Total War: Warhammer 3 has always been one of the more popular entries in the franchise. It’s the culmination of what’s probably the series’ best collaboration or choice of setting in terms of pop-cultural presence, and the one that contains basically everything the previous two games had in one package.
But being a Warhammer Fantasy game, it exists within a very strange state of stasis where the End Times simply never happened, and thus its universe remains intact. For those who don’t know, the End Times basically brought the OG Warhammer Fantasy world to an end. The bad guys won, and the world was splintered into several spheres, with the fantasy slowly but surely adopting a very science fiction vibe that was mostly reserved for its younger, more popular version: Warhammer 40,000.
The Total War games, though, just pretended those bits never happened. Until now.
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Total War: Warhammer 3 – Lords of the End Times launched on Sept. 24, adding in four new legendary lords, including the all-powerful necromancer Nagash. With eight new legendary heroes, several new lords and heroes, two dozen regular units, and a dozen regiments of renown, as well as a brand new endgame, this is perhaps one of the most exciting and comprehensive DLCs to date.
And the player base is responding very positively, with the game’s concurrent player numbers on Steam alone increasing fivefold since the DLC dropped. It went up from 19,000 or so players on average to a whopping 102,000 peak. The game hasn’t seen this much activity since August 2022, so that alone should tell you how massive this update really is.
And while I’m sad to say it, I have a feeling this will be one of the last major updates Warhammer 3 will receive. With Total War: Warhammer 40,000 coming out next year with a promised 10-year support timeline, I don’t think CA will spare too many resources to expand Warhammer 3 even further. In fact, if you buy this last DLC, you can play Warhammer 3‘s Immortal Empires without actually owning the game, which is a telling sign in and of itself.
I’d love to see more, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I think we truly are in the end times for Warhammer Fantasy.
