The sheer ambition behind Total War: Warhammer 2’s Mortal Empires campaign makes it seem like something completely implausible, something that someone on a forum would propose as their pie-in-the-sky, dream Warhammer game. Comprising five continents and 35 playable lords from 12 extremely distinct fantasy races, there’s simply nothing in the series’ history that compares with its scope. Yet while it accomplishes everything it says on the tin, it doesn’t always do so with a flourish.
The map itself is a great example of the “Oh man, this is awesome! But…” feeling I often had throughout the campaign. It is truly huge, make no mistake, and adds a lot to the diversity of regions to explore and conquer. Naggaroth is a menacing wasteland that doesn’t just feel like a rehash of Norsca - it’s sterile and oppressive where the home of the marauders is wild and vicious. Lustria’s deep jungles sprawl with creeping wonder, and the sweeping dunes of the Southlands stand as an almost elegant counterpoint to the reeking Badlands they border.
At the same time, it all feels a bit scrunched together. The placement of Ulthuan, the home of the High Elves, is one of my greatest criticisms. It looks like you could practically see its eastern shore with the naked eye from the coasts of Bretonnia, and it’s almost literally touching Naggaroth on the opposite end, which dilutes the feeling of being the secluded seat of a great, maritime empire. The New and Old Worlds in general simply aren’t remote enough from each other. I can understand not wanting to force players to spend dozens of turns sailing, but I think one more modestly-sized sea zone on each side of Ulthuan could have gone a long way to making the distances feel proper without being prohibitively annoying.
The real highlight of the campaign, of course, is all the new combinations of these varied, crazy armies that can come together on the battlefield. Dwarfs vs Skaven is one of the most thematically and mechanically satisfying match-ups. Every time I sent a gaggle of clanrats flying through the air with a mortar barrage, I was reminded how much the longtime Warhammer fan in me was grateful to this game just for existing. Marching an army of dinosaurs into Altdorf as the Lizardmen doesn’t have as much precedent in the lore, but was just as satisfying.
The sheer diversity you encounter fighting your way from region to region has really been taken to a new level. Starting as the Empire, you may be contending with orcs, vampires, Chaos marauders, beastmen, wood elves, and skaven all within the first 50 turns. Anyone with a coastline now must be wary of Dark Elf Black Arks appearing on the horizon. The Badlands, the infamous “Boring Corner” of the Old World map is now a major crossroads for many factions pursuing conquests in many directions - a battle royale that I suspect will only be improved with the upcoming addition of the Tomb Kings to its southern border.
The “but…” here comes from the fact that not all factions are created equal. Part of this is due to the fantastic changes to the core Warhammer 1 races from the Foundation Update not being integrated into Mortal Empires yet - though they will be when Norsca is implemented a bit down the line. Another major factor, though, is that the Warhammer II races have access to the rites mechanic from the Vortex campaign, which I really enjoy, while the Old World races don’t. And based on what Creative Assembly has said so far, it doesn’t sound like they ever will. I find this extremely disappointing and borderline maddening. I’d almost rather have seen none of the races get rites in Mortal Empires than have them selectively available to only a handful, and I hope the dev team will reconsider this decision in the future. I can’t imagine the campaign will ever truly feel complete unless all races have access to the same suite of core features.
The addition of chapter objectives for all races is great - though not all of them seem to take the larger world into account. Beastmen, for instance, have no reason to really venture beyond the Old World to finish their campaign objectives as they’ve remained more or less identical to how they looked in Warhammer 1. Even stranger, the Lizardmen lord Kroq-gar is required to cross the entire width of the map and conquer Lustria for his campaign - a copy-paste of his bud Mazdamundi’s objectives that doesn’t make a lot of sense given where he starts. There are lots of other little head scratch moments here and there that seem to be more a product of oversight and rushed release than design, and I’d like to see them get more love.
