We reported earlier this week on Creative Assembly’s upcoming plans for Total War: Warhammer 3, and offered some predictions about what the "mystery update" this week was likely to be. Well, we were absolutely wrong, and we’re rarely this happy to be wrong. As of patch 2.4, Warhammer 3’s massive Immortal Empires mode is out of beta, and is now available to every single player who owns Warhammer 3.
For the uninitiated, Immortal Empires is the grand culmination of everythingCA has been building towards since launching the first Total War; Warhammer game. A vast Total War game played across the entire Warhammer world, including (almost) every single race in the Warhammer lore, with biomes from beast-filled jungles, dry dusty deserts, and grim gothic forest. It’s an enormous mode, and the dream of every Warhammer fan for the last decade.
It used to be that Immortal Empires (as well as its Warhammer 2 predecessor, Mortal Empires) was only accessible by players who already owned the previous games in the series. But with this update, now all you need is a copy of Total War: Warhammer 3 to access the enormous mode.
There are some caveats, of course. The Total War: Warhammer series has a large amount of downloadable content (DLC), and CA isn’t removing the requirements for those. Instead, it’s restricting which races and lords you can access with just the base game. If you want to play any armies from the first or second game, or any of the DLC, then you’ll still need to buy them. But as a bonus, you can mix and match as you see fit. You’ll no longer need to own Warhammer 2 in order to use Warhammer 2 DLC, for instance. So you can buy the Tomb Kings DLC without needing to buy Warhammer 2. So starting with just your base races and adding new races as you fancy is possible.
Also included with the patch release was an epic trailer, which crucially included details of the next race to be released. It’s basically an open secret that the Chaos Dwarves are next, and true to that, the ending seconds of the trailer showed a Chaos Dwarf stronghold, with Greenskin slaves building weapons of war. Expect that to land in April.
Until then, we’ll see you on the battlefields of Immortal Empires.