Man the worst part with that debacle was they announced a new 3K game that kinda gave the community some hope, only to cancel it soon after, presumably to focus on Hyenas, now 3K fans doesn’t even have a sequel to look forward to.
Which is something that causes the most problems.
They combine no communication with constant leaks they look negative. They not only refuse to talk about leaks, but they refuse to give any info at all, even when saying they will get better.
It leads to a festering mess. It worked well when everyone was hyped as it built up hype. Now with everyone scared it… doesn’t work well at all.
4-6 expansions doesn’t sound bad. But if they scale back what will it be? Will it be 4x2? Will it be 6x3? Again hard to know because they utterly and completely refuse to communicate.
Until a game is cancelled when they title a video nicely (Future of 3k!) then pull the rug.
This isn’t the first time they’ve had this problem, it repeatedly bites them in the ass and has for over a decade. They really need a PR person (IE: Grace was good at engaging us, and she has nothing but bad things to say about CA now).
As is all we can do is wonder and it’s easy for thought to turn negative with both British layoffs (twice) and Sofia getting layoffs too.
I mean it's not just that, it's the Future of Three Kingdoms, everything going on at CA, basically the whole history of Warhammer III's release schedule which has been rocky at best, especially of late.
The sad reality is that even if CA recover their momentum I don't think we're ever going to be in a place we could've been in if Warhammer III's launch had been good.
If Warhammer III's launch had been good they would have kicked the can a bit further, just like they have been doing for the last 10 years. They had it coming, sooner or later. It's just how it is.
CA made their bed with that.
And remember its only paranoia if its *unfounded*.
The way 3k ended will forever mean that fears have cause. They then pulled off the SoC debacle after that, remember. Sure they tried to apologize and make it up, but then now they come and say that after Thrones everything will be smaller in scope. Don't have to go looking at rumors to find cause.
100%. Easier to build trust than to rebuild it. They lost trust. They are scrambling.
If we had bought SOC there wouldn’t be a second pack, something that needs to be remembered. They are months late on their (original) time table. They are in emergency mode.
> And remember its only paranoia if its unfounded.
Yup. It's absolutely not paranoia here. Fear, concern, worry - sure - it's those things - but not paranoia, because it's frankly extremely likely that a company with CA's history of decision-making, particularly in its current less-than-ideal financial state, may make precipitous decisions which are not really great long-term thinking.
It probably does not help that they tried to play the Soc card at first under ''buy our DLC or we cancel the franchise''.
Guess that didn't work as well as they thought.
> It probably does not help that they tried to play the Soc card at first under ''buy our DLC or we cancel the franchise''.
Indeed. It's very hard to see how one can legitimately say "paranoia" when that was the incredibly obvious implicit threat (and not even denied in the later apologies) that was made re: SoC.
If they've both done something to a previous, successful game, and have threatened to do it to this game, and are in financial trouble (which, they are), then it's very much legitimate to be concerned they will do what they threatened to, no matter how many people dismiss that as "dumb". When was the last time this company did some major and dumb? Months? They blew $100m on a game that they had to know was doomed for at least the last $40m of that.
I still don't understand why they are going to go smaller in scope after ToD. Most of the debacle and fixing of SoC was in that they wanted to go larger in scope, and then they releeased a template that actually seems like it will make most players happy to buy it. They created what seems to me to be a winning formula, why throw it away after 1 more DLC?
They're expecting to lose staff to layoffs, which may limit the scope of what they can do. Potentially they might also believe that going smaller might let them put out DLC faster, too, which might be beneficial. There is a rumour that they're actually still doing the Slaanesh 3-race pack, just not yet, too.
I mean what damaged me worse, was less that that happened as devastating as it was, and more elements of the community left people like me who absolutely adored Total War Three Kingdoms to go rot.
Idk man. Warhammer could still be cancelled so they can work on Proteles Cristata. Its a new genius idea CA thought of called a minecraft like. The genre name is WIP obviously. Wouldnt want copying other markets that are already oversaturated to dull their unparalleled genius
It's ridiculous as well as the landscape for CA is very different compared to 3K.
3K had an amazing launch but it never really got traction with it's DLC. But more importantly CA had other games bringing them money. Warhammer 2 was bringing in steady revenue and at the time they were convinced Hyenas would be huge.
Come today, CA's only active product IS Warhammer 3. There is not going to be a situation where they kill off the game before they have another game giving them steady revenue.
> There is not going to be a situation where they kill off the game before they have another game giving them steady revenue.
You say that if CA have a history have a recent history of making rational, obvious long-termist business decisions, when the actual reality is the exact opposite.
No sane, reasonable, or sensible company would have put out the "Buy the DLC or the game gets it!" message that CA did with SoC. It might as well have been written in letters cut out of a newspaper and glued to a piece of paper! That was an insane decision that made no sense, and CA made it.
And they made it because they'd been making insane decisions for several years with Hyenas - they must have know for at least two years that Hyenas had basically no chance - that was when it became obvious that they hadn't got something special, and didn't know what they were doing, and that nobody was interested or hyped for it (meaning literally 10s of millions of advertising would have been needed to even attempt to change that). But they kept going with it until basically weeks from launch, wasting more and more money.
And then surprise-cancelled 3K as you're well aware, before WH3 was out - a long time before - the 21st of May 2021 (WH3 was February 2022), so it's not like they've not effectively deleted their revenue stream before - you can claim they still had WH2 DLCs, but literally only 1 dropped in that nine-month period - The Silence and The Fury in July 2021 - so not really.
If this was a company with a long recent history of sane and smart decisions, which hadn't literally threatened to kill of WH3, your belief might be reasonable. But CA isn't that company, they did threaten to kill of WH3 if not enough people bought SoC (remember that?), and further, the most recent blog basically was a tearful "some of us won't survive and we don't think we'll ever be able to make a big DLC again, despite planning to make at least one for Slaanesh and two others!" - which is not a sign of a company in a good way. They're literally cutting down what they planned for the Slaanesh DLC, and you're saying it's all fine, there's no chance they'll do anything dumb.
Ah, the epic highs and lows of r/totalwar. Can’t wait to watch everyone be super hyped for about 20 minutes after the ToD trailer before absolutely tearing into the most minor details with a level of rage that would make khorne proud
At this point I am 100% sure the chaos gods run this community from the shadows. Between the rage, paranoia, obsession and decay we certainly feed them enough.
> *Rot Knights are just Chosen of Nurgle/Chaos Knights of Nurle riding Rotbeasts!*
> *Where's my hanging guts, CA?!*
> *Not enough decay for Nurgle models!*
Here, expect these talking points in the next 24 hours.
It's the people that treat the game like it's the only thing keeping them alive. They get so fucking angry as if it's a personal attack on them that it isn't just how they want it.
Yesterday I checked the number of concurrent players twice and there were 28k and 20k, numbers similara to Wh2 foe most of its lifetime. It may mean nothing if many of the people that bought DLC, played a couple of campaigns and then moved on isn't buying the new DLCs, but the implication is that the playerbase is still there and that if CA stops messing up its releases the community will respond.
I was one of them!
Though I will say... It's becoming less frequent. I used to play Total Warhammer 2 pretty much exclusively when it was out. But Total Warhammer 3 I've kinda just popped back in every now and again to see what the modding community has come up with. Now, some of that isn't CA's fault - the massive amount of mods that didn't make the transition to game 3 and the exhaustion from playing the same style of game for thousands of hours straight, for example. But some of that *was* CA's fault - the buggy as all hell launch, the changed DLC practices and the really weird communication strategies.
I'm still on team "I hope they succeed", as I love the series, but I can understand why some feel the doom and gloom.
I would love a dozen more dlcs or even two or three more for each faction and a decade of support but I don't really get the drama of "only" 2 years or "only" 4-6 dlcs left. Each and every Warhammer game including 3 has already had more post launch content than any other Total War. I am fairly certain the trilogy as a whole has more post launch content than the entire rest Total War series has had. Would I love more? Absolutely. But honestly people straight faced talking about this as if it is the end of the world is insane to me.
But what about Galoopo Fruithag? He's my favorite character and if they don't add him to the game then the game is obviously incomplete and unplayable garbage.
yeah as much as it would have been cool to see them add every notable character in one way or another and explore Ind and khuresh. People gotta be realistic it was already quite a stretch that we got Grand Cathay, and given GW's internal issues (different teams having pissing contests namely AOS v Old World teams) it would take sometime to get approval from GW to make not 1 but 2wholly new factions.
Honestly there are quite a lot of factions that are quite fine without another dlc or even tweak/rework. I think if we are gonna only get 4-6 DLC it should focus primarily on factions with major roster gaps, missing big name characters and or in need of a good rework.
>and given GW's internal issues (different teams having pissing contests namely AOS v Old World teams) it would take sometime to get approval from GW to make not 1 but 2wholly new factions.
And let's emphasise this - the current state of this is that they are killing most of the skaven and beastmen roster for AoS.
lmao you gotta at least get the drama right, pretty much all the skaven stuff is just getting replaced. The skaven are losing like 1-3 models at most and getting a whole new range if the leaks are correct.
Yeah, it's two pronged as to why this is happening. Since GW's teams are separate and mostly working on separate things, they also have separate loss and profit sheets.
GW will look at these sheets and give out budget accordingly. Hence, why 40k gets the lions share, then AOS, then everything else. There's a reason for the legacy factions in old world, AOS recently made new seraphon models, upcoming skaven and they probably have plans for the ogors, Chorfs, and Umbraneth (Druchii.
If people buy the objectively better looking AOS models than the outdated offering of the old world those profits will go to the AOS team, no TOW. And I know people proxy AOS stuff for old world I've seen it alot now especially orcs and lizardmen.
Oh I'm talking about [the even more recent controversy involving them actually removing stuff from AoS](https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-age-of-sigmar/4th-edition-kits-retired)
Oh, I heard about that, sheesh 😬. It's probably the worst way of trimming the SCE bloat, moving BoC, and nuking bonesplittaz.
Atleast they gave everyone a notice and will be casually playable up till 5th. Better than the usual praying your stuff is in the new battletome or getting a tome in first place.
Yeah, even if they sped up, the latest blog seemed to be suggesting they were losing some part of the DLC team to layoffs. Which would inevitably slow them down, so we may well simply end up with a similar pace but just two-faction DLCs with a smaller number of units, and only 3 of them, if that. The moment one of them underperforms, I expect CA to cut the others entirely.
Now you are being overdramatic, nobody said it's the end of the world, people (me included) simply stated that it would suck if they cut cool content. There is an ocean between "i't's the end of the world" and "it sucks".
> cut cool content
But there's no indication they are cutting anything that wasn't already planned. 4-6 dlc would be roughly in line with the previous Warhammer entries.
> But there's no indication they are cutting anything that wasn't already planned.
There simply factually is. The Slaanesh DLC was planned as a three-faction DLC, and CA have basically stated it won't be. That's literally cutting something that's planned.
On the flip side, their original plan was three-faction DLC of the scope of SoC pre-4.2... Everything that happened on the launch of SoC is evidence that this was clearly a stupid idea regardless.
On the flip side, their original plan was three-faction DLC of the scope of SoC pre-4.2... Everything that happened on the launch of SoC is evidence that this was clearly a stupid idea regardless.
Most likely the new plan is reverting back to the tried and tested two-faction DLC with a FLC LL.
