Total War: Warhammer Update 1 Launches Today

Published: June 30, 2016 10:15 AM /

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Total War Warhammer

Update 1 for Total War: Warhammer will be launching today according to an announcement on the game's Steam community page.

To start, Update 1 will be adding five new maps for the multiplayer portion of the game: Alpine Ridge, Blue Reach River, Crossroads, Heorot Ridge, and Peak Pass. The first "FreeLC" (Free DLC) content is the Blood Knights, a Tier 5 shock cavalry for the Vampire Counts. Players will be able to recruit them from the Vampire's Keep.

A few broad changes to overall gameplay behavior are coming. AI-controlled heroes will gain experience at half the rate of a human player and their success chance has been dialed back on Easy and Normal difficulties. Hero actions that cause damage to entire armies have had their damage significantly reduced.

The Campaign AI now punishes diplomatic treachery more severely. Diplomatic treachery will have a bigger impact on the player's reliability rating and the AI will remember it for a longer period of time. The late game AI behavior has been changed to be more aggressive as well as more likely to revert to a pre-Chaos state of breaking treaties and turning against one another.

In addition to numerous tweaks and balance changes, Update 1 for Total War: Warhammer will be putting DirectX 12 support into Beta. Furthermore, the developers have added benchmark functionality so you discover the performance differences you'll have between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. You can check out the system requirements here as well as a list of GPUs that will be supported in today's update.

Although there are some changes coming to multiplayer in Update 1, Creative Assembly has stated that they're still testing a lot of features and planned changes:

Update 1 is designed to add polish, increase stability, tweak AI behaviour, address some known gameplay issues and redress balance in a number of areas. This is the first in a number of updates, which means you may not see some changes you were expecting. For example, while multiplayer has seen some attention in this update, it’s in line for more focussed improvement, additional features and rebalancing in an upcoming update. Many of these changes are in testing right now, and as long-term stability and balance are of principle importance to us all, we don’t want to rush the process.
The patch is primed to go live at 2:00 PM BST - that's 9:00 AM Eastern Time for the Americans. Update 1 for Total War: Warhammer will be doing lots of little nerfs and buffs for units and various other elements of the game. If you'd like to read up on the specific details you can check out the patch notes here.

What do you think of the changes and additions coming to Total War: Warhammer in Update 1? Will you try out Direct X 12? How do you feel about Creative Assembly taking the time to test more multiplayer changes? Let us know in the comments below!

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More Info About This Game
Learn more about Total War: Warhammer
Developer
Creative Assembly
Publisher
SEGA
Platforms
PC
Release Date
May 24, 2016 (Calendar)
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