Total War Warhammer 2 New Gamemode and Cryptic Campaign DLC Update

Hey what's up guys it's Oakley and CA put up a development update. So this has to do with Norsca, the Mortal Empires campaign, and it teases a couple other things including shifts to the DLC plan. So I want to start off by saying this post by CA is very much appreciated. They've been, ever since Rome 2, taking a new turn to their community management, the way they interact with us and posts like this are why I think CA still has earned the good trust of the community since then. This post goes into great detail so pretty much they're up front with the mistakes they've had. And the full context for this is essentially they start off this post by saying work on Mortal Empires has been slow and not as smooth as players would like and for this they say they're sorry. Then they follow it up by a lengthy apology. They try and be a bit more detailed about what went wrong and how they're going to learn from this in the future. So you can go ahead and read the post yourself but essentially what the gist of it is, more on the technical side, basically for Total War they describe it as branches where different builds over time continually have more and more branches. And for example the branch of Warhammer 1 development would be different than the branch of Warhammer 2 development because of different ways that you write the code, different content, different ways of formatting things. And essentially what had happened is with Norsica they had created it in Warhammer 1, it was working, and they wanted to port it over in Warhammer 2 and they thought it would be an easy way to merge both branches but it ended up being more complicated than they had understood or expected as they dove deeper. And you can read the full technical details or perhaps, it's still pretty layman's terms but I don't want to go over all of it. They tried to merge two branches and they didn't quite have the ability to do it and it's a very manual process to get it to line up and work and they have to port things over in a much more painstaking way. It's not the same characteristic as you would expect people armchair developing saying, oh why don't you just copy and paste the files in, it's very much different than that. So CA goes into details about that. Anyways I'll let you read this if you'd like but anyways it's really good that CA comes out and is upfront about that and they say that this won't be quick but it's guaranteed to work and so we want to add one more thing to a long list of dumb mistakes we're never going to make again. So okay, I always like the fact that they're upfront or lately they've been upfront with the mistakes that they've made and that they're going to make sure to not repeat their mistakes. So this is definitely falling on appreciative ears here and this is great. But what they go ahead and do is say, hey this delay that they've had here has kind of had a knock-on effect as they would say to all the other upcoming Warhammer 2 DLC. So what was previously announced was that in Warhammer 2 we were expecting a major campaign post-release. So Mortal Empires of course was expected to come in, that has since been released but it's buggy and CA is working on it. In addition they're also working on Norsca but we're expecting a big campaign DLC. So rather than that being released this year they're actually saying it's going to be released in December. Or sorry, it's going to be released in January. In December we're going to be getting what's called the reprisal update rollout for Mortal Empires. So it should be fixing a fair amount of things. It's not going to be a full fix I would assume to all the problems people have been facing with Mortal Empires but it should do a good job of polishing it up or at least the major bugs and fixes. So that is great to hear. The campaign pack however in January here, this is interesting, our first campaign pack was planned for this year but slipped to January. Not to seem too cryptic but it's a hugely characterful and significant addition to both the Eye of the Vortex and Mortal Empires and we're sure people are going to enjoy it. So they're going to be coming out with this in January and people have been speculating that it is going to be the Tomb Kings. The cryptic here has a dual meaning I would think of also having to do with crypts I would think, I would think, excuse me, crypts, tombs, tomb kings perhaps. There's been a lot of speculation about that and I think it's pretty likely. I can't remember all the facts in front of me, people I'm sure will list them in the comments below but I think there's a fair amount of breadcrumbs leading us to believe that this is going to be a campaign pack for the Tomb Kings. That is going to be very cool. A very fun, interesting faction that should bring new life to the campaign. So that's January. Then in May, and that is a long time afterwards, they're finally going to be able to commit to bringing Norsca into the Mortal Empires campaign. So yeah, that's pretty interesting. So finally they're going to get to it in May so that's a long while off and CA basically here pre-empts some questions which is people asking, hey how come you're getting the first campaign pack, which is a paid DLC, into the game before you're getting this fully fledged free LC for a pre-order bonus that people should have already had and we have it, it's just not really working for Warhammer 2. So that is the question that they're pre-empting