Total War Warhammer – Immortal Empires: All the info on the Mega Game Mode – News

All races and heroes and specializations of the three Total War Warhammer-Parts (to my test of Warhammer 3) united in a gigantic giant sandbox, that is the idea behind the game mode initially planned as “Beta” for August 2022 Immortal Empires. To play it (with a caveat in case of a multiplayer campaign, see below) you will need all three previous Total War Warhammer mainstays on the same Steam account; it then shows up as a campaign option in Warhammer 3.

In addition, you will only be able to play the races and heroes that you own – there are currently over a dozen addons that add more heroes and factions.

In yesterday’s blog post, Creative Assembly revealed more about Immortal Empires, summarized the most important information here. The fact that Creative Assembly effectively speaks of “our most ambitious and complicated project to date” does not have to concern us.

Why “Beta”?

In addition to the new features (listed below), three games with different rules – and program codes – have to be merged. This takes time and effort and leads to errors. In addition to the programming challenge, there are also balance problems between the many different races. Or in the words of the blog post:

Immortal Empires isn’t just a “port” of content from one game to another, it’s a mountain of change-sensitive engineering work.

Among other things, the engine has evolved and, for example, adapting the lighting of the older battlefields to Warhammer 3 is complex. But also character models, effects, audio effects, the user interface and the balance of the three games have to be converted into a common whole (in the Warhmmer games almost every faction has its own interface details and rule peculiarities). Last but not least, the game element of corruption has changed a lot over the course of the series and will be adapted again for Immortal Empires.

Therefore one is realistic and will talk about a beta until one has the feeling that the game mode is really finished. And that will take years. However, the game mode will be available to all Warhammer 3 owners from August, it’s not a traditional beta that you have to register for.

What’s new?
Creative Assembly emphasizes that Immortal Empires isn’t just “The content of three games thrown onto one map”. First of all, this large world map will be a completely new one on a smaller scale, as was the case with Mortal Empires (especially since the world maps of the three previous games do not follow the same scale). The most important information:

• Total War Immortal Empires should already start in (probably) Aug 2022 be “complete in content”. This does not rule out balance adjustments and other features, they “beta”.
• One becomes all 86 legendary lords (Leaders with their own starting scenario and special rules) that exist across the three parts and all DLCs.
• Be’Lakor (the villain from part 3) is a Legendary Lord with his own faction
• Some of the older Legendary Lords receive full-fledged factions, including Grombrindal, Helman Ghorst, and Volkmar the Grim. And 29 of them get new starting positions.
• Preserved some of the Elder Lords individual faction game ruleswhich they have so far lacked.
• New feature sea ​​routes. With these you can move armies in rounds between distant countries and continents quickly instead of laboriously. This is certainly intended to make the Giganto playing field not just a relatively small bubble around your own starting position in practice, as was the case with Mortal Empires.
• It should dynamic endgame scenarios by rolling “challenges” in the middle and late stages of a game so that a human player, who is usually overpowered at that point, doesn’t just sweep over all factions. CA mentions greenskin invasions or large scale undead awakening.
• New Victory Conditions: CA says that most players never play to the win condition because they find it uninteresting (eventually you know you’ve won). I don’t entirely agree, because while that applies to the conquest objectives (“capture x of the following regions”), parts 2 and 3 in particular also have story victory conditions. In any case, I’m happy if there are more exciting victory conditions that are less based on pure diligence in the sandbox mode called Immortal Empires.
• Reworked Corruption: New options to spread or contain corruption (which comes in many forms: Vampiric, Chaos Corruption, etc.).
• Multiplayer campaign for up to eight players – and only the host needs to own all three games, Warhammer 3 will do for the rest, although they are then limited to the races in Part 3.

In the following months and years you want to react to player feedback and continue to write about the balance in particular. Creative Assembly simply sees the launch of the game mode as “phase 1”.