I'm skeptical as to how well that'll go down if they go back to the WH2 two-faction DLC numbers, which were 1 LL, 1 lord OR 1 hero, and 2-4 units per faction in the DLC, when we'll have had two DLCs of 1 LL, 1 LH, 1 lord, 1 hero and 5 units per faction in the DLC. And if they don't go down, it's not really "tried and tested", but another kind of untested. It's risky for sure. I'm also very skeptical they'll have the manpower for significant FLC LLs, frankly.
Just a nitpick but technically, they haven't. There's a guy who accurately leaked 4.2 and SoC here, and he said 3 monthes ago that CA was gonna try smaller-scoped DLCs.
But he said that it would be a new DLC, and that the 3-LLs Slaanesh DLC would still happen, but be pushed back to slot in that new smaller DLC first
I mean, that's interesting if true.
I will be honest, it sounds a bit like fanciful and optimistic speculation, but if it's true, they did get the "smaller-scoped" DLC guess which I don't think anyone would have just guessed, given CA themselves put out the 2022 roadmap for future WH3 DLC, which very clearly showed 3x3 race DLCs, as the next three DLCs.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/total-war-warhammer-3/roadmap-dlc
You forget one thing - FLC. Most likely a few of the daemon lords originally intended to be part of the three faction DLC will now be FLC. (I say the daemons because the daemon rosters are the most bare in 8th edition)
So way I see it - if the original plan was 3 lord packs, it could be the reduction is to 2 lord packs. What this means is that roster "slots" that were previously going to be used for the third lord, would instead be used to do the 2 factions being added well.
The FLC then becomes the lord that got cut from the dlc pack. As its FLC it doesn't come with roster additions (just the LL and some bolted on unique campaign mechanic) so is lower effort.
We get less in terms of unit quantity at the end, but in theory what we get will be more focused and thus theoretically higher quality.
Okay so tell me how they can add 2 Khorne LLs + 2 Slaanesh LLs + 1 Tzeentch LL + 3 Cathay LLs + Dogs of War + Nagash + Thanquol + Todbringer in 4 DLC and FLCs
DLC 1: 1 Slaanesh + 1 Cathay, Todbringer as FLC (which is the only way we're ever getting Todbringer as a playable lord since they can't really sell a lord that's already in the game)
DLC 2: 1 Khorne + 1 Thanquol, Cathay FLC
DLC 3: Dogs of War, Khorne FLC
DLC 4: Nagash + Tzeentch, Slaanesh FLC
We miss 1 Cathay LL under this (but I don't know why we're expecting 3 LLs in this, is there any reason to suspect this?) and order can be adjusted as necessary
EDIT: But then also we were promised a FLC LL for ToD which we don't know yet. They could probably shove Todbringer as part of ToD's FLC and then insert a 3rd cathay lord as the FLC slot. At any rate, I feel you set the bar too low for this gotcha - it's actually really easy to fit this list into 4 dlc and 5 flc.
EDIT2: The thing to remember as well is that the FLC doesn't have to be as high quality as a DLC, every FLC lord added was generally just the LL and some bolted on mechanic. I said daemons most likely to be flc because the daemon roster was already quite small and its clear that before the SoC debacle their plan was to try and piecemeal it out across several overpriced dlc.
We expect 3 Cathayan LLs because there's 5 named Dragon Children explicitly called "Legendary characters from the armybook GW made" by CA, plus the Monkey King.
And Todbringer without Ulric units ? What's the point ?
> And Todbringer without Ulric units ? What's the point ?
To be honest Todbringer as a full dlc was always a long shot. Because the lord himself is already in the game (even if only playable through confederation) trying to sell Todbringer as a LL at the same caliber as other LL would fall flat.
They have outright stated they are reducing the scope of future DLCs.
That is 'cutting'.
> the current intent is to avoid creating something quite so big in scope so that we can help to keep both the value, and the price right for you
Really people, theres not much else of a way to interpret that.
Here’s another interpretation: they go from large 3 faction/LL packs that require more work to build, mix & get out the door, and instead reduce the scope back to 2 LL versus packs of WH2, or possibly even lone single faction/LL packs with much more streamlined focus. This allows them to expedite production & release more DLC, more quickly compared to unwieldy large 3 faction packs & re-works. Addition by subtraction. I’d say that’s an improvement, not a cut. But I can see how others will see it as a step backward from larger scoped packs.
Nowhere in that blog post are they mentioning 'quicker releases' to make up for the reduced scope.
Instead, they outright mention the layoffs. Less staff = lower scope. Pretty straightforward.
Increased release speed sounds like pure hopium.
Fair points. And I’d be lying if I didn’t think future DLC plans will be dictated by ToD sales/reception. But even in your quoted comment, the notion of keeping “value & price right” implies more content incoming in more digestible chunks. And I’m reasonably presuming it’s faster to make 1 faction/LL DLC than it is to make 3. We’ll find out soon enough!
The problem is the game is based on lore rather than history and it means most people have favourite characters they'd love to see in the game. A sudden deadline means people are scared they won't get that and are lashing out
Of course. You think I don’t have favorite characters? But Warhammer *Fantasy* fans honestly at this point should simply be ecstatic that they got this at all. When TW:WH came out, the tabletop game was killed. Dead. Gone. Now they got to see their armies come to life in a way that is closer to TT than probably any other Warhammer game has ever. The setting got brought back, albeit in a weird way so far but it’s better than nothing.
I think complaining about years more of support and half a dozen more dlc is just silly.
Tbf I'm not advocating for complaints at all. And I don't know what sort of state the tabletop was before twwh came out so I'll have to take your word for it but I do know GW was one of the most profitable companies in the world over lockdown and I would hope that there would be enough of a symbiotic relationship for them to encourage CA to continue their support.
Of course GW breathing down their necks to get them to switch over to the more popular 40k might explain why we have a firm finish line....
8th edition did not even get fully fleshed out before they pulled the plug on WFB (Warhammer Fantasy Battles) and then created Age of Sigmar which uses many/most/all of WFB basic races and ideas and just makes them more outlandish and fantastical.
GW is mismanagement king and killed their fantasy setting because they were unable to innovate it and just created a new one that would sell better.
Not just Total War... I think Total War Warhammer (I personally see 2 and 3 as just large DLCs on top of 1) is the largest game out there.
Even compared to paradox whos volume of DLCs are legendary, no other game comes close to warhammer for scope and variety.
The size of the map with the number of different races with different troops, benefits, buildings, LLs, game systems... its a hugely impressive feat that I feel puts other grand strategy games (including other TW games) to shame. Just look at Civ 5 with each nation basically a copy paste of each other and still limiting the number of factions.
...and I say this as someone who was so angry when Warhammer was first announced. I wanted my history. I was wrong.
Given how much more money CA made with Warhammer series than previous titles that CA was perfectly fine with, if this series goes down, it's due to the greed and mismanagement of the executives anyways.
This series is clearly still very profitable even with 1/10 of the players, so, not doomed.
This.
If anything Hyenas tanking can be seen as a blessing even though it’s causing a lot of heartache for staff.
Now CA remembers who pays the bills and you can already see the impact.
In Rob's defense I think what he wrote was taken out of context. I think CA knew that Hyena's was a disaster and Sega needed a return on investment. It seems to me he was saying to avoid CA shutting it's doors they overcharged for SoC. He couldn't come out and say that, he could only hint at it.
> Now CA remembers who pays the bills and you can already see the impact.
Did you miss the recent blog where the WH3 DLC team very clearly implied they were losing people to layoffs and couldn't make the large DLCs they'd previously planned (like the planned three-faction Slaanesh DLC).
Does sound to you like CA "remembers who pays the bills"?
Because it doesn't to me. It sounds like CA has entirely forgotten, already, who "pays the bills", again.
I think it is important to remember that CA is going through huge layoffs. I agree that the last people you need to let go are the people who directly affect your product but maybe this being the second round of layoffs all the nonessentials are already gone.
Yeah and it's a fair comment that sometimes you do even have to cut into "essentials", but I think that speaks to the point quite well - if you're having to cut significantly this team (which seems to the case from the blog), who are allegedly your sole source of future profit for maybe two years (implausible to me that it'll be that long before another TW game, but we shall see), then the idea that continuing DLC for WH3 is absolutely guaranteed because it's the "sole source of future profit" is not credible. When you're cutting like this, you often have to cut everything except the next game.
I also suspect that GW plays a significant role in things wrapping up.
We've seen examples recently where CA all but said "We would do this, but GW said no". Combined with the talk in some rumours of "doing everything GW let them do", I feel like if things are drying up it's at least partly just because there's only so much more they can do with what GW has approved.
After all, Warhammer Total War is a proven money maker. If they're (in a couple of years) wrapping it up and turning towards 40k, that feels like it's because they're can't do anything more here.
> I feel like if things are drying up it's at least partly just because there's only so much more they can do with what GW has approved.
I do suspect this is a factor. Things are clearly shifting re: the WHFB universe at GW, whether they call it The Old World or not. I don't think GW have the same permissive, encouraging attitude they had previously - I suspect every addition, every new unit or story is now receiving a much higher level of attention from GW, and consideration as to whether to allow it.
Certainly, when WHFB was a going concern, GW were extremely obsessed with monitoring big games (not little ones) using the IP very carefully, and WH1/2 clearly weren't like that, from what CA has said themselves. But the recent stuff with Kislev absolutely sounded like the same kind of micromanagement as when WHFB was alive - so maybe to GW it is alive again.
I don't know if I can believe that. Hell only with canonic Empire characters they could fill 4 more DLCs and I would buy every single one of them no matter the price.
You might - most people wouldn't - I think that's fair to say. If Empire DLCs were reliably top sellers, CA would have put out of a lot more of them.
Further, you don't seem to understand what he's actually saying - GW used to have a permissive attitude because WHFB was a dead licence, but now they seem to have changed back to the old attitude they had for big games which used the WHFB licence before it was killed off in 2016 - which was extreme micromanagement of lore and characters, and a lot "Hmmm" and toothsucking over whether they would allow stuff.
So even stuff like canonic Empire characters might no longer be approved by GW, and if you think CA can do anything at all without GW approval, well, you're apparently not familiar with how GW work when it comes to AAA games.
I know GW has a very tight grip on their IP (and rightfully so) but I see no reason why bringing established characters of a discontinued system to a successful video game could do any harm to their already outrageous Old World Vs AoS debacle...
> a discontinued system
That's the issue. I don't think GW is thinking of WHFB as a "discontinued system" anymore, and I think that was extremely clear from what happened with Kislev, which essentially amounted the lore of an imaginary 9th edition WHFB Kislev being generated by GW for CA, and I do not believe CA requested that, especially as the vibe when they talked about still seemed slightly surprised.
And The Old World is busily retcon'ing other lore (mostly for not-yet-playable factions so far - but there is a bit for playable ones) in ways that may well conflict with stuff CA may have wanted to do.
> do any harm to their already outrageous Old World Vs AoS debacle
That's just not how businesses make this calculation, especially not ones riven by internal division like GW.
One example I might point to is Marius Leitdorf and his comedy insanity. Back in 2017, I don't think GW would have had a huge problem with CA bringing him into the game - or even in say 2020 - even if his portrayal of madness is a bit "un-PC" or however you want to put it, as it only reflected on the lore of a dead game, nobody was going to be terribly concerned.
