Total War will ditch blood packs, early-adopter faction DLC, and its launcher

3 days ago 3

Roger Collum, vice president of Total War, addressed the electorate via blog post to thank players and explain the team is currently working on a patch for Total War: Warhammer 3's Omens of Destruction DLC.

As Collum put it, "A big challenge in game making is trying to please everyone without watering things down so much that you basically ruin what's special. The truth of the matter is that it will be impossible to please everyone. Instead, we'll always strive to make the best decisions we can which make the game as good as we hope it can be. We'll always be heavily guided directly and indirectly by all of you. It's why we've put the latest patch out as a beta first."

Collum also looked to the future, laying out four changes we can expect to see. For starters, the practice of selling Blood Packs as DLC will end. Previously, the Total War games shipped as bloodless things and you had to buy an add-on that coated your soldiers in red after each battle. It helped keep the age rating of the base game low, and Creative Assembly made a few bucks out of people who want everyone to look like Dragon Age: Origins characters in post-battle dialogue scenes. From now on though, any games where blood is appropriate will come with it as a base feature and age ratings be damned. (If the rumors about a Total War: Star Wars game are true I expect we wouldn't see blood there, while Total War: Warhammer 40,000, should such a thing come to pass, would be drowning in the stuff.)

Second, the launcher's going to die. As it currently stands, no matter which storefront you own a Total War game on, launching it instead launches the Total War launcher first. It's not entirely pointless since it also serves as a mod manager, and so Collum says the team wants to have something to handle mod management ready to go before the launcher is removed. But it is going to go away at some point.

Next up: "Factions will no longer be an early-adopter bonus". Used to be that if you pre-ordered a Total War game or bought it in the first week of release you'd get the first faction DLC for free. In Total War: Warhammer 3, for instance, that meant the Ogre Kingdoms. From now on, Collum says, "we will still ensure some form of bonus such as discounts," but the practice of putting one faction aside for early adopters and making everyone else pay for it separately will die a death.

The final announcement is that the Shadows of Change DLC for Warhammer 3, released last year to much gnashing of teeth, will be broken up. As was the case for subsequent expansions Thrones of Decay and Omens of Destruction, Shadows of Change will be made available as three separate add-ons for players who just want one bit of it rather than the whole enchilada.

These are all fan-pleasing changes, addressing things the commentariat has been vocally complaining about for a while. Although I'm sure they'll find new things to fill their diapers about after these changes are made.

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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.