Total War: Warhammer 2 is happening, if you haven’t heard. As part of that, Creative Assembly are redoubling their efforts to create unique factions that feel like an entirely different style of game, rather than simply a new flavour to the same world-conquering. However, that leaves the first game’s four races seeming a little out-dated. Given it’s designed to eventually allow you to play all three games together, they need to be up to code. Thankfully, it looks like CA have a plan.
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“At the risk of saying things I shouldn’t, it’s a trilogy that we’re making. So by the time we’ve finished we would like to go back and do a sweep over most of the races,” says Ian Roxburgh, game director on the franchise. “As much as anything else, just to have different start positions for different lords, a few more unique lords. Retrofit the processes we’ve added now back into some of the [older] stuff.”
The races of Warhammer 2 are promised to play extremely different from one-another, and presumably CA would like that to be true across the entire, eventual Warhammer world. In fact, explains communications manager Al Bickham, in a way they’ve already started. “We’ve done a little bit of that already. We tweaked [legendary lord] Balthasar Gelt a bit recently as well.
“The two [recently added] legendary lords are essentially their own Vampire Counts subfaction. So the beauty of doing lots of free content drops and paid DLC content as well is it constantly gives us a bit of extra time to go back and tweak things. When we do a new content update there’s always some new patch notes with it because the battle team is always sitting there rebalancing stuff for multiplayer furiously.
“Having a living game, and that’s what this is going to be right across all three parts of the trilogy, constantly gives us the opportunity to go in and tweak here or push this.”
Roxburgh points out why it’s good for everyone, even those who don’t buy addons themselves, saying that “it’s a win-win, it’s great for the fans because even if [they] have never bought any DLC the game world is just growing and getting more diverse. If you buy the game now, just vanilla out the box, it’s a different world, it’s got loads more content in it. We really wanted that, we looked across this whole fantasy universe and were like ‘Oh God there’s so much cool stuff here we wanna do.’ Can’t do it in one game.”