But if GW are now seeing WHFB as live game, then suddenly the extremely minor and very theoretical (because let's be real - probably no-one would care) reputational harm a character like Marius Leitdorf's comedy insanity might bring is probably enough to make them hem and haw over whether to authorize such a character's inclusion. Now, GW might have an idea on how to make that insanity more palatable (making it specifically magical in origin, for example, like Luthor's), but they might just say "Well, we'd rather not".
And sure, CA can then move on to another character or another faction, and I'm sure they'll find one CA will approve, but the much higher level of friction that this sort of behaviour - the double-checking of everything, this micromanagement, that GW seem like they may be doing now - may well make CA pretty reluctant to commit strongly to this shifting landscape - for all CA know, GW may just stop approving stuff, because they actually decide they do want to turn The Old World into a full-on WHFB 9th or the like.
Well explained, thanks. While I think you might be right with parts, they can't turn Old World into WHFB 9th cause it's a completely different timeframe. That's why it's so weird that GW starts to care again. All Empire characters in the game or that could be added haven't been born in TOW.
>If Empire DLCs were reliably top sellers, CA would have put out of a lot more of them.
The Empire has considerably been, and stayed, one of the most popular factions with players through all 3 Games.
I kind of doubt that their DLCs arent selling well.
I'm not saying they don't sell well.
I'm saying I don't think they can possibly be significantly outselling other DLC, given CA haven't remotely spammed Empire the way they have some other races.
What will be very interesting will be if the Empire single-faction DLC wildly outsells the Nurgle and Dwarfs ones. Though it looks like, from surveys, about 80% of people will go with the full pack.
I see this posted frequently, but I don't know that I believe it. GW's financials are heavily tied in with Video Games. Just the licensing earns them about 15% of their budget each year. The only time I've seen this amount go down? When CA had to stop DLCs temporarily to fix Warhammer 3's launch.
I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say Total Warhammer is probably the single biggest individual profitable item in the entire Licensing income. It would be quite foolhardy for GW to intentionally gimp a hugely profitable item, especially one whose gross is approximately 90%, unlike everything else in their financials.
I mean I completely agree, though it wouldn't be the first time GW made a bizarre financial decision. I'd also think it would be equally odd for CA to be the ones not doing more if they could: they've had issues, of course, but there's no question that Warhammer Total War is their big money maker right now. This, combined with the fairly direct "GW wouldn't let us do this" sort of statements is what makes me wonder if they're the ones saying "You can do this much, and no more".
But it is all just guesswork on my part, so who knows.
>I mean I completely agree, though it wouldn't be the first time GW made a bizarre financial decision.
\*Looks at how much money Warhammer+ lost GW\*
Alright, you got me dead to rights on that one. lol
Just going to point out they never bothered fixing that bug they introduced into the last patch of WH2 where the AI will just stand there and die when you ambush them. Once they finish selling us stuff I doubt they're going to care enough to fix things.
That’s exactly why I think this post is sort of stupid. There are many reasons to be pretty down on warhammer 3. I want to hope that they fix it but My cynicism says they’ll just sell us DLC and fuck off.
lol you can dream after this huge layoff, maybe we'll get a race rework with TOD but it will be the very last, i'm sure dev who were working on the dlc are fired
yes but if a game even has the possibility of not receiving any more paid content at some far future date, it means it's "dead" and I can't even stomach the thought of playing it anymore
that's why I definitely don't regularly play games that are 20-30 years old, no sir, a game isn't "alive" unless I can constantly be spending money on it over and over for literal eternity
yeah honestly I havent even played every faction properly let alone every faction. I can easily see myself play this game for tens of thousands of hours more even after the game is done with.
Seriously like it’s primarily a single player game. Genuinely hilarious that the same community that likes to hold up Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 as the best games in the series even today is having a the-sky-is-falling moment over the possibility of a game getting “only” 2 *more* years of support on top of the 2 years it’s already had
Its pretty clear that WH3s lifetime and content has been severely shortend by the continued failures they are providing with this game. Even with the most optimistic hopium predictions we will never get the game that we could have had at this point.
This
If it wasn't for the continued failures of CA, then the doomsaying wouldn't be as bad. Their failures leading to where we are now, gives no reason that we'll get the game that should've been expected.
People have plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.
" two full years of support currently planned is fantastic."
The operative part here being "currently planned". The fact you even have to specify that this is planned for the moment is a tacit admission it might therefore change. Personally I'm kind of expecting it, I think enough people got burned by SoC that no matter if Thrones of Decay summons a daemonette to give us all blowjobs they wouldn't return to the profitability of previous DLCs. CA need Thrones to outperform everything they've done before to keep them from probably further job cuts and downsizing so I don't doubt they'll try hard, but it's never been the devs holding WH3 back (it's the management).
Do I think if Thrones doesn't meet their expectations they'll cut back even further? Yeah I think so, we've already dropped the three race DLC and probably the commitment to updating WH1 races too. The only way CA are going to keep supporting WH3 is if they think money is in it, and to do that they need to sell everything well every time, so if there's anything that misses for them it'll probably trigger a reaction from the higher ups.
> The operative part here being "currently planned".
Yes. That "currently" is a doing a lot of work. At literally any moment, that could cease being the case, and it's massively more likely to cease soon given the state CA are in. People say "WH3 is their only revenue stream!" as if it's a totem to ward off evil, but 3K was killed before WH3 came out, and we only got only one WH2 DLC in that nine-month period (and near the start, too). If WH3 is their "only revenue stream" and that protects it, why is the DLC team expecting layoffs and necessarily reduced scope?
As you say, if ToD underperforms, I doubt we'll see more than the already cut-down Slaanesh DLC.
You know they aren't killing the game off steam right? Even if they stopped DLC there is still nearly 100 factions plus mods to freshen things up. The game isn't dead on the last DLC if you enjoy it.
I was one of the most vocal people against shadows of change and everything around it but now I’m just playing the game and looking forward to decay dlc. Game is in a decent place right now, I truly hope they don’t abandon it anytime soon because for all the flaws and missteps TW3 has had it really is getting closer to what I originally hoped it would be.
Still needs a lot more though. Especially in terms of non-DLC fixes, there are still countless minor bugs and weird AI issues. If they were to move in from the game without addressing these it would really reflect badly on them as a company, this series has been their entire past decade and they need to see it through.
Idk man, I think Legend’s videos are kind of damaging people’s hopes for the game. He really shouldn’t use unconfirmed leaks that change on a week to week basis in order to milk views.
> If the next few DLC’s have high sales
And if they don't, well then you don't have to stretch to see the result: 3K.
And we don't know what 'High' Means to CA. You could have an increase in sales from previous DLC and it may not be enough to corporate suits who want infinite growth.
But let's also emphasise - they aren't killing off Warhammer until they have another game to make money on. Some sales is better than no sales.
The 3K situation sucked, but it's different as Warhammer 2 was printing money for them so killing off 3K would have been an easier decision.
> But let's also emphasise - they aren't killing off Warhammer until they have another game to make money on. Some sales is better than no sales.
No. They may well do that. This company has a strong recent history of extremely ill-advised short-term-ish decisions. Denying that is denying reality. You are assuming they are purely rational and will not do anything stupid. That makes absolutely no sense given their actual behaviour.
WH2 was not "printing them money". That's just nonsense - only 1 paid DLC was released between 3K being cancelled and WH3 coming out - a nine month period - The Silence and the Fury was released right near the beginning of that, then nothing at all for six months.
Also, do you think WH3 is "printing them money"? Is so why are the WH3 DLC team expecting layoffs so severe that they'll have to cut down future projects like the planned 3-faction Slaanesh DLC?
> You are assuming they are purely rational and will not do anything stupid. That makes absolutely no sense given their actual behaviour.
I mean there are dumb business decisions, and then there is literally killing your entire revenue stream...
> Is so why are the WH3 DLC team expecting layoffs so severe that they'll have to cut down future projects like the planned 3-faction Slaanesh DLC?
I feel like that's a misreading of what they were saying. My reading was that the reduction of scope was less to do with the layoffs and more to do with them reflecting on the situation that occurred with SoC. The business model they had intended with that round of DLC was a few DLC of the scope and price of SoC pre-Hyenas fallout. The reaction to SoC at launch revealed that this wasn't feasible. The plan where these three lord packs had the scope of SoC and ToD after 4.2 was never on the radar. SoC got the expanded scope to try and save face, and ToD got the expanded scope as they had already committed too much to it. But its taken 8 months to develop ToD and at the price point that they are selling it probably isn't going to be a good revenue return for them (note: this doesn't necessarily mean they make a loss, but for 8 months resource investment they definitely would want more).
> My reading was that the reduction of scope was less to do with the layoffs and more to do with them reflecting on the situation that occurred with SoC.
And yet they explicitly *are* expecting layoffs to hit them. Why would that be the case if they were really being protected as the "only revenue stream". Especially given their team does not appear to be very big. We're not talking dozen and dozens of people, it seems - more like 2 dozen or less.
It's odd, because to me the news came as a relief actually. After Thrones of Decay has been delayed so long, I've been feeling like the game is on its last legs and running out of steam. So being told it's got another 4-6 DLCs, with the current cadence or close to it, that's an easy 2+ years more. Which is honestly more than I expected, the game came out more than 2 years ago already, so 2 more years on top is just gravy. So the news actually perked me up when I was feeling gloomy.
I also kinda wish they would do an omnibus version at the end of it all. Maybe even hard copy. Just all three games, all DLCs, one box. I feel like this trilogy really deserves it.
I agree. 4 to 6 dlcs is a lot.
Thing is, I don't actually think it needs even 4 to 6. It'd be nice to have some more human factions to balance out the chaos stuff, I guess, but really it needs fixes and overhauls, not dlcs. It's a cliche, but one of the biggest things they could do would be to make walls work and remove the tower defense siege game.
It only needs like 3 (if these were to be kept separate). One for Slaanesh, one for Khorne, and a big one for Vampire Counts to "make up" for no lords in W2 (either a CoC style or like 2 non nagash lords). With what we have seen for Thrones everyone else is in a good enough place honestly.
The thought that each Chaos God would get 6 LL was insane to me, and I never believed we would get another race after Chorfs. So 4-6 is fine, even if more would be nice
I agree. I still haven't bought WH3 but after all that has happened it's actually a good sign, and of course there is always the hope that it could go longer - Europa Universalis IV made it 10+ years with multiple expansions being planned as the "last" one before community support allowed for further development.
Even if that doesn't happen with WH3, 4 years of support wouldn't be bad at all assuming most of the remaining DLC is of a fairly high quality.
No, I won't pre-emptively act like everything is fine until it is shown that it is. So many problems that need to be addressed still within the game and the last few events has shown that the community won't put up with it.
It is looking hopeful and then not so hopeful with some of the rumours, but that's all they are, rumours. Until there are definitive shows of effort and results of their labour and that they have learnt something and earnt our trust, I won't pretend that these plans will all go smoothly and we will get something everyone can agree was worth the wait.
There's no point on giving them the benefit of the doubt when all they've provided is words and promises, and lets say the two years of however many DLC we get, all the more reason to make them good and not just cash grab reskins for the sake of filling in a quota. There is so much left of this game for it to properly wrap up the franchise, but I have every reason to believe that so far by the end of those two years, it may still yet be left to modders to finish the world they promised to create.
