Creative Assembly’s long-running readjustment of Total War: Warhammer 3 presses on with the slow but inexorable determination of an army of dwarves. Back in March, the developer completely overhauled the game’s maligned Kislev faction to make its polar-bear riding humans more fun to play. Now, it has issued a new patch targeting another specific area of the game with deep restructuring—its magic item system.
For those unaware, Total War: Warhammer 3 allows its faction and army leaders to equip magical items known as “ancillaries”, RPG-ish baubles that afford a wide array of stat bonuses. According to the patch notes, this system has been reworked from the ground up to make it more streamlined, uniform, and better balanced. “In total some 600 ancillaries (all items in common, uncommon and rare) have had their effects and rarity adjusted to match our new balancing paradigm.”
Regarding why CA has done this, the studio provided a thorough explanation in last week’s developer diary, diving greedily and deep into its dragon’s hoard of magical jewellery. Basically, Creative Assembly has greatly expanded the number of these items over the course of all three Total War: Warhammer games and their various DLC, without making appropriate balance tweaks when such new items were added.
“While each iteration was always made with the best of intentions, none of these iterations ever shared a balancing framework,” senior game designer William Håkestad writes. “Over the years, this has understandably caused a significant disparity between items in a variety of locales.”
Such problems include items being the wrong strength for their rarity, which CA has addressed with a complex-sounding “cost/budget matrix” that more accurately judges how rare an item should be based on a hidden stat called “uniqueness”. Håkestad says this involved “a lot of pen and paper” work, and admits it isn’t very “flashy”. But the net result is a system that provides clearer power differences between items of varying rarity tiers, and a general rebalancing of rarity thresholds.
This broader rework isn’t the only goal of the patch. It also expands the number of magical item effects for greater variety, reduces the number of items to “reduce UI overload”, and also tailors items to your current collection and playstyle, meaning you’re less likely to see all the system’s possibilities in a single playthrough.
Outside of the magic item system, the update adds two new units, namely Hobgoblin bolt throwers for the Chaos Dwarfs, and the ominous sounding Blood Knights, which are anti-infantry vampiric cavalry. The game’s storage size has been reduced by 27%, which is pretty impressive when you’ve put more stuff in, and the game should load between 5% and 42% faster too.
Finally, that most stubborn gremlin of the Total War series, the AI, has been given a few extra customisation options. Players can now toggle AI Strength & Threat Assessment, which overrides the chosen campaign difficulty to let AI dynamically assess the threats of rivals, and minor faction potential, which allows smaller factions to make better campaign decisions.
While I haven’t played CA’s latest fantasy romp for a while, these all sound like sensible design changes to me. There are more additions coming to Warhammer 3 soon, too, with its Tides of Torment DLC due later this summer.
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