On the positive side, the Chaos invasion has been improved to account for the much larger play area and number of factions. Rather than arriving in a single throng under Archaon, the forces of the ruinous powers now comprise a handful of separate factions, each with multiple horde armies to command, which will focus on different parts of the map. I’ve seen them go straight for the heart of Ulthuan or cut across the Sea of Claws to menace Bretonnia right of the bat, so it truly feels like no one is safe when they get on the move.
Mortal Empires is truly an achievement, and has the potential to be an excellent platform for further expansion. Unfortunately, it does feel a bit like an open beta at the moment. It’s a fun beta, but there are enough little things that seem off, missing, or simply lacking polish that it doesn’t really come across as finished. This is offset somewhat by the fact that it’s free to owners of both Warhammer 1 and II, but if you only own one of the above and planned to buy the other just for Mortal Empires, you may want to hold off for a couple of months. Otherwise, by all means, jump in and get your hands (or claws) dirty. There’s a lot to do and see, and I don’t think I’ll have scratched past the surface for a very long time to come.
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In Total War: Warhammer the entire Old World can be found on the campaign map. This is the biggest and the most important continent in this universe and may bear some resemblance to Europe. A player can conquer this land by using one of the five in-game factions:
Apart from that, the campaign map is filled with neutral factions controlled by the AI (some of the factions will be playable after other DLCs are published). Also, each of the factions (except for Chaos) is divided into smaller, individual groups. This means, that upon starting the game, the player starts the campaign having only one province. Thus, the first tours are spent on creating and maintaining the right relationships with the 'relatives'. The map below shows the starting position and the political situation in the Old World.
The main mechanics of the gameplay are mostly the same as they were in the other Total War games. However, two basic differences can be found:
There is no total conquer anymore - A limit has been imposed concerning the areas that one can conquer, in order to make the gameplay more interesting and difficult, but also to avoid some potential story plotholes. For example, greenskins cannot conquer anything beyond the mountains and wastelands on the south of the Old World (they can still plunder them however).
Winds of Magic - Magic is common in any type of fantasy and so it is present in Warhammer. Here, sorcerers and spells exist but their effectiveness varies depending on the location. If the Winds are strong in a particular area (depicted as colorful waves of energy hovering over the ground), casting spells can be easier and vice versa. It is advised to keep an eye on it before attacking an enemy.
It is important to mention the types of characters that play the crucial role in the campaign map.
Legendary lords - Faction leaders. Before starting a campaign, a player has to choose a character that will stand in the charge of the kingdom. All of the Legendary Lords differ between each other with their special abilities, artefacts that they can obtain during the missions and also with their goals required to win the campaign. They are also immortal, even if they are killed they are resurrected couple of tours later.
Lords - They are leading the armies to battle (Generals), lead the fleets (Admirals) and maintaining the provinces (Overseers). Each of the lords has different abilities which help him in taking active part in the battle and giving particular bonuses on the territories they maintain.
Heroes - They move on the map by themselves sabotaging and assassinating other heroes. They can also calm down the riots in the provinces and discover unraveled parts of the Old World. They can also be added to army in order to get more help from their abilities during the fight.
Total War: Warhammer is a big game, and the recently released Total War: Warhammer II [official site] is even bigger. But in the eyes of the Creative Assembly, that still isn’t big enough. To remedy this, they’ve come up with the Mortal Empires DLC, a free download that will essentially merge the two games’ campaigns together in one huge map, letting players assume command of any of the eight races available in the series so far.
To find out why this is happening and how the Creative Assembly are going about it, we spoke to Game Director Ian Roxburgh and Lead Designer Jim Whitson.
RPS: My first question is: why do this? Why did you decide to take the two games you’ve made, smash them together as one huge game, and then release it for free?