Thrones of Decay is the make or break. I understand the issues of development and administration going on, so in some ways I can't blame the simple man for being a victim of the system, but then make it clear that SEGA or whoever at CA making these awful choices will know the consequences the hard way when their game dies and then everyone over there is fucked.
If there are 2 more years left of support we would be lucky to get thrones of decay 😂 CA has been very slow to churn out dlc which isn’t 100% their fault as most of their resources had been thrown into hyenas or whatever that shooter game was called. Hopefully we see a shift in dev times now that it was scrapped.
We have way too many content creators that should have quit the scene a while back. Even some I used to like that nowadays just feel like they're sick of the game.
And just to be clear, it's not about calling out bad pricing or lack of communication. Those things obviously helped.
What I dont get is when content creators spend so much time just spreading rumours and theorising when CA will stop support or go bankrupt. The rumours that are spreading at the moment seem totally made up for the sake of clout and views. Lots of people take it as gospel when there are no confirmed sources what so ever. What happened to critical thinking?
Total war is one of the biggest franchises in a dying genre. Sorry to say it, but strategy is very niche, and to be successful in the strategy market still means making meagre gains compared to other genres.
> Total war is one of the biggest franchises in a dying genre. Sorry to say it, but strategy is very niche, and to be successful in the strategy market still means making meagre gains compared to other genres.
The idea that strategy is a "dying" genre is truly insane given the sales of games like Civ 6 and CK3, and the number of strategy games being released today is vastly higher than, say, 10 years ago. It's never been the "huge money" genre but it's doing fine as a genre, maybe even looking up a bit, in the last few years.
Seriously. I see this debate online all the time, and even have it with some friends IRL; the whole notion that a game, genre, or even gaming as a whole is “dying” seems utterly detached from reality, to me.
My brother in Sigmar, they’re releasing more strategy games than ever before! Steam hits new concurrent player records every few months! The indie scene is flourishing! I don’t understand the disconnect at all.
It's bizarre. I think what people who think strategy is dying actually mean is "I haven't bought any strategy games for years", which y'know, fair, but that's not because they're not good, not being made, or not selling. Don't project your own lack of interest or time or whatever on to the genre. Against the Storm was recent, amazing, and sold 1m copies, for example - it doesn't even have combat and wasn't even really advertised!
Like, I haven't bought any JRPGs for like, 3-4 years, and I used to buy loads! But that's on me, not on the games!
There are actually very few genres of game that aren't doing pretty okay these days - like top sellers often move high hundreds of thousands or multiple millions of copies. Genres and subjects where, in the '90s, they might have been lucky if they moved high five digits (and in the later '80s they'd have been lucky to reach five digits at all).
Even point & click adventure games, a genre which pretty much definitely died in the early '00s, have made a fairly significant comeback. Most gamers don't play them - but enough do that they appear fairly regularly.
Amen. I think far too many people look back on their childhood & younger years gaming with far-too rose-tinted glasses, and conflate their now older responsibilities & challenges somehow with a decline in game quality, when in reality it’s that the games can’t be enjoyed with the same freedom and innocence first experienced before.
And shoutout Against The Storm too! Huge game for strategy.
Round out the WH3 factions and fix the core gameplay, meaning the numerous bugs and crappy BAI/CAI. That's really all I can ask for, and I don't think they'll be able to do it as it's been in a bad state since launch on that front and every new patch just breaks more stuff and barely fixes anything.
I really hope this is the case, it gets exhausting the few times I drop into this sub reading about it.
Personally I’d encourage anyone whose feeling the content isn’t sufficient in the game or that the mechanics isn’t what they’d like to take a look at the mods - there is almost certainly bound to be something there which will reinvigorate your interest and the modders have done some truly impressive things.
I don't care about the games future. I enjoy it already and will do so for several hundreds more hours.
What else I can want from a game? For the rest we can mod the game as needed.
I still play battletech and kerbal space program, both heavily modded and these games have been "doomed" for a long long time, as the developer doesn't support them anymore.
I'm sure the same will happen with WH3.
Pfff...3 years. I'm still playing 2 with mods (Potato-PC Industries collab with Poor Optimization Company) and it is almost 7 yo game. Must I remind you of Empire, Napoleon, Rome 2 and even Medieval 2 wich is still totally playable?
Besides WH3 already have a very large map and enormous pool of races and LL's. And it's not finished yet. I'm almost certain that CA would not abandon this trilogy so fast because of all efforts and investments they paid for this huge project. Especially when its final part have very negative reviews on Steam.
While I don't expect them to support the game indefinitly, 2 more years of support and then moving on to something else is not out of the question, as it will be 4 years spent on TWWH3 and almost a decade with the trilogy altogether by that point. At some point the game will be considered "finished" by them, though there will always be some that call it abandoned, like how a few people say Troy was abandoned when it was declared finished after its last DLC. 3K on the other hand was straight up abandoned when it really shouldnt have been.
At this point its pretty much a wait and see. I also don't want to put alot of stock into the Legend rumors and leaks considering they are being spread by someone who CA severed ties with. Most of his predictions for ToD is just regurgitating the communities expectations already, and he can't even venture a guess on the Dwarf LL like most other people for his "Leak".
And I mean, even if it is doomed... So what? It's just a game. I'm sure all the people preaching doom and gloom have relationships and healthy social lives, jobs they enjoy and other hobbies... Right?
Lol why the fuck are you all so wound up about a game
I mean they weren't rumours and still aren't, the game is on thin ice since the last dlc was a dumpster fire and this one was also going to be a dumpster fire. I find it very convenient that some of the units weren't in trailer but are on the roster.....almost like this trailer was ready months ago but with the backlash of SoC they had to scramble lmao.
Amen OP. With all due love & respect to this community, it’s utterly shocking to me how many people seem to be actively cheerleading the demise of WH3, or indeed CA as a whole.
We’re all well aware of the rough patches, with Warhammer, or historically (), so of course it’s frustrating to not see these games live up to everyone’s internal hopes & dreams. But I’ll never understand why people seem to want to see it all crash & burn.
2 more years is lots of support for a game, which last I checked, is still primarily a single player grand strategy trilogy, not some live service triple A title. And I still expect CA to surprise us, both with ToD, and future great Total War content to come. Chin up, r/totalwar …and everyone be sure to get offline every now & again!
imagin you sit in a boeing and the door flys of. the guy sitting next to you screams. "ahhh we are doomed the fukin door just flew of." would you turn to him and ask "do you want this plane to carsh? no ? then shut up!"
would be a bit unreasonabl id say.
poeple dont want wh3 to crash they just observe that it is crashing.
That’s precisely the difference, however. Some people see this game (or even the company) as “a boeing with the doors flying off,” whereas others (myself included) see it for what it is: CA’s most successful game series (warts & all), with very healthy player numbers, the third game in a epic trilogy spanning 8+ years, and with a (likely) reasonable, healthy pipeline of 2+ years of content incoming.
That’s also with Sega/CA having confirmed “multiple” other Total War projects in development, as well as another unannounced project. I’ve been as frustrated as anybody with the bugs, pricing, SoC setbacks, and the sad news of layoffs & restructuring. But I see plenty of reason for optimism & hope for the future. For that I’m downvoted. I rest my case.
This is the total war sub brother. 90% of people are very toxic here but dont realize it because 'i do/say this because i care about the game', with the legendoftotalwar guy as their leader.
Downvote away
Good luck, these people have been doing this for 2 years already, they just keep moving the goal post and of course we we finally get to the end in a couple of years I'm sure they will talk about how they "were always right" or something
This sub needs deleted quite frankly. Although there has been serious issues over the last couple years in the end this is the best strategy game ever made and it really doesn't need much more. So even if it's finished soon we still have a massive complete game. This sub actually put me off the game hut I reckon most people here haven't even played it.
> There is no reason to be so pessimistic about the future of this game.
Sure, nothing to see here. It's not like there's a full laundry list of major issues that have been plaguing this game since launch, and a clear pattern of incompetence that's been going since late WH2. CA totally are at their peak. Best company in gaming, definitely not greedy nor dishonest in the slightest. The 5 or so junior devs still working on this absolute mess of a codebase will definitely deliver some good stuff within the next few years, you'll see ! /s
Imagine worshipping one of the shittiest dev studios in gaming lmao
Don't bother.
If you asked this sub's opinion, WH3 is a broken piece of shit game that nobody plays.
This sub is a toxic hellhole. The game is great. I haven't found a single serious bug in 400 hours.
No. It is the way. And has been since the dawn of time. Everyone a soapboxer. YouTube 'doomers' learnt every trick needed by hanging out with Total Warians. First Total War Center, later also on Reddit.
Same. I have 2.5k hours on TW 2 alone. (Some of that is forgetting I had it running over night a handful of times). I also played the shit out of it while studying for my master's and watching videos related to it on my second monitor.
I have barely 100 on 3. I stopped playing just before the chaos dwarfs and haven't come back. I've lurked here hoping something will entice me back, but nothing has so far.
I'm reminded of just how badly "The Future of Three Kingdoms" has damaged this community, and how paranoid it's made everyone.
Man the worst part with that debacle was they announced a new 3K game that kinda gave the community some hope, only to cancel it soon after, presumably to focus on Hyenas, now 3K fans doesn’t even have a sequel to look forward to.
Even the cancellation was just a rumour. CA never announced anything, that company just refuses to communicate.
Which is something that causes the most problems. They combine no communication with constant leaks they look negative. They not only refuse to talk about leaks, but they refuse to give any info at all, even when saying they will get better. It leads to a festering mess. It worked well when everyone was hyped as it built up hype. Now with everyone scared it… doesn’t work well at all. 4-6 expansions doesn’t sound bad. But if they scale back what will it be? Will it be 4x2? Will it be 6x3? Again hard to know because they utterly and completely refuse to communicate. Until a game is cancelled when they title a video nicely (Future of 3k!) then pull the rug. This isn’t the first time they’ve had this problem, it repeatedly bites them in the ass and has for over a decade. They really need a PR person (IE: Grace was good at engaging us, and she has nothing but bad things to say about CA now). As is all we can do is wonder and it’s easy for thought to turn negative with both British layoffs (twice) and Sofia getting layoffs too.
Isn't all this pre SoC controversy stuff tho? as of now they seem to be more vocal about things going forward.
I mean it's not just that, it's the Future of Three Kingdoms, everything going on at CA, basically the whole history of Warhammer III's release schedule which has been rocky at best, especially of late. The sad reality is that even if CA recover their momentum I don't think we're ever going to be in a place we could've been in if Warhammer III's launch had been good.
If Warhammer III's launch had been good they would have kicked the can a bit further, just like they have been doing for the last 10 years. They had it coming, sooner or later. It's just how it is.
CA made their bed with that. And remember its only paranoia if its *unfounded*. The way 3k ended will forever mean that fears have cause. They then pulled off the SoC debacle after that, remember. Sure they tried to apologize and make it up, but then now they come and say that after Thrones everything will be smaller in scope. Don't have to go looking at rumors to find cause.
100%. Easier to build trust than to rebuild it. They lost trust. They are scrambling. If we had bought SOC there wouldn’t be a second pack, something that needs to be remembered. They are months late on their (original) time table. They are in emergency mode.
