Total War: WARHAMMER III News

Total Warhammer 3's co-op campaign supports eight players and simultaneous turns

Creative Assembly is stepping up its multiplayer offering in Total War: Warhammer III. While the upcoming strategy game's predecessor Total War: Warhammer II allowed for a maximum of two players in its campaign multiplayer mode, this time around the studio has quadrupled that number.

Total Warhammer III's campaign multiplayer has received a bunch of improvements and changes over the previous two in the series, as game director Ian Roxburgh tells us in an interview. "We'll evolve, we'll get all the things that fans wanted, but then we're going to throw some curveballs and put things in they'd never have expected," he says. "Real innovative Total War stuff as well, like eight-player simultaneous campaign multiplayer. No one would dream of that happening. It's so much fun; we've had a blast developing that, having battles with eight of you playing a party in it and controlling a few units each, and the way that works."

Roxburgh says the studio has even created some "mini" multiplayer campaigns, which will allow you to essentially "start and finish an eight-player multiplayer campaign in one evening with friends, where you get straight into the action and the armies fighting each other within the first turn or so".

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Total Warhammer 3's ninth legendary lord is a daemonic Mr Potato Head

The Total War: Warhammer III release date is less than a month away now, and Creative Assembly has revealed the ninth legendary lord you'll be able to pick in the strategy game's campaign. It's the Daemon Prince, the leader of a surprise eighth launch faction, the Daemons of Chaos. With no set affiliation to any specific Chaos god, the Daemon Prince can take powers and equipment from all four, and is as a result the most customisable lord Total War has ever seen.

The Daemons of Chaos, like their tabletop namesake, represent 'Chaos Undivided' - an army that has access to units from all four Chaos gods' rosters. That on its own is enough to guarantee some interesting buildcrafting with the Daemons of Chaos, but as it turns out, it's their leader who provides the broadest canvas for player creativity.

The Daemon Prince is a fallen prince of Kislev, as we learned in our hands-on campaign preview. Game director Ian Roxburgh tells us that Warhammer III's prologue "tells you about how that particular Daemon Prince came about", and confirms that he is the same Yuri named in the letter Tzarina Katarin is studying in the announcement trailer (this is not the same Yuri as Yuri Kovalenko, however - "there's more than one Yuri in Kislev," says principal writer Andy Hall).

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50 turns as Cathay in Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign

I wouldn't say it's the best feeling, to watch a dozen portals to hell burst into existence across the green pastures of Grand Cathay, the site of my steadily growing empire in Total War: Warhammer III.

Not that it's supposed to be, but I'm especially sensitive to this sort of thing. I like to build and beautify; I've been known to build unnecessary parade grounds in Command & Conquer rather than finish missions just because I thought them thematic. My biggest gripe with Total War: Warhammer II was that it would drop hostile armies into my territory as soon as I started a Vortex ritual; they always seemed to appear whenever my own troops were absent, so that no matter how I prepared, I was powerless to prevent the destruction of several carefully tended cities.

So you can imagine how I felt when these rifts into the Realm of Chaos burst upon my territory like acne before a first date. Warhammer's infamously grimdark lore is all about the fact that even the most redoubtable city is only a Skaven orgy away from drowning in a tide of rats, but look, it's not just me: "It felt a bit contrived that you can't control the fact there's going to be a few stacks coming in and attacking you," game director Ian Roxburgh tells us, reflecting on player feedback from Warhammer II.

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Total Warhammer 3 devs unveil a generous look at Grand Cathay gameplay

Creative Assembly has shared a generous look at some new Total War: Warhammer III gameplay ahead of the strategy game's arrival next month. In a new clip (below), we get to see an eight-and-a-half-minute chunk of campaign action as Grand Cathay Legendary Lord Miao Ying leads her Northern Provinces faction to stave off the Chaos hordes threatening the Great Bastion and map beyond.

Starting off with a successful flanking at Gunpowder Road to "sandwich" rebels between the faction's cavalry and other forces, the battle kicks off in earnest. The faction uses its Sky-Junk (essentially armed air balloons) and "superior ranged capabilities" to defeat the defecting rebels. The clip then shows us what could be some of the big focal points of battles around the Great Bastion: its three entrypoint gates, embedded in the walls. "When Chaos invasions come, it's these locations that take the brunt of the attacks," the narrator explains.

Elsewhere, we see tactics such as the Storm Dragon's Edict Commandment deployed, which is used to suppress corruption, bolster defences, and dial down enemies' movement range. We also get to see the Northern Provinces make use of the Ivory Road - a mechanic which helps the faction bring in additional funds to support its growing army. It seems you can dispatch a caravan to trade with cultures based far away, but there's a catch. "Caravans come with plenty of risk," the narrator warns, though "the potential rewards are more than worth it".

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"We're killing a god" - how Total Warhammer 3 is going all-in on story

With just over two months to go until the release of Total War: Warhammer 3, developer Creative Assembly is shovelling coal into the hype train at an unprecedented rate. The studio has not only revealed all the launch races, but gone into greater depth about their mechanics than we've ever seen at this stage. It's a bottom-up approach to hype - red meat for the core fans who can tell from these fiddly details just how radical and ambitious the game will be in its design.

But for many fans - and certainly for me - the macro stuff is a big part of the anticipation too. Previous Warhammer entries have done more than any other Total War game to try to tell a story in the series' traditional sandbox setting. When CA is emphasising at every turn just how big Warhammer III will be, what does that look like?

CA has stated that it won't recreate the End Times, the in-universe apocalypse with which publisher Games Workshop pulled the plug on the Warhammer Fantasy tabletop game back in 2015. But with such a sense of escalation behind it as the crescendo in a trilogy, one which also stars the Chaos Gods who were behind the End Times, it's an understandable guess for some fans to have made. Exactly how wide of the mark were they?

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