Ian: Well, very very early on when we first decided to do the deal with Games Workshop, and you look at the massive, massive amount of content there is in the Warhammer Fantasy IP, we knew that we ultimately wanted to do all of it, and make a game with all of it in. But that’s just far too vast a task to do in one game, there’s just so much there, that we thought the only way we could ever achieve that ultimately is by breaking it down into a trilogy, make three full-sized games just ram-packed with content themselves, and then as a free offering for our fans, we can merge them all together and put them all together and create what we ultimately want and what we believe our fans would ultimately want, which is this massive, Warhammer universe, but with everything in it.
RPS: Is the idea to combine it all again after releasing a third game in the series?
Ian: Yeah. So what will happen is when we release Warhammer 3 eventually, we will actually combine all three games into a bigger map from all three games. So this is like a halfway stage if you like, where we are taking the first two and combining them into the biggest map we’ve ever done. Then by the time we’ve finished 3 we’ll do the same after that as well so and again that will be free to our fans.
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Bus simulator 2019 mods download. RPS: Why did you decide to release the Mortal Empires campaign now rather than when the third game came out?
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Ian: In a nutshell, because we could.
RPS: Fair enough.
Ian: Because whatever way you look at it, this game, the Mortal Empires campaign now, is a magnificent, huge game in its own right, it’s by far and away the biggest and most content-rich campaign map we’ve ever done, and so there’s no reason to wait until the end of the third, because we’ve already got two games plus DLC’s worth of content in a free campaign, and we wanted to be able to give that to our fans to play and enjoy sooner rather than later. There’s no reason not to do that if you can and we have the desire to do it, because our fans get the benefit of playing the Mortal Empires campaign sooner than they otherwise would.
RPS: Were you ever concerned that releasing it in this manner would lead people to believe that these were two halves of a game that were originally intended to be one?
Ian: We’ve tried our best to make it clear, because I think people who have played Total War: Warhammer II will realise that’s a massive game in its own right. It’s huge, I mean it was a massive undertaking for us to do, and you know, and the Mortal Empires campaign is something on top of that as well. So I don’t think anyone would feel like we’ve sold them short on what Warhammer II was.
The idea is that actually they’re just getting even more really cool stuff, thousands of hours of gameplay in the Mortal Empires campaign for free, and that is really about the policy from the beginning with this trilogy, [which] was to be able to give loads of stuff free as we go along, as we refine and evolve the game through DLC. Yes there has to be some paid DLC obviously to generate the revenue to be able to make the future games.
But at the same time, we’re giving away a load free, so everyone can get the benefit of it, and feel that we’re giving something back. And like we said that’s hugely gratifying for us as developers and hopefully it’s really gratifying for our fans as well. Because they get the benefit of the game getting continually better and better and better for free, even once they’ve bought the first game. So that was the plan.
RPS: How exactly does the combined campaign work? I’ve played both games and they’re quite different in terms of the victory conditions and how the different races function. So how are you merging those two campaigns together in terms of how they play?
Jim: In terms of the victory conditions we’re not going with the Vortex narrative on this one. It’s more focussing on the sandbox aspect of Total War, which was still there in Total War: Warhammer II, but obviously because of the huge breadth and depth of content we’ve got by mashing the two games together, that in itself provides a constantly changing gameplay experience.
So each of the races has got individual victory conditions that are tailored to the flavour of that race which again keys back into the lore, and amongst those victory conditions there are ones that will encourage the player not to turtle in their starting area but to go out and experience the world so they go out into contact with all those many many races there. I mean in turn one of the campaign there’s something like 117 factions present on the map.
RPS: One of the things I recall from the first Total War: Warhammer is that the races were quite different in terms of who they could ally with and where they could place settlements. With this Mortal Empires campaign seems to be more focussed on conquest. How are you going to facilitate that through the game systems?
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Jim: Well, we haven’t got the mechanic we had in Warhammer 1 where, for instance, Dwarves could only capture territory off of Greenskins. We’ve included the mechanic we had in Total War: Warhammer II with climates and universal territory capture, so you can legitimately go over to Ulthwan as Karl Franz and actually capture territory over there. Functioning wheelchair sims 4 cc. It’s not necessarily always going to work out for you particularly well because there’s a place that’s got a climate that doesn’t really suit your race then you’re going to make slower progress there. But that’s all part of the strategic thinking.