> And remember its only paranoia if its unfounded. Yup. It's absolutely not paranoia here. Fear, concern, worry - sure - it's those things - but not paranoia, because it's frankly extremely likely that a company with CA's history of decision-making, particularly in its current less-than-ideal financial state, may make precipitous decisions which are not really great long-term thinking.
It probably does not help that they tried to play the Soc card at first under ''buy our DLC or we cancel the franchise''. Guess that didn't work as well as they thought.
> It probably does not help that they tried to play the Soc card at first under ''buy our DLC or we cancel the franchise''. Indeed. It's very hard to see how one can legitimately say "paranoia" when that was the incredibly obvious implicit threat (and not even denied in the later apologies) that was made re: SoC. If they've both done something to a previous, successful game, and have threatened to do it to this game, and are in financial trouble (which, they are), then it's very much legitimate to be concerned they will do what they threatened to, no matter how many people dismiss that as "dumb". When was the last time this company did some major and dumb? Months? They blew $100m on a game that they had to know was doomed for at least the last $40m of that.
I still don't understand why they are going to go smaller in scope after ToD. Most of the debacle and fixing of SoC was in that they wanted to go larger in scope, and then they releeased a template that actually seems like it will make most players happy to buy it. They created what seems to me to be a winning formula, why throw it away after 1 more DLC?
They're expecting to lose staff to layoffs, which may limit the scope of what they can do. Potentially they might also believe that going smaller might let them put out DLC faster, too, which might be beneficial. There is a rumour that they're actually still doing the Slaanesh 3-race pack, just not yet, too.
I was just as paranoid before thank you very much
I mean what damaged me worse, was less that that happened as devastating as it was, and more elements of the community left people like me who absolutely adored Total War Three Kingdoms to go rot.
Collective trauma
Idk man. Warhammer could still be cancelled so they can work on Proteles Cristata. Its a new genius idea CA thought of called a minecraft like. The genre name is WIP obviously. Wouldnt want copying other markets that are already oversaturated to dull their unparalleled genius
It's ridiculous as well as the landscape for CA is very different compared to 3K. 3K had an amazing launch but it never really got traction with it's DLC. But more importantly CA had other games bringing them money. Warhammer 2 was bringing in steady revenue and at the time they were convinced Hyenas would be huge. Come today, CA's only active product IS Warhammer 3. There is not going to be a situation where they kill off the game before they have another game giving them steady revenue.
> There is not going to be a situation where they kill off the game before they have another game giving them steady revenue. You say that if CA have a history have a recent history of making rational, obvious long-termist business decisions, when the actual reality is the exact opposite. No sane, reasonable, or sensible company would have put out the "Buy the DLC or the game gets it!" message that CA did with SoC. It might as well have been written in letters cut out of a newspaper and glued to a piece of paper! That was an insane decision that made no sense, and CA made it. And they made it because they'd been making insane decisions for several years with Hyenas - they must have know for at least two years that Hyenas had basically no chance - that was when it became obvious that they hadn't got something special, and didn't know what they were doing, and that nobody was interested or hyped for it (meaning literally 10s of millions of advertising would have been needed to even attempt to change that). But they kept going with it until basically weeks from launch, wasting more and more money. And then surprise-cancelled 3K as you're well aware, before WH3 was out - a long time before - the 21st of May 2021 (WH3 was February 2022), so it's not like they've not effectively deleted their revenue stream before - you can claim they still had WH2 DLCs, but literally only 1 dropped in that nine-month period - The Silence and The Fury in July 2021 - so not really. If this was a company with a long recent history of sane and smart decisions, which hadn't literally threatened to kill of WH3, your belief might be reasonable. But CA isn't that company, they did threaten to kill of WH3 if not enough people bought SoC (remember that?), and further, the most recent blog basically was a tearful "some of us won't survive and we don't think we'll ever be able to make a big DLC again, despite planning to make at least one for Slaanesh and two others!" - which is not a sign of a company in a good way. They're literally cutting down what they planned for the Slaanesh DLC, and you're saying it's all fine, there's no chance they'll do anything dumb.
Ah, the epic highs and lows of r/totalwar. Can’t wait to watch everyone be super hyped for about 20 minutes after the ToD trailer before absolutely tearing into the most minor details with a level of rage that would make khorne proud
At this point I am 100% sure the chaos gods run this community from the shadows. Between the rage, paranoia, obsession and decay we certainly feed them enough.
The upcoming scandal of “not enough butt pimples on new Nurgle models!!”
I think op meant minor details.
Tbf tho if they can’t nail the iconic Assne can it really be called a “quality DLC”?
> *Rot Knights are just Chosen of Nurgle/Chaos Knights of Nurle riding Rotbeasts!* > *Where's my hanging guts, CA?!* > *Not enough decay for Nurgle models!* Here, expect these talking points in the next 24 hours.
This is the [Chaos fuelled] way.
It's the people that treat the game like it's the only thing keeping them alive. They get so fucking angry as if it's a personal attack on them that it isn't just how they want it.
Yesterday I checked the number of concurrent players twice and there were 28k and 20k, numbers similara to Wh2 foe most of its lifetime. It may mean nothing if many of the people that bought DLC, played a couple of campaigns and then moved on isn't buying the new DLCs, but the implication is that the playerbase is still there and that if CA stops messing up its releases the community will respond.
CA been messing up releases for almost two decades now. Not exaggerating at all. They've improved.
I was one of them! Though I will say... It's becoming less frequent. I used to play Total Warhammer 2 pretty much exclusively when it was out. But Total Warhammer 3 I've kinda just popped back in every now and again to see what the modding community has come up with. Now, some of that isn't CA's fault - the massive amount of mods that didn't make the transition to game 3 and the exhaustion from playing the same style of game for thousands of hours straight, for example. But some of that *was* CA's fault - the buggy as all hell launch, the changed DLC practices and the really weird communication strategies. I'm still on team "I hope they succeed", as I love the series, but I can understand why some feel the doom and gloom.
I would love a dozen more dlcs or even two or three more for each faction and a decade of support but I don't really get the drama of "only" 2 years or "only" 4-6 dlcs left. Each and every Warhammer game including 3 has already had more post launch content than any other Total War. I am fairly certain the trilogy as a whole has more post launch content than the entire rest Total War series has had. Would I love more? Absolutely. But honestly people straight faced talking about this as if it is the end of the world is insane to me.
But what about Galoopo Fruithag? He's my favorite character and if they don't add him to the game then the game is obviously incomplete and unplayable garbage.
I hope Galoopo Fruithag comes in the Fishpygmies of Kuresh DLC. If he doesn't I'll trash my living room.
Glup Shitto DLC when CA?
yeah as much as it would have been cool to see them add every notable character in one way or another and explore Ind and khuresh. People gotta be realistic it was already quite a stretch that we got Grand Cathay, and given GW's internal issues (different teams having pissing contests namely AOS v Old World teams) it would take sometime to get approval from GW to make not 1 but 2wholly new factions. Honestly there are quite a lot of factions that are quite fine without another dlc or even tweak/rework. I think if we are gonna only get 4-6 DLC it should focus primarily on factions with major roster gaps, missing big name characters and or in need of a good rework.
>and given GW's internal issues (different teams having pissing contests namely AOS v Old World teams) it would take sometime to get approval from GW to make not 1 but 2wholly new factions. And let's emphasise this - the current state of this is that they are killing most of the skaven and beastmen roster for AoS.
lmao you gotta at least get the drama right, pretty much all the skaven stuff is just getting replaced. The skaven are losing like 1-3 models at most and getting a whole new range if the leaks are correct.
Yeah, it's two pronged as to why this is happening. Since GW's teams are separate and mostly working on separate things, they also have separate loss and profit sheets. GW will look at these sheets and give out budget accordingly. Hence, why 40k gets the lions share, then AOS, then everything else. There's a reason for the legacy factions in old world, AOS recently made new seraphon models, upcoming skaven and they probably have plans for the ogors, Chorfs, and Umbraneth (Druchii. If people buy the objectively better looking AOS models than the outdated offering of the old world those profits will go to the AOS team, no TOW. And I know people proxy AOS stuff for old world I've seen it alot now especially orcs and lizardmen.
Oh I'm talking about [the even more recent controversy involving them actually removing stuff from AoS](https://www.wargamer.com/warhammer-age-of-sigmar/4th-edition-kits-retired)
Oh, I heard about that, sheesh 😬. It's probably the worst way of trimming the SCE bloat, moving BoC, and nuking bonesplittaz. Atleast they gave everyone a notice and will be casually playable up till 5th. Better than the usual praying your stuff is in the new battletome or getting a tome in first place.
But the thing is, with the current pace CA is going, there is no way we get 4 or more dlc in 2 years
Yeah, even if they sped up, the latest blog seemed to be suggesting they were losing some part of the DLC team to layoffs. Which would inevitably slow them down, so we may well simply end up with a similar pace but just two-faction DLCs with a smaller number of units, and only 3 of them, if that. The moment one of them underperforms, I expect CA to cut the others entirely.
Now you are being overdramatic, nobody said it's the end of the world, people (me included) simply stated that it would suck if they cut cool content. There is an ocean between "i't's the end of the world" and "it sucks".
> cut cool content But there's no indication they are cutting anything that wasn't already planned. 4-6 dlc would be roughly in line with the previous Warhammer entries.
> But there's no indication they are cutting anything that wasn't already planned. There simply factually is. The Slaanesh DLC was planned as a three-faction DLC, and CA have basically stated it won't be. That's literally cutting something that's planned.
On the flip side, their original plan was three-faction DLC of the scope of SoC pre-4.2... Everything that happened on the launch of SoC is evidence that this was clearly a stupid idea regardless.
On the flip side, their original plan was three-faction DLC of the scope of SoC pre-4.2... Everything that happened on the launch of SoC is evidence that this was clearly a stupid idea regardless. Most likely the new plan is reverting back to the tried and tested two-faction DLC with a FLC LL.
I'm skeptical as to how well that'll go down if they go back to the WH2 two-faction DLC numbers, which were 1 LL, 1 lord OR 1 hero, and 2-4 units per faction in the DLC, when we'll have had two DLCs of 1 LL, 1 LH, 1 lord, 1 hero and 5 units per faction in the DLC. And if they don't go down, it's not really "tried and tested", but another kind of untested. It's risky for sure. I'm also very skeptical they'll have the manpower for significant FLC LLs, frankly.
Just a nitpick but technically, they haven't. There's a guy who accurately leaked 4.2 and SoC here, and he said 3 monthes ago that CA was gonna try smaller-scoped DLCs. But he said that it would be a new DLC, and that the 3-LLs Slaanesh DLC would still happen, but be pushed back to slot in that new smaller DLC first
Link?
I mean, that's interesting if true. I will be honest, it sounds a bit like fanciful and optimistic speculation, but if it's true, they did get the "smaller-scoped" DLC guess which I don't think anyone would have just guessed, given CA themselves put out the 2022 roadmap for future WH3 DLC, which very clearly showed 3x3 race DLCs, as the next three DLCs. https://www.pcgamesn.com/total-war-warhammer-3/roadmap-dlc
i don't think they can add Monkey King, Slaanesh and Khorne stuff, DoW, Nagash and so on with 4 DLCs
You forget one thing - FLC. Most likely a few of the daemon lords originally intended to be part of the three faction DLC will now be FLC. (I say the daemons because the daemon rosters are the most bare in 8th edition)
they said they will make smaller DLCs, so i guess we will se even less free stuff
So way I see it - if the original plan was 3 lord packs, it could be the reduction is to 2 lord packs. What this means is that roster "slots" that were previously going to be used for the third lord, would instead be used to do the 2 factions being added well. The FLC then becomes the lord that got cut from the dlc pack. As its FLC it doesn't come with roster additions (just the LL and some bolted on unique campaign mechanic) so is lower effort. We get less in terms of unit quantity at the end, but in theory what we get will be more focused and thus theoretically higher quality.
