We’ve been playing Total War in the Old World for ten years. It seems that Creative Assembly have decided that it’s time to blow it all up. Teased as part of the 25 year anniversary of Total War (if you remember playing Shogun when it came out, you’re also an old like me), Lords of the End Times represents the next stage of content for Warhammer Total War 3 – and perhaps the last.
I’ll not break down the trailer second by second, because that’s incredibly tedious – go watch it – but it’s a nicely animated piece of work teasing a lot more than it spells out. Nagash, The Great Betrayer, is coming to Warhammer Total War, and bringing his slave-lords, the Mortarchs, with him.
In terms of Warhammer 3 DLCs, that most likely means new legendary lords, new campaign mechanics and new ways of playing, but to work out what’s probably in there we’d have to know who the Mortarchs and Nagash are, right?
First, to Nagash. You might know him as the God of Undeath or the Lord of Shyish, or simply as a whole lot of points in a variety of Age of Sigmar armies. If you’ve been around a while, you might be more familiar with him as the first and greatest of the End Times revelations – if you’ve been here for a very long time indeed, you’ll know his intricate and slightly ridiculous story throughout Warhammer Fantasy. In the Old World, Nagash is the highly disputed lord of all Undead, the originator of the Vampire curse, destroyer of Khemri and the ultimate bad guy lurking behind the rotting facade of the Warhammer world.
For all that, Nagash arriving as a Legendary Lord in Warhammer Total War 3 might not happen. The Legendary Lords we have are largely drawn from the old Special Characters of Warhammer (of which Nagash was, once, one), but adding him in to the rosters of the Undead factions represents a massive jump up the power scales. Lord Kroak, Skarbrand, Fateweaver and all the other near-godlike Lords will have literally nothing on him. It’s possible – I won’t say likely – that Nagash remains off the board, perhaps an overarching mechanic for a Nagash faction rather than a character you can point and click with. How could you possibly level up a God? Very happy to be proven wrong on this one – let’s see what we get in the end.
The Mortarchs are where the Lord Choices come in. Nagash’ Mortarchs were the Nine Greatest Undead of the Old World, a replacement for his long-lost Nine Dark Lords, and carried out more of the nitty-gritty of his plan to kill everything living in the Warhammer World before the Chaos Gods ate it. While they failed, it’s very possible we’ll get to pull that off in Warhammer 3. There were nine Mortarchs, 6 of which are definitely shown in the trailer – Arkhan the Black, Krell, Luthor Harkon, Vlad and Manfred von Carstein already in the Lord roster, joined by Neferata, the first Vampire, as a new Lord choice. We also might see a glimpse of others – the charging Vampire on horseback is probably Walach Harkon – but unless I’ve really missed something Dieter Helsnicht and Drachenfels are both absent for the moment.
In Total War terms, they’d all make excellent Legendary Lords – they already do – with a much earned promotion for Krell as everyone’s favourite Warhammer Skeleton. Mortarchs get a nice new legendary mount as well, the Dread Abyssal that we see Manfred Von Carstein flying in the trailer.
Why Is This a Good Thing for Total Warhammer?
One of the most exciting bits for those of us who were around in the Warhammer fantasy days before the End Times is that Nagash is back. Before he was the God of Death in the Mortal Realms, Nagash was much more interesting. He was is a big bad – if not THE big bad of Warhammer Fantasy. Archaon may have destroyed the world and various Chaos lads, lasses and theys gave it a good go, but there are no substitutes for the biggest, moustache-twirlingest, big-hatted, greatest bastard of Warhammer. His transformation from Priest into Necromancer, Vampire and eventually Godlike weirdo draws in most of the factions of the Old World. Wars are fought in his shadow, for his leavings – the shadow cast by Nagash across the fantasy setting is long and pervasive.
He’s always been there, lurking and threatening – in middle editions of fantasy even receiving a much reviled model – and the return of Nagash was the most exciting thing about the End Times. It represented a genuine threat to the status quo that had persisted in the fantasy world for thirty years – one that was quickly made good on before the end times spiraled into ultra-high fantasy.
We need that end times threat in Warhammer 3. Once you’ve nailed the short victory and are working towards the long, you’re unassailable and it’s only patience that you battle with on your way to final world domination. There’s no threat there, is there? Grimgor might have snowballed in the east, and the Von Carsteins probably wiped the Empire off the map but there isn’t anything that can stop a player once they’ve hit the short victory conditions. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a threat here – the End Times that can stop any campaign in its tracks.
The other exciting thing is Settra. The End Times turned Settra from another fairly interesting character in a world of meh to fairly good ones into both a badass and an eventually tiresome meme. The trailer contains the terrible, not-quite final, death of the King of Khemri. Settra does not kneel, or serve – so he dies. His inclusion, perhaps, hints at us getting to play out a choice he makes, and wouldn’t it be interesting to make it…. differently?
What Else Might We Get?
If this is the start of the End Times, the Nagash element is only the first in a series of events that rapidly escalate in ridiculousness, and each one could well bring fantastic gameplay opportunities for Total War 3. Malekith will be revealed as the true rightful Phoenix King, the Skaven will grow some even bigger rat ogres and then do something so totally them that it earned the horned rat an ascension to major chaos god, the Empire will not do an awful lot and, most importantly, we’ll all cry over Gobbla.
If Lords of the End Times follows the model releases, we can expect most factions to get something, even if it’s simply a rejig of units available, easy alliances or cheap multi-faction recruitment. The Undead will almost certainly get the new units that released alongside the resurrected Nagash, for all that they probably don’t need the boost at the moment. But the undead are the first and most sensible set of likely new units – those who have begged for a fully integrated elf alliance are probably going to get it! The wrinkle is in Cathay – will GW allow their new, incredibly powerful and incredibly good-guy written faction get absolutely shit on as they did the Empire, Brettonnia and all the other human realms they never bothered to write? Time will tell, but I suspect the East may end up a Bastion against the End Times for at least a patch or two.
If the new fly-over of the campaign map and the dynamic changes teased as part of the Lord of the End Times DLC/Patch say anything though, it’s that I won’t be able to play it – I play Warhammer 3 limping along on minimum settings and even then, it melts my computer. A lovely, dynamic map that substantially changes due to events and corruption levels? That’s going to turn my computer into toast – so please, everyone, enjoy what’s coming. Tell me about it, while I try to coax another couple of % points of performance out of my aged machine.
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