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Being "different" were not TWW3's biggest issues.

Autoresolve is overtuned and scales to campaign difficulty.
Player bias is even higher than in WH2.
Game actually crashes consistently. WH2 crashed maybe a half dozen times in 2500~ hours.
UI is markedly worse.
Map layout is bland, especially in comparison to the lore rich ME map.
Campaign level graphics changed for no reason. Additional unnecessary SFX added.
Lazy and broken skill design. Heroes don't even have 49 options. Many skills flat out don't work.
The abomination that is Daniel's side/down grades and overall campaign mechanics.

 Overread wrote:
Also lets not forget one reason Warhammer 3 has "issues" is because its a fast continuation of Warhammer 2 and some of the issues are simply "its different" or "its not got Immortal Empires".

I'm going to disagree on that. The primary complaints are -

1.) Poor settlement battles implementation
2.) A campaign that encourages players to turtle up
3.) Screwed up auto-resolve

Settlement battles worked fine in Three Kingdoms, so the problem is how they implemented them in this game specifically.
The problem with the campaign is a pretty clear design flaw with it. The whole point of a game like this is for players to grow their empire, and not wait behind their walls.
The auto-resolve problem is bad weighting somewhere in the number crunching, probably.

Several of the issues make you wonder if the game was even playtested.

According to the various youtubers the issue of the Realm of Chaos campaign was raised by all of them.

There are definate improvements to areas like Diplomacy which was in Troy and I think 3K ( I did not play that one)

Alot of people wanted Minor Settlement Battles but why they wanted to make them into a mini-game with tower building I am not sure.

The new autoresolve means that you have to fight more battles but they are often the wrong battles - so full stacks against 5 units and you take no damage.

I actually quite like Vortex - and you can tackle it your own pace - many people dislike that yiu can;t do this in the Chaos Realms.

I still wonder why modders get so many of these things right compared to the devs?

 Mr Morden wrote:
According to the various youtubers the issue of the Realm of Chaos campaign was raised by all of them.

I think a lot of issues were raised by YTers but it was too late to fix them. The issue with flying units being unable to land is one I saw a few times before the game even came out, and the snow issue also, but it was only a month or so prior to release.

I actually don't mind the Vortex, even after ME came out I've played a couple of Vortex campaigns.

But also, I don't really hate Realm of Chaos either, it's all the other things, particularly unit responsiveness (which CA say they're addressing in the May update, but also say "it will be a long-term project", meaning it's probably not actually going to be fixed) and the minor settlement tower defence minigame, the hideous UI and other little things that add up to be a big thing.

This is probably one case where delaying the game a few extra months would have helped.

But a lot of their 'fixes' have just been changing values, or implementing rewards that are carbon copies of the rewards from the Vortex campaign.

In their roadmap they talk about, for example, one of their big sign-posted changes will be a change to Tzeentch and Slaanesh casualty replenishment rates. This is changing a few values, not some massive overhaul of a game mechanic. Why do we have to wait months for them to change something modders could do overnight?

I have been very down on the TWW modding scene, even since the first game, as I generally see a lot of mods that aren't about adding or fixing things but are more about "CA did this wrong. This is how it should be based upon my personal views on Warhammer!", but with everything happening with TWW3, and seeing how many fixes the modding community are making to really obvious issues, I'm starting to view this more as I viewed Skyrim modding: An absolute necessity!

There's definitely things that make me think "Seriously, this is going to take 3 months to fix? Maybe you should fire the person working on that..."




As an aside, there's no race packs listed in the Roadmap, so we're not getting Chaos Dwarfs (or anything else) this year I guess.

Well no, because the DLC team now have to fix the game the main dev team dumped on them. They haven't got time to actually do their jobs.

I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.

What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.

 Henry wrote:
I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.

What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.

No.
It won't, atleast never mechanically, considering how CA is stagnant on that front since ever.

And yes, getting 3 Kingdomed is a full on possibility for WHTW 3.

The Three Kingdoms abandonment was unusual. In the past, they've always attempted to save their games. A good example of that is the fiasco of the Rome 2 launch. But CA stuck with the game. It's possible that Three Kingdoms represents a change in policy. But I think it's more likely that some of the experimental stuff in the game was causing problems they couldn't fix.

TWW3 is the final game in a very profitable series. I can't imagine CA going the 3K route instead of the Rome 2 route. It's possible, but I would be surprised if they did.

Once they do finish the game, I am interested in that Chaos Warriors rework. Finally.

 Henry wrote:
I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.

What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.

I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?

Thing is I'm looking forward to it being a fantastic game further down the line, there are some aspects of it that I really do enjoy. I just think it wasn't finished when it was released.

Eumerin wrote:
The Three Kingdoms abandonment was unusual. In the past, they've always attempted to save their games. A good example of that is the fiasco of the Rome 2 launch. But CA stuck with the game. It's possible that Three Kingdoms represents a change in policy. But I think it's more likely that some of the experimental stuff in the game was causing problems they couldn't fix.