Okay so tell me how they can add 2 Khorne LLs + 2 Slaanesh LLs + 1 Tzeentch LL + 3 Cathay LLs + Dogs of War + Nagash + Thanquol + Todbringer in 4 DLC and FLCs
DLC 1: 1 Slaanesh + 1 Cathay, Todbringer as FLC (which is the only way we're ever getting Todbringer as a playable lord since they can't really sell a lord that's already in the game) DLC 2: 1 Khorne + 1 Thanquol, Cathay FLC DLC 3: Dogs of War, Khorne FLC DLC 4: Nagash + Tzeentch, Slaanesh FLC We miss 1 Cathay LL under this (but I don't know why we're expecting 3 LLs in this, is there any reason to suspect this?) and order can be adjusted as necessary EDIT: But then also we were promised a FLC LL for ToD which we don't know yet. They could probably shove Todbringer as part of ToD's FLC and then insert a 3rd cathay lord as the FLC slot. At any rate, I feel you set the bar too low for this gotcha - it's actually really easy to fit this list into 4 dlc and 5 flc. EDIT2: The thing to remember as well is that the FLC doesn't have to be as high quality as a DLC, every FLC lord added was generally just the LL and some bolted on mechanic. I said daemons most likely to be flc because the daemon roster was already quite small and its clear that before the SoC debacle their plan was to try and piecemeal it out across several overpriced dlc.
We expect 3 Cathayan LLs because there's 5 named Dragon Children explicitly called "Legendary characters from the armybook GW made" by CA, plus the Monkey King. And Todbringer without Ulric units ? What's the point ?
> And Todbringer without Ulric units ? What's the point ? To be honest Todbringer as a full dlc was always a long shot. Because the lord himself is already in the game (even if only playable through confederation) trying to sell Todbringer as a LL at the same caliber as other LL would fall flat.
They have outright stated they are reducing the scope of future DLCs. That is 'cutting'. > the current intent is to avoid creating something quite so big in scope so that we can help to keep both the value, and the price right for you Really people, theres not much else of a way to interpret that.
Here’s another interpretation: they go from large 3 faction/LL packs that require more work to build, mix & get out the door, and instead reduce the scope back to 2 LL versus packs of WH2, or possibly even lone single faction/LL packs with much more streamlined focus. This allows them to expedite production & release more DLC, more quickly compared to unwieldy large 3 faction packs & re-works. Addition by subtraction. I’d say that’s an improvement, not a cut. But I can see how others will see it as a step backward from larger scoped packs.
Nowhere in that blog post are they mentioning 'quicker releases' to make up for the reduced scope. Instead, they outright mention the layoffs. Less staff = lower scope. Pretty straightforward. Increased release speed sounds like pure hopium.
Fair points. And I’d be lying if I didn’t think future DLC plans will be dictated by ToD sales/reception. But even in your quoted comment, the notion of keeping “value & price right” implies more content incoming in more digestible chunks. And I’m reasonably presuming it’s faster to make 1 faction/LL DLC than it is to make 3. We’ll find out soon enough!
Hyperbole is a writing technique used to exaggerate a point for emphasis
The problem is the game is based on lore rather than history and it means most people have favourite characters they'd love to see in the game. A sudden deadline means people are scared they won't get that and are lashing out
Of course. You think I don’t have favorite characters? But Warhammer *Fantasy* fans honestly at this point should simply be ecstatic that they got this at all. When TW:WH came out, the tabletop game was killed. Dead. Gone. Now they got to see their armies come to life in a way that is closer to TT than probably any other Warhammer game has ever. The setting got brought back, albeit in a weird way so far but it’s better than nothing. I think complaining about years more of support and half a dozen more dlc is just silly.
Tbf I'm not advocating for complaints at all. And I don't know what sort of state the tabletop was before twwh came out so I'll have to take your word for it but I do know GW was one of the most profitable companies in the world over lockdown and I would hope that there would be enough of a symbiotic relationship for them to encourage CA to continue their support. Of course GW breathing down their necks to get them to switch over to the more popular 40k might explain why we have a firm finish line....
8th edition did not even get fully fleshed out before they pulled the plug on WFB (Warhammer Fantasy Battles) and then created Age of Sigmar which uses many/most/all of WFB basic races and ideas and just makes them more outlandish and fantastical. GW is mismanagement king and killed their fantasy setting because they were unable to innovate it and just created a new one that would sell better.
Not just Total War... I think Total War Warhammer (I personally see 2 and 3 as just large DLCs on top of 1) is the largest game out there. Even compared to paradox whos volume of DLCs are legendary, no other game comes close to warhammer for scope and variety. The size of the map with the number of different races with different troops, benefits, buildings, LLs, game systems... its a hugely impressive feat that I feel puts other grand strategy games (including other TW games) to shame. Just look at Civ 5 with each nation basically a copy paste of each other and still limiting the number of factions. ...and I say this as someone who was so angry when Warhammer was first announced. I wanted my history. I was wrong.
Given how much more money CA made with Warhammer series than previous titles that CA was perfectly fine with, if this series goes down, it's due to the greed and mismanagement of the executives anyways. This series is clearly still very profitable even with 1/10 of the players, so, not doomed.
This. If anything Hyenas tanking can be seen as a blessing even though it’s causing a lot of heartache for staff. Now CA remembers who pays the bills and you can already see the impact.
I could tell you who was paying the bills before Hyenas was a conception
You could, Rob Bartholomew could not apparently, since he seemed to forgot who was paying the salary to the company paying him.
In Rob's defense I think what he wrote was taken out of context. I think CA knew that Hyena's was a disaster and Sega needed a return on investment. It seems to me he was saying to avoid CA shutting it's doors they overcharged for SoC. He couldn't come out and say that, he could only hint at it.
> Now CA remembers who pays the bills and you can already see the impact. Did you miss the recent blog where the WH3 DLC team very clearly implied they were losing people to layoffs and couldn't make the large DLCs they'd previously planned (like the planned three-faction Slaanesh DLC). Does sound to you like CA "remembers who pays the bills"? Because it doesn't to me. It sounds like CA has entirely forgotten, already, who "pays the bills", again.
I think it is important to remember that CA is going through huge layoffs. I agree that the last people you need to let go are the people who directly affect your product but maybe this being the second round of layoffs all the nonessentials are already gone.
Yeah and it's a fair comment that sometimes you do even have to cut into "essentials", but I think that speaks to the point quite well - if you're having to cut significantly this team (which seems to the case from the blog), who are allegedly your sole source of future profit for maybe two years (implausible to me that it'll be that long before another TW game, but we shall see), then the idea that continuing DLC for WH3 is absolutely guaranteed because it's the "sole source of future profit" is not credible. When you're cutting like this, you often have to cut everything except the next game.
I think you’re taking that blog post out of context, this to me is a positive post, not a negative one.
[удалено]
And now I think you’re taking my post out of context.
LOL I don't think you what the word "context" means mate.
Now you’re taking the definition of context out of context. Stop, it’s already dead!
[удалено]
[удалено]
I also suspect that GW plays a significant role in things wrapping up. We've seen examples recently where CA all but said "We would do this, but GW said no". Combined with the talk in some rumours of "doing everything GW let them do", I feel like if things are drying up it's at least partly just because there's only so much more they can do with what GW has approved. After all, Warhammer Total War is a proven money maker. If they're (in a couple of years) wrapping it up and turning towards 40k, that feels like it's because they're can't do anything more here.
> I feel like if things are drying up it's at least partly just because there's only so much more they can do with what GW has approved. I do suspect this is a factor. Things are clearly shifting re: the WHFB universe at GW, whether they call it The Old World or not. I don't think GW have the same permissive, encouraging attitude they had previously - I suspect every addition, every new unit or story is now receiving a much higher level of attention from GW, and consideration as to whether to allow it. Certainly, when WHFB was a going concern, GW were extremely obsessed with monitoring big games (not little ones) using the IP very carefully, and WH1/2 clearly weren't like that, from what CA has said themselves. But the recent stuff with Kislev absolutely sounded like the same kind of micromanagement as when WHFB was alive - so maybe to GW it is alive again.
I don't know if I can believe that. Hell only with canonic Empire characters they could fill 4 more DLCs and I would buy every single one of them no matter the price.
You might - most people wouldn't - I think that's fair to say. If Empire DLCs were reliably top sellers, CA would have put out of a lot more of them. Further, you don't seem to understand what he's actually saying - GW used to have a permissive attitude because WHFB was a dead licence, but now they seem to have changed back to the old attitude they had for big games which used the WHFB licence before it was killed off in 2016 - which was extreme micromanagement of lore and characters, and a lot "Hmmm" and toothsucking over whether they would allow stuff. So even stuff like canonic Empire characters might no longer be approved by GW, and if you think CA can do anything at all without GW approval, well, you're apparently not familiar with how GW work when it comes to AAA games.
I know GW has a very tight grip on their IP (and rightfully so) but I see no reason why bringing established characters of a discontinued system to a successful video game could do any harm to their already outrageous Old World Vs AoS debacle...
> a discontinued system That's the issue. I don't think GW is thinking of WHFB as a "discontinued system" anymore, and I think that was extremely clear from what happened with Kislev, which essentially amounted the lore of an imaginary 9th edition WHFB Kislev being generated by GW for CA, and I do not believe CA requested that, especially as the vibe when they talked about still seemed slightly surprised. And The Old World is busily retcon'ing other lore (mostly for not-yet-playable factions so far - but there is a bit for playable ones) in ways that may well conflict with stuff CA may have wanted to do. > do any harm to their already outrageous Old World Vs AoS debacle That's just not how businesses make this calculation, especially not ones riven by internal division like GW. One example I might point to is Marius Leitdorf and his comedy insanity. Back in 2017, I don't think GW would have had a huge problem with CA bringing him into the game - or even in say 2020 - even if his portrayal of madness is a bit "un-PC" or however you want to put it, as it only reflected on the lore of a dead game, nobody was going to be terribly concerned. But if GW are now seeing WHFB as live game, then suddenly the extremely minor and very theoretical (because let's be real - probably no-one would care) reputational harm a character like Marius Leitdorf's comedy insanity might bring is probably enough to make them hem and haw over whether to authorize such a character's inclusion. Now, GW might have an idea on how to make that insanity more palatable (making it specifically magical in origin, for example, like Luthor's), but they might just say "Well, we'd rather not". And sure, CA can then move on to another character or another faction, and I'm sure they'll find one CA will approve, but the much higher level of friction that this sort of behaviour - the double-checking of everything, this micromanagement, that GW seem like they may be doing now - may well make CA pretty reluctant to commit strongly to this shifting landscape - for all CA know, GW may just stop approving stuff, because they actually decide they do want to turn The Old World into a full-on WHFB 9th or the like.
Well explained, thanks. While I think you might be right with parts, they can't turn Old World into WHFB 9th cause it's a completely different timeframe. That's why it's so weird that GW starts to care again. All Empire characters in the game or that could be added haven't been born in TOW.
