The Final announcement blog post Total War: Warhammer 3's Shadows of Change update ends with a strikingly clever marketing move: an image with a before and after slider showing all of the newly added units. That's not it quite Double the number of units (despite what the misplacement of Katarin's new sleigh might initially suggest), but there are plenty of impressive, shiny toys. Now imagine a picture where, for example, the second half contained only the new heroes, but also a series of numbers and UI screens indicating faction updates for Kislev and the older Cathay lords. I estimate that visually this would probably have been about 74% less impressive, although it's much closer to what the game actually needs right now.
So here is the puzzle. Toys sell content. Toy apologizes. But toys, at least in this quantity, are not what Total Warhammer 3 needs half as much as campaigns with the same kind of character like Grom and Eltharion, Rakarth, Snikch, Marcus Wulfhart or (insert your favorite, which I missed). ) Campaigns that channel all of those top-notch assets, lore, and voice lines through the context and atmosphere they need to keep me going long after I've unlocked all the new parts, fought a few battles, and then been fed up, click on . Aside from the Changeling, which has other problems, the DLC's other campaigns lack both context and dynamism, and the update does little to change that.
Ostankya, for example, feels like a variation of the Wood Elves' Drycha; a rogue faction that eschews most of the traditional members for wild beasts and strange magic. Here the magic comes in the form of the new Lore of the Hag, which is great, but not enough. There is still a lack of determination to either make the campaign as radically different as Drycha's or to completely re-examine Kislev's core themes. The result is something that's too indebted to what came before to really stand out, but too tangential to really strengthen the faction as a whole, and lacks a compelling enemy, story, or anything else to back it up Problems would be more easily overlooked.
For the record, I think the idea behind the patch is fantastic. Maybe my memory has faded from delegating a large portion of this to remembering what all of these new features do, but I can't remember the last time a developer of this stature announced such a clear mea culpa and upheld it made amends in such a tangible way. It actually seems a bit crass to flesh out the details of such a classic CA move, but £20 is still half the price of the base game, or thereabouts. And since the most dramatic change here in terms of faction switching is a bunch of angry Kislev dads with fire pokers, which you can probably find a mod for, I can't get too excited about the whole thing.
That's certainly a little reductive of me. There are definitely more winners here. The new heroes are all excellent. The Golden Knight and Katarin's Sleigh form a deadly force of Kislev thugs. Cathay's Construct Hero is the final word in any artillery duel that doesn't involve pirate vampires. The flying flamethrowers, combined with their new melee hero on a disc mount, make building a Tzeentch air weapon both viable and incredibly fun. Ostankya's Lore of the Hag brings an oppressive quality to their campaign. But a little spice doesn't go far when Kislev as a whole still remains a scattered mess of contradictory or uninteresting subsystems, and when Cathay's two core game masters are functionally identical save for a few small modifiers.
I found the real star of this update in a very unexpected place. I've always wanted to love Kairos Fateweaver on principle. He's a huge goofball with the funniest overworld map-walking animation in the game, but I always found his campaigns frustrating. I'm not sure if I have the patch to thank for this, but the new toys made me push through and realize that after about twenty tricky rounds, frying lizards and bringing elves into military alliances is really fun to force one by giving them back the settlements you just stole across the ocean. Aekold Helbrass offers supply buffs throughout the game, and the aforementioned air force offers some alternative army compositions to work towards.
The big question, of course, is whether Shadows of Change is worth it now. These are honestly a few different questions. You don't have to look any further than the above slider to know that there's now more bang for your buck. But while I can't blame CA for wanting to come back in style after such a difficult time, a little more substance would have gone a long way.
Is it worth it in the sense that I would recommend that everyone make this the first or even fifth expansion they buy? No. It feels too much like an awkward middle child, too much in transition. But it might be worth it for the simple reason that the waste of money, time and attention here is a clear signal from Creative Assembly that it still values ​​the health of the series. This feeling of transition may be a little uncomfortable and not particularly exciting, but it certainly has a positive connotation. Transitions ultimately lead to something. And while these particular reinforcements may not be Gandalf arriving at daybreak, they still make me cautiously hopeful that a game that features war twice in its title will get some of his fighting back.