Total War Warhammer Mortal Empires Map
We’ve got much more sea hexes as well. That adds a whole new dynamic and the AI’s been beefed up to handle intercontinental invasions across seas. So you can’t just capture an entire continent and then sit there with it lightly defended. You’re gonna get the AI turning up on your shore and attacking you. So all of those things are new, strategic things that players need to be thinking about, and that keeps it fresh. At the same time we’ve still got Diplomacy. That’s all perfectly legitimate. It’s a sandbox game, we don’t lock of diplomatic options particualrly between factions. So if you want to as Karl Franz make an alliance with the Vampire Counts, if you work hard at that and make the right moves that’s perfectly possible.
Ian: I’ve just been doing that in my campaign [laughs].
Jim: So it’s all about providing players with that toolbox of toys and features to you know, go about things in the way that they want to.
RPS: How have you merged the two maps? What changes have you needed to make in order to make the setting as a whole functional?
Total War Warhammer Mortal Empire Faction Tips
Ian: Well first and foremost, the gameplay and the design is the priority in this. So we did look long and hard about how we’d go about doing it, and very early on came to the conclusion that just a simple adding of both maps together wasn’t going to be the right gameplay choice. Because even in the Vortex campaign, if you’ve played that you’ll realise there’s four separate continents and you’ll spend a lot of the game just building up on one of those continents in relative isolation. If you just bolt that onto another massive map on the other side of the world, again it would be so long before you broke out of that and actually engaged with others.
So largely from that point of view, and also the more technical restrictions or considerations, like for example, the end-turn times. There’s so many new factions in this new game, and the end turn goes through all these factions. We don’t want you to be waiting much longer than previously for each end turn.
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So what we’ve done is we’ve reduced the actual scales and size of the map for the New World part of the map, but it’s still as rich in content, it’s still got loads and loads of regions to capture. But it’s not as vast as the Vortex map was itself if you follow me. So it’s designed to bring the Lizardmen and the High Elves into a bigger world more in terms of gameplay and to keep the whole thing under control. But the whole map is still way bigger than anything we’ve done and it’s cram-packed full of everything. All the DLC we’ve done, for one. And there’s 35 starting position, so you can play 35 different campaigns and when you consider how massive an investment a time each individual one of those is.
Jim: Yeah it’s about bringing this scale, but without allowing the gameplay to become baggy in any way. It has to remain tight.
Ian: That was far more succinctly put than my waffle.
RPS: Alongside the map, you’ve got all the different races squaring off, and all playable. So when you were thinking ahead to the Mortal Empries campaign, did you need to make a plan so they would be balanced equally?
Ian: We knew full well from the beginning for each individual game and for the Mortal Empires campaign that balancing was going to be a big issue, because one of the fundamental design tenets of the whole trilogy is this asymmetry of races. And so balancing was always gonna be a tougher task than it was before, and let’s face it balancing a game the size of Total War is always a tough task.
So very early on as part of this plan, because we knew what we were going to be doing, we built in new systems and put aside the time needed to be able to properly test the balancing. So we have put a lot more time than we would have in previous products into that whole balancing and new systems in order to do that, and of course we use a lot of internal feedback and feedback from our fans in pre and post-release as well. We’ll always keep refining and evolving and responding to feedback and tidying up the edges where fans report that something might be a bit OP here and there.
And again, the plan beyond the Mortal Empries release is, as we release DLC for Warhammer II and ‘free-LC’ for Warhammer II, again we’ll be patching in refinements to the balancing as well. So the whole trilogy is an ongoing refinement and balancing as well as having a lot more time put into the initial working game.
RPS: Thank you for your time.
Mortal Empires is due to launch on October 26th and is free to owners of Warhammer 1 and 2.
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