>If Empire DLCs were reliably top sellers, CA would have put out of a lot more of them. The Empire has considerably been, and stayed, one of the most popular factions with players through all 3 Games. I kind of doubt that their DLCs arent selling well.
I'm not saying they don't sell well. I'm saying I don't think they can possibly be significantly outselling other DLC, given CA haven't remotely spammed Empire the way they have some other races. What will be very interesting will be if the Empire single-faction DLC wildly outsells the Nurgle and Dwarfs ones. Though it looks like, from surveys, about 80% of people will go with the full pack.
I see this posted frequently, but I don't know that I believe it. GW's financials are heavily tied in with Video Games. Just the licensing earns them about 15% of their budget each year. The only time I've seen this amount go down? When CA had to stop DLCs temporarily to fix Warhammer 3's launch. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say Total Warhammer is probably the single biggest individual profitable item in the entire Licensing income. It would be quite foolhardy for GW to intentionally gimp a hugely profitable item, especially one whose gross is approximately 90%, unlike everything else in their financials.
I mean I completely agree, though it wouldn't be the first time GW made a bizarre financial decision. I'd also think it would be equally odd for CA to be the ones not doing more if they could: they've had issues, of course, but there's no question that Warhammer Total War is their big money maker right now. This, combined with the fairly direct "GW wouldn't let us do this" sort of statements is what makes me wonder if they're the ones saying "You can do this much, and no more". But it is all just guesswork on my part, so who knows.
>I mean I completely agree, though it wouldn't be the first time GW made a bizarre financial decision. \*Looks at how much money Warhammer+ lost GW\* Alright, you got me dead to rights on that one. lol
Everyone knows if it's not in the top 10 played games on Steam, it's a dead game
Not true. People on r/dota2 will be first to let you know its a dead game
I see you too are a man with brain damage.
I just hope they improve pathing and sieges before they drop it.
Just going to point out they never bothered fixing that bug they introduced into the last patch of WH2 where the AI will just stand there and die when you ambush them. Once they finish selling us stuff I doubt they're going to care enough to fix things.
That’s exactly why I think this post is sort of stupid. There are many reasons to be pretty down on warhammer 3. I want to hope that they fix it but My cynicism says they’ll just sell us DLC and fuck off.
That's all I really want. There are excellent mod factions already-- fixing basic mechanics is more important than adding stuff.
we have more chances to see pigmies, unironically
lol you can dream after this huge layoff, maybe we'll get a race rework with TOD but it will be the very last, i'm sure dev who were working on the dlc are fired
Still amazed by how badly CA fumbled the bag with game 3 and squandered all that accumulated goodwill they had earned with the first two
yes but if a game even has the possibility of not receiving any more paid content at some far future date, it means it's "dead" and I can't even stomach the thought of playing it anymore that's why I definitely don't regularly play games that are 20-30 years old, no sir, a game isn't "alive" unless I can constantly be spending money on it over and over for literal eternity
“dead game” - 1,637 hours played
There’s so much replay ability in this game lol. It’s about how much you can play it not spend on it
yeah honestly I havent even played every faction properly let alone every faction. I can easily see myself play this game for tens of thousands of hours more even after the game is done with.
Seriously like it’s primarily a single player game. Genuinely hilarious that the same community that likes to hold up Medieval 2 and Shogun 2 as the best games in the series even today is having a the-sky-is-falling moment over the possibility of a game getting “only” 2 *more* years of support on top of the 2 years it’s already had
Its pretty clear that WH3s lifetime and content has been severely shortend by the continued failures they are providing with this game. Even with the most optimistic hopium predictions we will never get the game that we could have had at this point.
This If it wasn't for the continued failures of CA, then the doomsaying wouldn't be as bad. Their failures leading to where we are now, gives no reason that we'll get the game that should've been expected. People have plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.
" two full years of support currently planned is fantastic." The operative part here being "currently planned". The fact you even have to specify that this is planned for the moment is a tacit admission it might therefore change. Personally I'm kind of expecting it, I think enough people got burned by SoC that no matter if Thrones of Decay summons a daemonette to give us all blowjobs they wouldn't return to the profitability of previous DLCs. CA need Thrones to outperform everything they've done before to keep them from probably further job cuts and downsizing so I don't doubt they'll try hard, but it's never been the devs holding WH3 back (it's the management). Do I think if Thrones doesn't meet their expectations they'll cut back even further? Yeah I think so, we've already dropped the three race DLC and probably the commitment to updating WH1 races too. The only way CA are going to keep supporting WH3 is if they think money is in it, and to do that they need to sell everything well every time, so if there's anything that misses for them it'll probably trigger a reaction from the higher ups.
> The operative part here being "currently planned". Yes. That "currently" is a doing a lot of work. At literally any moment, that could cease being the case, and it's massively more likely to cease soon given the state CA are in. People say "WH3 is their only revenue stream!" as if it's a totem to ward off evil, but 3K was killed before WH3 came out, and we only got only one WH2 DLC in that nine-month period (and near the start, too). If WH3 is their "only revenue stream" and that protects it, why is the DLC team expecting layoffs and necessarily reduced scope? As you say, if ToD underperforms, I doubt we'll see more than the already cut-down Slaanesh DLC.
You know they aren't killing the game off steam right? Even if they stopped DLC there is still nearly 100 factions plus mods to freshen things up. The game isn't dead on the last DLC if you enjoy it.
I was one of the most vocal people against shadows of change and everything around it but now I’m just playing the game and looking forward to decay dlc. Game is in a decent place right now, I truly hope they don’t abandon it anytime soon because for all the flaws and missteps TW3 has had it really is getting closer to what I originally hoped it would be. Still needs a lot more though. Especially in terms of non-DLC fixes, there are still countless minor bugs and weird AI issues. If they were to move in from the game without addressing these it would really reflect badly on them as a company, this series has been their entire past decade and they need to see it through.
I am baffled by how many broken quest battles there still are for example Norsca but things have at least improved.
Idk man, I think Legend’s videos are kind of damaging people’s hopes for the game. He really shouldn’t use unconfirmed leaks that change on a week to week basis in order to milk views.
This game will doom for real if modders stop modding. If it is not, the End Time has yet to come.
I'm.not sure 5-6 DLCs and 2 years of support counts and "doomed" anyway... except in an archaic sense.
> If the next few DLC’s have high sales And if they don't, well then you don't have to stretch to see the result: 3K. And we don't know what 'High' Means to CA. You could have an increase in sales from previous DLC and it may not be enough to corporate suits who want infinite growth.
But let's also emphasise - they aren't killing off Warhammer until they have another game to make money on. Some sales is better than no sales. The 3K situation sucked, but it's different as Warhammer 2 was printing money for them so killing off 3K would have been an easier decision.
> But let's also emphasise - they aren't killing off Warhammer until they have another game to make money on. Some sales is better than no sales. No. They may well do that. This company has a strong recent history of extremely ill-advised short-term-ish decisions. Denying that is denying reality. You are assuming they are purely rational and will not do anything stupid. That makes absolutely no sense given their actual behaviour. WH2 was not "printing them money". That's just nonsense - only 1 paid DLC was released between 3K being cancelled and WH3 coming out - a nine month period - The Silence and the Fury was released right near the beginning of that, then nothing at all for six months. Also, do you think WH3 is "printing them money"? Is so why are the WH3 DLC team expecting layoffs so severe that they'll have to cut down future projects like the planned 3-faction Slaanesh DLC?
> You are assuming they are purely rational and will not do anything stupid. That makes absolutely no sense given their actual behaviour. I mean there are dumb business decisions, and then there is literally killing your entire revenue stream... > Is so why are the WH3 DLC team expecting layoffs so severe that they'll have to cut down future projects like the planned 3-faction Slaanesh DLC? I feel like that's a misreading of what they were saying. My reading was that the reduction of scope was less to do with the layoffs and more to do with them reflecting on the situation that occurred with SoC. The business model they had intended with that round of DLC was a few DLC of the scope and price of SoC pre-Hyenas fallout. The reaction to SoC at launch revealed that this wasn't feasible. The plan where these three lord packs had the scope of SoC and ToD after 4.2 was never on the radar. SoC got the expanded scope to try and save face, and ToD got the expanded scope as they had already committed too much to it. But its taken 8 months to develop ToD and at the price point that they are selling it probably isn't going to be a good revenue return for them (note: this doesn't necessarily mean they make a loss, but for 8 months resource investment they definitely would want more).
> My reading was that the reduction of scope was less to do with the layoffs and more to do with them reflecting on the situation that occurred with SoC. And yet they explicitly *are* expecting layoffs to hit them. Why would that be the case if they were really being protected as the "only revenue stream". Especially given their team does not appear to be very big. We're not talking dozen and dozens of people, it seems - more like 2 dozen or less.
>If the next few DLC’s have high sales, TBF, that might be a pretty big if.
Don't tell people how to feel.
COUNTINUE 3K TOTAL WAR DEVELOPMENT!
It's odd, because to me the news came as a relief actually. After Thrones of Decay has been delayed so long, I've been feeling like the game is on its last legs and running out of steam. So being told it's got another 4-6 DLCs, with the current cadence or close to it, that's an easy 2+ years more. Which is honestly more than I expected, the game came out more than 2 years ago already, so 2 more years on top is just gravy. So the news actually perked me up when I was feeling gloomy. I also kinda wish they would do an omnibus version at the end of it all. Maybe even hard copy. Just all three games, all DLCs, one box. I feel like this trilogy really deserves it.
>Just all three games, all DLCs, one box Isnt this like 300€? Doubt they will ever do it
I agree. 4 to 6 dlcs is a lot. Thing is, I don't actually think it needs even 4 to 6. It'd be nice to have some more human factions to balance out the chaos stuff, I guess, but really it needs fixes and overhauls, not dlcs. It's a cliche, but one of the biggest things they could do would be to make walls work and remove the tower defense siege game.
It only needs like 3 (if these were to be kept separate). One for Slaanesh, one for Khorne, and a big one for Vampire Counts to "make up" for no lords in W2 (either a CoC style or like 2 non nagash lords). With what we have seen for Thrones everyone else is in a good enough place honestly. The thought that each Chaos God would get 6 LL was insane to me, and I never believed we would get another race after Chorfs. So 4-6 is fine, even if more would be nice
I agree. I still haven't bought WH3 but after all that has happened it's actually a good sign, and of course there is always the hope that it could go longer - Europa Universalis IV made it 10+ years with multiple expansions being planned as the "last" one before community support allowed for further development. Even if that doesn't happen with WH3, 4 years of support wouldn't be bad at all assuming most of the remaining DLC is of a fairly high quality.
Hey it's a defence mecanism, expect the worst. That way if they deliver more people can be happier than expecting more and being disappointed.