and they're basically saying, hey we messed up essentially, we're devoting the time and effort we can to get to it. So yeah, there's a little bit of justification to them. It is kind of shady you could say but I think CA is taking the right to be upfront about, hey we have different teams working on things, it's just going to be the fact that the team working on the campaign pack is going to be done, there's no sense delaying them and we're working as hard as we can on the Norsca project. Specifically about Norsca, they also say there's no real way to accelerate it. It would be inefficient to pull people from other parts of the project to get in because of the technical nature of the details, those new individuals would have to get up to speed and it's just not very efficient in terms of what they're trying to do and it would just have too many delaying effects on other projects. So that's kind of the justification for that. I know myself, I'm not a huge campaign player so all of these kind of mishaps and problems don't really affect me too much but I'm sure people who are viewing this are big campaign players and this is something you'll be keen to hear about. So again, let CA know what your feedback is on the forums, on Reddit, on whatever thread you can find it and to me this is just very appreciative them being upfront about this. Next they talk about why can't you do more frequent patches and basically they just talk about scheduling test cycles, trying to have it up to a higher quality and bugs that are rather extensive that they have to quash. So yeah, there's a lot to it. So all that is rather interesting. There was one little sneaky bit here that was hidden in the December update that I now want to turn to and this has me actually about the most excited. So here's what they say. So in December we're going to get the reprisal update for Mortal Empires, some fixes to the campaign, but take a look at this. They say we're also building in a new, free, and highly experimental game mode which we've had in our back pocket for a while now. More news on this later in the week. So okay, highly experimental game mode. What could this be? Man, I really hope it's not something lame like drop-in campaign battles or something like that. I know that's kind of cool, but we've had it in the past. It's not that highly experimental or that new. So to me, it might be a new twist on victory conditions. So they rolled out with free-for-all, which is great. There's a way to get points, but perhaps there's going to be a new win condition introduced. So maybe I have perhaps two theories. Maybe one is going to be some sort of king of the hill or capture point type mechanic, which would be really cool, especially considering what modders can be able to do with a capture point mechanic that you can use in field battles in a different point system. Modders can go to town with that. So that would be one idea. It would be a new way to score points based off area control instead of kills. And then another one that would be really cool would be some sort of way to do a horde survival mode. That's probably way out there, but I know survival modes and horde modes are very popular in lots of games. CA could theoretically make this possible where it's a specific map that is perhaps you deploy on one side and then the other side you can maybe queue up several AI armies and do something like that. It would be very interesting. So those are my two takes on it. I'm not quite sure what else there could be. Feel free to leave your comments in the description below what you think this new experimental gameplay is going to be. I hope it's something pretty cool. I would actually be very happy with a reintroduction of something about capturable points. Either a king of the hill type game or something a la dojos would be really great. So dojos instead of giving you armor like we saw in shogun, but maybe something that tweaks the winds of magic or magical resistance or that gives you different augments would be really cool and interesting. And especially with all the mod tools that we have for maps now, that would be even better because the modders would be empowered to do a lot of cool stuff with this new game mode. With more capture points we'll be seeing even better stuff. So yeah, like I said, we are going to have to wait and see. They say later this week, so not too long to wait until they announce it. And then this new campaign in January, not to seem too cryptic, all right, let's place our bets. Who thinks it's going to be Tomb Kings and who thinks it's going to be another faction. The other speculation might be like a Sotek for the Lizardmen and maybe a bit more looking at the Skaven forces fighting Sotek. Actually, I'm not quite sure. You'll have to defer to the lore experts on what that is. But yeah, so there is a glaring potential for introducing more units to both Lizardmen and Skaven because Skaven is obviously missing the Jazails and some various other units. So there is definitely a gap there. So we'll wait and see. But I think this campaign pack makes more sense for a completely new faction that they're hinting at here. So yeah, Tomb Kings most likely. So yeah, that's it for this video. Hope you guys enjoyed and stay tuned for more as we await this news to drop later in the week. So yeah, again, thanks to CA for being so open and upfront about the issues that they're dealing with. And it's definitely appreciated. So that's it. See you in the next one. Peace out.