As promised a few days ago, Creative Assembly just came out and revealed a bunch of new info regarding Total War: Warhammer 3 update 1.1. The first big patch for the game is scheduled to launch sometime early next month and will include a variety of bug fixes, balance changes, mechanics adjustments, and more. The developers also mentioned Immortal Empires but it looks like the highly anticipated grand campaign map is still a ways off.
Realm of Chaos Changes
In a new post on the official Total War blog Creative Assembly went on to detail everything that’s coming with update 1.1. One of the first aspects the developers touched upon is the Realm of Chaos mechanic. The Realm of Chaos is seeing significant changes in Warhammer 3 update 1.1, many of which are designed to make the mechanic less tedious. Here’s what you can expect:
- Realm of Chaos negative traits strength reduced by about half
- Daemon Legendary Lords immune to negative traits of their patron god
- Negative traits removed once the Legendary Lord completes the survival battle and leaves the chaos realm
- Defeating an AI Legendary Lord at the Forge of Souls will cause them to lose all their collected souls
- Patch 1.1 adds new buildings that prevent rifts from spawning in the province they were built
- Better rewards for defeating demon princes and acquiring souls
The Realm of Chaos campaign is one of the most divisive aspects of the game so it’s great to see that CA are taking steps to improve it. They could have taken things even further by making demon princes drop just a single soul but this is still a good start. CA did mention that we can expect further changes to the Realm of Souls past Warhammer 3 update 1.1.
Faction Balance Changes
A lot of the Warhammer 3 factions are still imbalanced one month after launch but it looks like this won’t be the case for much longer. At least as far as the multiplayer is concerned. Most of the upcoming faction changes will apparently be based on the data collected from ranked matchmaking and domination mode.
At a quick glance, it looks like the Ogre Kingdoms will be hit with some significant nerfs in Warhammer 3 patch 1.1. Meanwhile, Grand Cathay, which has been underperforming the most so far, is receiving some buffs. Kislev and Nurgle are also going to receive some tweaks aimed at making the two factions slightly stronger.
CA also mentioned that they are happy with where Khorne is at the moment so it probably won’t undergo any major changes. Same with Slaanesh, though some changes seem likely further down the line. The developers didn’t mention anything about the Daemons of Chaos. Or about any faction changes designed specifically for the campaign.
Bug Fixes and Other Changes
Warhammer 3 update 1.1 will also include a number of important bug fixes for issues that have been present since launch. Among other things, we’re likely to finally see an ALT + TAB crash fix along with fixes for other issues known to cause crashes. The patch will also bring to the table fixes related to the prologue, achievements, and more.
While it’s great that these issues will finally be addressed, it’s quite unfortunate that players will have to wait another couple of weeks for fixes to problems that should have been dealt with a while ago. The game would have already been around for about a month and a half by the time patch 1.1 launches.
Bug fixes aside, CA mentioned improvements to supply lines, infantry responsiveness, and performance. At the moment, a lot of players are forced to consult a Warhammer 3 optimization guide to get decent performance on a lot of systems. Not exactly ideal so let’s hope that those performance improvements come sooner rather than later.
Immortal Empires, Blood Pack, Mod Support
The Immortal Empires grand strategy map, blood DLC, and mod support are by far the three most requested features at the moment. Unfortunately, Warhammer 3 update 1.1 will only include one of them.
Creative Assembly confirmed that the mod manager and Workshop support for Total War: Warhammer 3 will be available starting with patch 1.1. The Assembly Kit will likely not be complete at launch but should include many of the important tools modders are looking for.
The developers only briefly mentioned Immortal Empires and the Blood DLC but didn’t specify any possible release windows. We assume the Blood Pack will release before Immortal Empires but there’s no way of knowing for sure. They could be coming at the same time.
According to CA, “The game needs to be in a solid place before we consider adding new content and features to the mix, so we’re in the process of reviewing the release timing of both Immortal Empires and the Blood Pack.”
Final Thoughts
All in all, we’ve got a lot of good news and a lot of bad news with this announcement. Many of the fixes and improvements sound promising but it’s taking the developers a long time to roll them out.
Warhammer 2 got Mortal Empires one month after launch and the game was in a better state to begin with. So far we’ve only got two small patches for Warhammer 3 and it looks like we’ll have to wait another two, maybe three weeks for the first big update. Which won’t include the most important features we’ve been waiting for, aside from mod support. These long wait times are starting to become a bit much even for diehard fans of the series.
Total War: Warhammer 3 currently sits at a 62% user score on Steam and 5.9 user score on Metacritic. We don’t imagine those scores improving anytime soon. User scores don’t always reflect the quality of a game but, as someone who has put over 110 hours into the game already, I can confirm that in this case, they do. Unfortunately. Let’s hope Warhammer 3 update 1.1 will change that, at least to some degree.
