The Creative Assembly team has announced that the release of Total War: Warhammer will be pushed back nearly a month from its original launch date (April 28, 2016) to May 24th, 2016. This announcement comes on the heels of newly revealed campaign and battle gameplay footage showing what prospective buyers can expect in the new title. The reason for the date change was explained in a post on the Total War: Warhammer's Steam News page:
Listen – we don’t want to rush this. This could be the best TW game we’ve made and we want reviewers to have enough time to play it thoroughly before launch, so that you get a fair review from a reviewer you trust. Hopefully, you can understand that – and of course we apologise for any hassle this might cause you.The same progress update also revealed Total War: Warhammer's operating specifications and the news that Total War: Warhammer would be the "the first 64Bit Total War title" and the release of "an additional ‘60fps+ Spec’ for those gamers looking to hit that threshold during battles". This is likely an attempt to stop a repeat of outrage inducing poor performance rates of Creative Assembly's prior launches. The release of Total War: Rome II is remembered for its lack of optimization at launch, requiring multiple patches and complex optimization guides to bring even highly-spec'd PC rigs tolerable frame-rates at the game's higher settings.
The reaction to the announcement by potential buyers has been mixed. Some are cautiously supporting the move in the hope that a more polished game will be released while others are angry at the delay for a game they have already pre-ordered. A few more opportunistically minded individuals within these two groups are to turn the news into an opportunity to gain some free DLC. In any case, this move is sure to generate mostly negative buzz around a title already plagued by it.
For ease of reference, the current requirements posted by Creative Assembly for '60fps+ Spec' in Total War: Warhammer are as follows:
PC 60fps+ Specifications:
[Expected 60 FPS+ on campaign map and in a 1v1, 20 units vs 20 units battle, default graphics preset set to “Ultra”]
- Operating System: Windows 7/8.1/10 64Bit
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K 4.0 GHz
- RAM: 8 GB
- Hard Drive: 35 GB
- Video Card: (DirectX 11) AMD Fury X or Nvidia GTX 980 @1080P
