Creative Assembly is trying out a new format for its community updates, which will hopefully placate its fractious fans, with a 17-minute chat between the developers on “What’s Next?” The upcoming DLC gets some more detail, but before going into that, the team explains that they’ve listened to feedback from players and will be shifting future additions away from the Realm of Chaos narrative campaign and over to the sandbox Immortal Empires campaign. “Our next DLCs will be focused on IE specifically for our new characters and our factions,” says senior game director Rich Aldridge.”That doesn’t mean we will stop supporting Realm of Chaos,” clarifies associate game director Victor Dosev,” before adding that, “We’re moving to Immortal Empires being the place to be.” It sounds like the narrative campaign will continue receiving bug fixes and balance updates, but future DLC will expand the sandbox paint-the-map mode instead. “Immortal Empires is the quintessential Warhammer experience,” Aldridge says.
For the next DLC, that’ll mean new legendary lords and accompanying units to field on the huge Immortal Empires map. The Greenskins’ lord will be Gorbad Ironclaw, while Khorne gets Skulltaker, and the Ogre Kingdoms get a classic lord from the early days of Warhammer, the mercenary Golgfag Maneater. A handful of units are teased in the video as well, with a giant Thundertusk mammoth and Blood Vultures for the ogres, and the Slaughter Brute for Khorne. It’s mentioned that the next “freeLC” released for everyone alongside the DLC will be another legendary lord for Khorne—maybe Arbaal the Undefeated?
Looking ahead, they note that older Total War: Warhammer armies will be shown some more love in the future as well. “Vampire Count fans, don’t worry,” Aldridge says. “Don’t worry, you’ll be good. Norsca fans again, you know, we want to come back there and address things to do with the monster hunts.” DLC lead designer Sean Macdonald says the patches between DLC will be getting more substantial, saying, “Things that you wouldn’t normally see in a patch, including things such as the reworks that you might expect to come with a .0 drop like the cults, we’re gonna take a look at them. And then, even beyond reworking, we might try and add some new content to create some new fresh experiences.”
They finish by explaining the next DLC doesn’t have a solid release date yet, but Aldridge says, “We’re looking at the back end of the year.” And we should expect another communication from Creative Assembly in “late summer.”
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.
