Developer Creative Assembly has announced that the free Immortal Empires update for Total War: Warhammer 3 will be released in August. The studio announced details about Immortal Empires on its official blog, where it revealed that it will be seeing some major changes when compared to its predecessor, Mortal Empires for Total War: Warhammer 2.
All 86 Legendary Lords from throughout the Total War: Warhammer games will be available in Immortal Empires, along with Be’Lakor being a Legendary Lord with his own faction. Some of the older Legendary Lords will also be getting their own factions, including Grombrindal, Helman Ghorst, and Volkmar the Grim.
A new quality-of-life feature in the update—likely added in because of the potential size of the new map—is Sea Lanes, which allow players to move their armies between distant lands and continents. This means players don’t have to worry about leapfrogging their armies all the way across the map.
The end game is also seeing some changes with new randomly-generated scenarios. Meant to counter players getting too powerful in the late game stages of an Immortal Empires campaign, new, dynamic scenarios will be generated for players to handle. Examples given include Greenskin invasions or resurgences of the undead.
Victory conditions for Immortal Empires will also be changing, simplifying them into meaningful objectives that prevent the any arbitrary changes to play style.
Immortal Empires will also feature 8-player multiplayer campaigns, and one of the biggest new features is that not all players involved need to own all the Total War: Warhammer games to access Immortal Empires in multiplayer—only the host of the campaign needs to do so. Players who don’t own DLC, however, will be limited to the Legendary Lord that they already own.
Creative Assembly also goes into detail about why the studio is referring to the August release of Immortal Empires as a beta. A lot of it comes down to the studio not really considering the feature finished owing to a lot of smaller things that still need development, including new Corruption mechanics, party in UI, FX, audio, and game balance, and lighting across battle maps in Total War: Warhammer 3‘s updated engine.