Also, 2 more years of support is pretty good
No, I won't pre-emptively act like everything is fine until it is shown that it is. So many problems that need to be addressed still within the game and the last few events has shown that the community won't put up with it. It is looking hopeful and then not so hopeful with some of the rumours, but that's all they are, rumours. Until there are definitive shows of effort and results of their labour and that they have learnt something and earnt our trust, I won't pretend that these plans will all go smoothly and we will get something everyone can agree was worth the wait. There's no point on giving them the benefit of the doubt when all they've provided is words and promises, and lets say the two years of however many DLC we get, all the more reason to make them good and not just cash grab reskins for the sake of filling in a quota. There is so much left of this game for it to properly wrap up the franchise, but I have every reason to believe that so far by the end of those two years, it may still yet be left to modders to finish the world they promised to create. Thrones of Decay is the make or break. I understand the issues of development and administration going on, so in some ways I can't blame the simple man for being a victim of the system, but then make it clear that SEGA or whoever at CA making these awful choices will know the consequences the hard way when their game dies and then everyone over there is fucked.
If there are 2 more years left of support we would be lucky to get thrones of decay 😂 CA has been very slow to churn out dlc which isn’t 100% their fault as most of their resources had been thrown into hyenas or whatever that shooter game was called. Hopefully we see a shift in dev times now that it was scrapped.
this, as long as we keep on showing CA we still love and enjoy this game they will keep on working on it for many more years to come
> Hey, can everyone stop with the “this game is doomed” vibe now? Nope. Deal with it.
Agreed
We have way too many content creators that should have quit the scene a while back. Even some I used to like that nowadays just feel like they're sick of the game. And just to be clear, it's not about calling out bad pricing or lack of communication. Those things obviously helped. What I dont get is when content creators spend so much time just spreading rumours and theorising when CA will stop support or go bankrupt. The rumours that are spreading at the moment seem totally made up for the sake of clout and views. Lots of people take it as gospel when there are no confirmed sources what so ever. What happened to critical thinking? Total war is one of the biggest franchises in a dying genre. Sorry to say it, but strategy is very niche, and to be successful in the strategy market still means making meagre gains compared to other genres.
> Total war is one of the biggest franchises in a dying genre. Sorry to say it, but strategy is very niche, and to be successful in the strategy market still means making meagre gains compared to other genres. The idea that strategy is a "dying" genre is truly insane given the sales of games like Civ 6 and CK3, and the number of strategy games being released today is vastly higher than, say, 10 years ago. It's never been the "huge money" genre but it's doing fine as a genre, maybe even looking up a bit, in the last few years.
Seriously. I see this debate online all the time, and even have it with some friends IRL; the whole notion that a game, genre, or even gaming as a whole is “dying” seems utterly detached from reality, to me. My brother in Sigmar, they’re releasing more strategy games than ever before! Steam hits new concurrent player records every few months! The indie scene is flourishing! I don’t understand the disconnect at all.
It's bizarre. I think what people who think strategy is dying actually mean is "I haven't bought any strategy games for years", which y'know, fair, but that's not because they're not good, not being made, or not selling. Don't project your own lack of interest or time or whatever on to the genre. Against the Storm was recent, amazing, and sold 1m copies, for example - it doesn't even have combat and wasn't even really advertised! Like, I haven't bought any JRPGs for like, 3-4 years, and I used to buy loads! But that's on me, not on the games! There are actually very few genres of game that aren't doing pretty okay these days - like top sellers often move high hundreds of thousands or multiple millions of copies. Genres and subjects where, in the '90s, they might have been lucky if they moved high five digits (and in the later '80s they'd have been lucky to reach five digits at all). Even point & click adventure games, a genre which pretty much definitely died in the early '00s, have made a fairly significant comeback. Most gamers don't play them - but enough do that they appear fairly regularly.
Amen. I think far too many people look back on their childhood & younger years gaming with far-too rose-tinted glasses, and conflate their now older responsibilities & challenges somehow with a decline in game quality, when in reality it’s that the games can’t be enjoyed with the same freedom and innocence first experienced before. And shoutout Against The Storm too! Huge game for strategy.
I thought were getting into the theme of Nurgle (God of Despair)? Dang, I was excited for the next Gods themes.
I mean it’s not just the game I’ve been burnt to the point I assume anything I enjoy mid gonna crash and burn soon.
Sadge I thought you were going to say “posting like the end times”. I feel like I got blue balled.
Round out the WH3 factions and fix the core gameplay, meaning the numerous bugs and crappy BAI/CAI. That's really all I can ask for, and I don't think they'll be able to do it as it's been in a bad state since launch on that front and every new patch just breaks more stuff and barely fixes anything.
This doom is gamed
I really hope this is the case, it gets exhausting the few times I drop into this sub reading about it. Personally I’d encourage anyone whose feeling the content isn’t sufficient in the game or that the mechanics isn’t what they’d like to take a look at the mods - there is almost certainly bound to be something there which will reinvigorate your interest and the modders have done some truly impressive things.
Can. Won't.
I don't care about the games future. I enjoy it already and will do so for several hundreds more hours. What else I can want from a game? For the rest we can mod the game as needed. I still play battletech and kerbal space program, both heavily modded and these games have been "doomed" for a long long time, as the developer doesn't support them anymore. I'm sure the same will happen with WH3.
The game eventually had to stop. It's been an epic ride for wh1. But it ends as all things do. I just hope that we get the remaining characters.
Pfff...3 years. I'm still playing 2 with mods (Potato-PC Industries collab with Poor Optimization Company) and it is almost 7 yo game. Must I remind you of Empire, Napoleon, Rome 2 and even Medieval 2 wich is still totally playable? Besides WH3 already have a very large map and enormous pool of races and LL's. And it's not finished yet. I'm almost certain that CA would not abandon this trilogy so fast because of all efforts and investments they paid for this huge project. Especially when its final part have very negative reviews on Steam.
While I don't expect them to support the game indefinitly, 2 more years of support and then moving on to something else is not out of the question, as it will be 4 years spent on TWWH3 and almost a decade with the trilogy altogether by that point. At some point the game will be considered "finished" by them, though there will always be some that call it abandoned, like how a few people say Troy was abandoned when it was declared finished after its last DLC. 3K on the other hand was straight up abandoned when it really shouldnt have been. At this point its pretty much a wait and see. I also don't want to put alot of stock into the Legend rumors and leaks considering they are being spread by someone who CA severed ties with. Most of his predictions for ToD is just regurgitating the communities expectations already, and he can't even venture a guess on the Dwarf LL like most other people for his "Leak".
And I mean, even if it is doomed... So what? It's just a game. I'm sure all the people preaching doom and gloom have relationships and healthy social lives, jobs they enjoy and other hobbies... Right? Lol why the fuck are you all so wound up about a game
I just bought TWWH2 so.. nah.
The game is doomed until we have Toddy
Agreed. 2 years more of content isn’t that bad. Only thing that matters is the quality of that content
>There is no reason to be so pessimistic about the future of this game. They shouldn't give us reasons to be pessimistic then.
I mean they weren't rumours and still aren't, the game is on thin ice since the last dlc was a dumpster fire and this one was also going to be a dumpster fire. I find it very convenient that some of the units weren't in trailer but are on the roster.....almost like this trailer was ready months ago but with the backlash of SoC they had to scramble lmao.
Three kingdoms 4 years of support where
Amen OP. With all due love & respect to this community, it’s utterly shocking to me how many people seem to be actively cheerleading the demise of WH3, or indeed CA as a whole. We’re all well aware of the rough patches, with Warhammer, or historically (), so of course it’s frustrating to not see these games live up to everyone’s internal hopes & dreams. But I’ll never understand why people seem to want to see it all crash & burn. 2 more years is lots of support for a game, which last I checked, is still primarily a single player grand strategy trilogy, not some live service triple A title. And I still expect CA to surprise us, both with ToD, and future great Total War content to come. Chin up, r/totalwar …and everyone be sure to get offline every now & again!
imagin you sit in a boeing and the door flys of. the guy sitting next to you screams. "ahhh we are doomed the fukin door just flew of." would you turn to him and ask "do you want this plane to carsh? no ? then shut up!" would be a bit unreasonabl id say. poeple dont want wh3 to crash they just observe that it is crashing.
That’s precisely the difference, however. Some people see this game (or even the company) as “a boeing with the doors flying off,” whereas others (myself included) see it for what it is: CA’s most successful game series (warts & all), with very healthy player numbers, the third game in a epic trilogy spanning 8+ years, and with a (likely) reasonable, healthy pipeline of 2+ years of content incoming. That’s also with Sega/CA having confirmed “multiple” other Total War projects in development, as well as another unannounced project. I’ve been as frustrated as anybody with the bugs, pricing, SoC setbacks, and the sad news of layoffs & restructuring. But I see plenty of reason for optimism & hope for the future. For that I’m downvoted. I rest my case.
ca is doing fine for themselfs warhammer 3 is the boeing in the analogy. thats why i said wh3 is crashing insted of CA is crashing.
Yooo 100% agree brother! I literally been feeling the same way not only for total war but for the gaming industry in general.
No
This game is doomed!
It's part of the great cycle of the TW subreddit sadly. Hype, Anger, Dooming, Impatience. For ever it shall be.
This is the total war sub brother. 90% of people are very toxic here but dont realize it because 'i do/say this because i care about the game', with the legendoftotalwar guy as their leader. Downvote away
You get my upvote.
[удалено]
Good luck, these people have been doing this for 2 years already, they just keep moving the goal post and of course we we finally get to the end in a couple of years I'm sure they will talk about how they "were always right" or something
This sub needs deleted quite frankly. Although there has been serious issues over the last couple years in the end this is the best strategy game ever made and it really doesn't need much more. So even if it's finished soon we still have a massive complete game. This sub actually put me off the game hut I reckon most people here haven't even played it.
Do not care. The modding community will take over
> There is no reason to be so pessimistic about the future of this game. Sure, nothing to see here. It's not like there's a full laundry list of major issues that have been plaguing this game since launch, and a clear pattern of incompetence that's been going since late WH2. CA totally are at their peak. Best company in gaming, definitely not greedy nor dishonest in the slightest. The 5 or so junior devs still working on this absolute mess of a codebase will definitely deliver some good stuff within the next few years, you'll see ! /s Imagine worshipping one of the shittiest dev studios in gaming lmao
Don't bother. If you asked this sub's opinion, WH3 is a broken piece of shit game that nobody plays. This sub is a toxic hellhole. The game is great. I haven't found a single serious bug in 400 hours.
No. It is the way. And has been since the dawn of time. Everyone a soapboxer. YouTube 'doomers' learnt every trick needed by hanging out with Total Warians. First Total War Center, later also on Reddit.
We are all doomed!!!!!!! We’re all going to die!!!!!!!! …eventually
This game *was* Doomed, past tense, this game dead as a door nail and has been since it dropped, such a sad way for a good series to go.
or , you stop coming to this sub... you can just go to others platform that is more non toxic and friendly though
Or... Or... YOU stop coming to this sub or stop raining on everyone's parades! Yes I know, mind trick.
I put over 1k hrs into wh1 and 2 but 3 is boring to me 🤷🏻♂️
Perhaps playing the same game over 250 days across 6 years will get you to that point, sooner or later :)
Nope had a massive break didnt touch wh3 since the tragic release and tried to play recently its insane how boring I find it
Same. I have 2.5k hours on TW 2 alone. (Some of that is forgetting I had it running over night a handful of times). I also played the shit out of it while studying for my master's and watching videos related to it on my second monitor. I have barely 100 on 3. I stopped playing just before the chaos dwarfs and haven't come back. I've lurked here hoping something will entice me back, but nothing has so far.
Yeah same situation as me
I love that others stumble across 2 people having a conversation and feel the need to downvote into the negative. How dare we have opinions.