TWW3 is the final game in a very profitable series. I can't imagine CA going the 3K route instead of the Rome 2 route. It's possible, but I would be surprised if they did.

It was not. Indeed it is more the norm than CA fixing their games, considering ETW to this day still has some sever AI bugs that have been resolved in etw2, sorry NTW.

 Mr Morden wrote:

I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?

That's kind of what I'm getting at. TWW2 was the first game I've ever played where I bought new content as it came out, the game was that good to me and the team earned the trust. But 3 isn't worth playing, so I'll hold off DLC until the base game is fun to play. Until then how many people are like me and won't buy any DLC?

 Henry wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?

That's kind of what I'm getting at. TWW2 was the first game I've ever played where I bought new content as it came out, the game was that good to me and the team earned the trust. But 3 isn't worth playing, so I'll hold off DLC until the base game is fun to play. Until then how many people are like me and won't buy any DLC?

Kind of a non-issue. The road map has exactly one... a small lord pack with 4 'champions.' Somewhere vaguely in Q3 along with the IE beta and a rework of Warriors of Chaos. And the blood pack.
But this is _all_ in update 2.0, and there is almost no way that quarter estimate won't slip into Q4 or even 2023. And then planned improvements to make IE functional in 2.1 will be pushed even further.

Until IE is released and polished, there really isn't any reason to buy DLC, but they aren't really offering any reasons or anything to buy, either. If Chaos Dwarfs were on the map for this year and ignored the main campaign the way Tomb Kings ignored the Vortex, I'd probably go for it. But they're not even in the cards yet, and Immortal Empires is still a hollow promise.

MacOS release is apparently tomorrow.

Just in case there are any Mac users that want to dive into the game despite the last few pages of comments.

Eumerin wrote:
MacOS release is apparently tomorrow.

Just in case there are any Mac users that want to dive into the game despite the last few pages of comments.

yes me, I like M1

I can't help but think there's an echo chamber in CA that leads them to weird decisions.

Like, if TWW3 had just been an expansion to TWW2... literally take the same game and the same map and expand it a little bit further north and then expand the east across the mountains to Cathay then added in the same races into the game... I feel most people would have been reasonably happy with that. Yeah, maybe the end turn would have gotten a bit longer, but I think most people would be fine with that.

Instead they went down the road of creating a campaign that it seems very few people care about to the detriment of the campaign people actually do want. I get that they want TWW3 to feel like a game in and of itself the same way as TWW2 with the vortex, but the vortex was always the sideshow to the mortal empires experience (and I say that as someone who actually doesn't mind the vortex campaign).

Maybe they'll prove me wrong and the new mortal empires will be awesome on a spherical map with proper proportions and whatnot, but I doubt it.

MAC version of the game has an updated map:



Albion and part of Bretonnia are suddenly there, as are a few other new areas.

Yeah, more provinces at the edge of the map away from everything are definitely going to improve things.

More crap factions to automatically be at war with the Daemon Prince and add to the never ending zerg rush, I guess.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
MAC version of the game has an updated map:

Spoiler:

Albion and part of Bretonnia are suddenly there, as are a few other new areas.

What are the "few other new areas"? I only spotted Albion and Marches of Couronne.

Middle Mountains. Northern Wastes.

I hate everything about that map.

You should. The map is (for me at least) hands down the worst aspect of the game. And it affects so much.

Putting the Realms of Chaos on the mortal map was just dumb. Putting true north between the realms of Khorne and Nurgle just warped _everything_. Caravans from Cathay travel 'south' to the Empire, still through the ogre kingdoms, because obviously west is south on that edge of the map (that's how badly its distorted). The Empire is just... a directionless squash.
Regions are warped, shrunk and stretched to function against their natural layout. In familiar areas of the map (like the Empire and Norsca), my brain actively fights against the presentation of geography- its just that wrong. In unfamiliar areas (like Cathay, which was never really mapped) it feels like a realm of chaos in its own right- nothing makes sense, and nothing links up to a recognizable geography, because important features like the coastline are off the edge of the map.

What's even worse, is Kislev was very obviously designed from a gameplay perspective, and is more or less the 'heart' of the map. So it kind of gets a pass from the scale warping, and is instead scaled on gameplay concerns- specifically that major or important towns are all exactly more than a single turn of travel time apart. So its on a very different scale than the rest of the map, which causes the scale warp elsewhere to be even more exaggerated.

It is incredibly terrible design, to the point that I'm somewhat incredulous that it made it into the final game.

Voss wrote:

It is incredibly terrible design, to the point that I'm somewhat incredulous that it made it into the final game.

You just described 50-75% of the new content. The only new thing they added that I actually miss when playing WH2 are the new options to merge or destroy items.

"New " areas highlighted

100% agreed with Voss. Huge miss of them to do the map that way and it impacts a *lot* beyond just the aesthetics of the game.