shown some love in this one, the pink-and-purple artwork accompanying it suggests Slaanesh will be one of them. Or that we'll be getting an add-on inspired by the music of Prince, but Slaanesh is more likely.

As CA notes, there's more in the works than what's mentioned here, like "ongoing performance, optimization, gameplay and mechanics improvements", as well as more to come in 2024. While Warhammer 3 had a rougher launch than the previous games, it's already been significantly improved and earned a place among the best Warhammer Fantasy games, and CA clearly intends to keep tinkering for a good long while yet.

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.