The Chaos Warriors DLC for the upcoming game Total War: Warhammer will be free with purchase of the game for the first week of the game's release according to PC Invasion. The announcement was accompanied with a Let's Play video of Kholek Suneater versus Ungrim Ironfist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EIkvHD7MU8
Customers who pre-order Total War: Warhammer (developed by Creative Assembly) or purchase it within the first week will receive the Chaos Warriors Race Pack DLC for free. The offer was initially announced a news post on the game's Steam Community page and explained in detail with a FAQ on the game's wiki.
Any retailer who is providing the Chaos Warriors DLC as a preorder bonus will be supplying it for free for the first week of the game's launch. Customers who have already pre-ordered the game will get access to it.
The Chaos Warriors DLC was initially a preorder exclusive bonus that resulted in backlash from the community. The in-engine cinematic trailer for the DLC had accumulated nearly 50,000 dislikes (compared to less than 4,000 likes). The developers of Total War: Warhammer wrote a rather lengthy blog post detailing why they decided to have the Chaos Warriors DLC as a pre-order bonus, a portion of which is excerpted here:
So in TW: Warhammer’s case, we had our four main playable races sorted, and we’ve planned for Chaos to have a big role to play later in the trilogy. But we really wanted Chaos Warriors in the main game, even without DLC – to give a big, bad end of game "boss" enemy Race for all players. But we couldn’t do that within the resources for the main game. So we added it as the pre-order incentive that also gets sold on day one – making Chaos Warriors fully playable but also giving us the extra resources to add them as an Ai race for everyone.This discussion took place between November and December of 2015, and the result of fan feedback and internal discussion is likely the offer you see today.So is adding chaos as a pre-order incentive "cut content"? I think the opposite is true. If we didn't add it to the pre-order, it would have been DLC later on and not in the game at release.
We thought we'd done well. Maybe there is a better solution - we're listening to all suggestions for the future. Maybe pre-orders are becoming so toxic they will stop working altogether. You'd hope not though, as it quite simply means those incentives will end up just being paid DLC after launch.
The offer for the free Chaos Warriors DLC ends at 6:00PM BST on May 31st, 2016. Total War: Warhammer launches on May 24th, 2016. You can preorder it on the Humble Store and Steam.
How do you think Total War: Warhammer is shaping up? What do you think of the developers giving away the Chaos Warriors DLC for the first week? Do you feel it will be a worthy addition to the Total War series of games that also does justice to Warhammer? Let us know in the comments below!