In more ways than one, today’s Total War: Warhammer 3 expansion marks a milestone for game director Rich Aldridge and his team at Creative Assembly. Omens Of Destruction’s three headline legendary lords each bring new campaigns and units for their respective factions, but it’s the fourth lord – a Khorne champion free to all players – that I imagine Aldridge will end up remembering the most fondly.
When Total War: Warhammer released back in 2016, it shipped with eight legendary lords – famous characters from Games Workshop’s fantasy setting that here act as faction leaders. The number grew steadily and, in terms of announcement order at least, today’s addition of Arbaal The Undefeated marks the series’ 100th. That’s a hundred campaigns, a hundred joint efforts of game design, animation, art, writing and voice work.
Aldridge has never been shy about the team’s ambition for the series to eventually offer up each unit from every Fantasy Battle 6th edition army book (“The goal is to do everything, right?”). But ambition is one thing, and considering the fraught conditions at Creative Assembly and parent company Sega over the past few years, it’s not just the addition of the 100th lord that feels like something to celebrate. It’s taken time, effort, and a siesmic shift in update frequency, but Total War: Warhammer III is in the best place it’s ever been.
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So, as I say, that 100th lord is a big milestone. Except, talking to Aldridge, I sort of get the sense that he and the team are just warming up.
“I think what we’ve come to learn – you know, we’ve been making this game for what, best part of a decade now – is that it’s a really organic process,” he tells me from an office filled with Christmas decorations and Warhammer miniatures. “Some things will naturally bubble to the top, and some things will fall down and need new, fresher paint.”
“And that’s the kind of cycle that we built. We’ve got our big playground, if you like, that we’ve always wanted to do when we set out with the vision of the trilogy, to have the entirety of the world map that’s at our disposal now. And now it’s: how can we fill that? How can we make use of that space? How can we bring out some of the flavour and try to bring everything up to the same standards, the same quality level for players to enjoy?”
For recent expansions, it’s been a case of thinking about how the new lords can interact with that big playground in new ways. For Aldridge, new Ogre lord Golgfag Maneater stands out as a personal favourite for this very reason.
“He can interact in the world in such a different manner to everybody else, and kind of gets you role playing and fantasy setting in a whole different vibe, where you can play people off against one another. You don’t have to take territories like you’d normally do in a Total War game, but then you can still grab them back later on. You can double cross people. Triple cross people. You’re a proper mercenary out there. So I think he’s the star of the show.”
Having spent a little time with all three campaigns now, there’s a real sense that the potential for emergent narratives and fantasy fulfilment has been a design priority, whether that be Skulltaker’s relentless path of bloodshed, or Gorbad’s flavorful bonuses for different themed armies across the Greenskins’ massive roster. Where Omens Of Destruction differs from a lot of past expansions, though, is that the lords don’t really have much relationship with each other. When thinking of narrative high points in the series’ history, I’m always reminded fondly of the Warden And The Paunch’s front-and-centre rivalry. So, I’m curious: does Aldridge feel they’ve reached a spot where such narratively focused DLC isn’t serving the game anymore?
“Narrative is a really interesting one,” says Aldridge. “There’s narrative in the lore, but people create their own narrative as they play our game. So it’s trying to strike that right balance. And there’s also things that, you know, people maybe never got to experience when they played the tabletop, but our game allows for that.”
“When we did things like Warden And The Paunch or even Thrones Of Decay, there is that natural rivalry. It’s instantly recognizable for fans of the lore. But obviously we’ve tried to do other narratives as well in the past, which did pick characters which maybe wouldn’t see one another so often. But it still made for interesting gameplay, and I think that’s still where we sit now.”
But the team are also thinking about expansions centered around parts of Warhammer’s fiction that “possibly [doesn’t] have that same connection, but is still really sought after and wanted by the players. I think it would be a combination of the two. The other thing that we’ve done a little bit of, and we could maybe do more of, is some of the narratives which are more emerging. Things like the Sword Of Khaine or the Nemesis Crown, which are not necessarily character led, but are world events.”
In a recent blog, design director Mitchell Heastie wrote about changes to control and corruption, noting that the mechanics suffered from a legacy of “being carried from game to game without a real deep dive into what their place in the game actually entails”. So I’m curious about which other elements of the Total War framework have affected the design journey.
“I think what was different in the past was Total War was very much a game of: everything is pretty much the same between each faction,” Aldridge says. “Everyone had spears and arrows and all the rest of it. Now, with the asymmetric design of Warhammer, that was the big thing that we embraced to make sure that each faction plays its own way.”
“On the other side, people like different things about our games. What might work for one might be something that’s not quite fitting for another, but we’re obviously in a fortuitous position that we do get to listen to our players. You see that now with the regular hot fixes and patches that we’re putting out there. Ultimately, we want the players to keep telling us what works and doesn’t work for them, because we’re making the experience for them to enjoy.”
It’s taken some time to get into that rhythm of regular hotfixes, and it did feel for a while that Creative Assembly had ceased communication with a fanbase growing discontent with a game that was still a long way off from the level of quality it’s reached recently. After Hyenas was shut down, Sega president and CEO Haruki Satomi highlighted that CA’s strengths lie in the “offline RTS games” they’d always been known for, and that the studio would be refocusing their efforts on Total War. Statements like this get thrown around lot, but in this case, it didn’t take long to feel like a genuine shift was happening at CA, from Total War Pharaoh pricing changes and free content to a big upgrade in quality with Thrones Of Decay.
“I think there’s been a lot of positive change,” Aldridge says. “But you know, we’re still very much on a journey with our community. We want to make sure that they’re valuable and meaningful experiences. We know the job’s not done. We want to continue being allowed back into the conversations with them, and to make great content for as many people to enjoy as we can.”
“So yeah, there’s good energy. We are all fans, so it’s lovely to see people getting excited about it and playing it. But we also welcome the criticism as well, where things aren’t quite right. So, yeah, it’s been, it’s been good, but there’s still more more work to be done.”
One example in Omens Of Destruction that’s a direct result of this feedback is the new Savage Orc Great Shaman lord. Previously, you could recruit a variety of Savage Orc units, but besides legendary lord Wurrzag, you’d still have to lead these armies with the more basic Orc warboss.
“When we first started on the journey, it was trying to make sure that we’ve got this kind of strategic power battle going on between different factions, respecting the asymmetric design that Warhammer offers,” says Aldridge. “As we padded that content out, we realised that we’re now sort of stepping on the toes of things, if you like, creating that design space. But what the players really told us strongly – and we like to embrace and continue to support – is that kind of role-playing element.”
“We really made a concerted effort with [recent expansions] to make sure people can have that fantasy. You can have now a savage orc leading an army other than Wurrzag. You can have Golgfag supplemented by a roster of different maneater units and the like. So that’s been the big one to follow.”
I knew going in that Aldridge wouldn’t be able to tell me specifics about future content, but I couldn’t let him leave without at least asking for some words of encouragement for the Total War subreddit’s greatest hero. At the time of writing, zaneprotoss is on the 175th day of his ‘drawing every day until (setting big-bad necromancer) Nagash DLC comes out’. His efforts haven’t gone unnoticed.
“I do like seeing them. I will check in from time to time. So, yeah, it’s lovely, to see that. I think I’ve said this numerous times, and will continue to keep saying it: The Warhammer world’s a massive one. There’s lots of characters, lots of creatures, lots of things that we still haven’t done. Our goal, as I said at the start, is to try and bring as much of that to life as possible. So keep dreaming it, and maybe one day we will get there for you.”