Creative Assembly lays out its plans for Total War: Three Kingdom’s post launch content

Even more Lu Bu

With Total War: Three Kingdoms releasing in a few days, development has wrapped on the main title and work has begun on post-launch support. While there will obviously be updates to the core experience as more players get their hands on it, developer Creative Assembly has laid out how Three Kingdoms will change moving forward.

The first order of business is for what additional content the game will get. As with past Total War entries, there will be a mixture of free and paid DLC that will expand the title for months to come. The first is the “Yellow Turban Rebellion” add-on that was granted to players that pre-ordered the game. It’s currently unavailable and should be ready for launch this Thursday. After that, the team says it will focus on what it is calling “Chapter Packs” for the campaign mode.

These chapter packs will take “notable chapters from Romance” and put players in brand new starting positions on the strategy map to tweak the scenarios slightly. New characters and objectives will be featured, forcing you to make different decisions with the armies you’ve grown accustomed to. This will also extend to villain characters, which may be younger or older based on which scenario you pick.

As for how large each chapter pack will be, Creative Assembly says, “you can expect a Chapter Pack to be somewhere between a Culture Pack and a Campaign Pack.” Culture packs are small scenarios that the game lets you play while a Campaign pack is an entire story that takes several hours to finish. The goal is to allow players to eventually decide which chapter of a character’s life they want to play in, instead of going full hog on a massive campaign.

As for how the main game will be shaped outside of DLC, Creative Assembly states there will be an additional support team to help players with any issues that may arise. Since PC configurations vary wildly, there is no accounting for absolutely every setup, and the developer urges fans to give feedback on its forum dedicated to Three Kingdoms. I can live with that, especially since I feel the game is pretty solid from a stability standpoint.

Modding will also be coming to Three Kingdoms shortly after launch. The reason it isn’t currently available is that Creative Assembly reports players sometimes report bugs caused by mods that then derail the patching process. At least when modding does eventually come, the team assures fans that the game’s data structure is a lot more robust than previous entries, which should allow for more complex mods to be cooked up.

Even if you may be rolling your eyes at potential DLC, I do currently think the base Total War: Three Kingdoms experience is solid. DLC will always be a tricky process, but I don’t get the feeling that things were left out to be sold back later. It seems more like this has taken the place of traditional expansion packs, which Rome II started years ago. Hopefully, that is the case because Three Kingdoms is a lot of fun.

Business Practices Blog – Three Kingdoms Post-Launch and What’s Next [Total War]