Total War: WARHAMMER III – CA Recap & Hotfix Timeline

[76561199238047981]

Hello everyone,

First things first, we’d like to start by (again) offering our heartfelt THANKS for all the healthy communication, detailed issue reports, thoughtful concerns, and for your ongoing patience with the many people working to collect, understand, and escalate your crucial feedback to the development team. Whether you’ve contributed to the conversation on our official Forums or Discord, on the Steam Discussions board, or via the community-led subreddit, your feedback has not only helped us understand the areas where your expectations of the current release have fallen short, but have helped drive the direction of where we go from here. Thank you for being a part of this initial conversation—one which will undoubtedly lay the groundwork for Total War: WARHAMMER III in the years to come.

HOTFIX TL;DR

Today we’d like to clarify what we’re focusing on as a team and what you can expect to come next. To quickly answer a few questions that are at the top of everyone’s mind:

• Yes; we are in the process of working on the first of several hotfixes to address the critical issues you’ve identified over the past several days. We plan to release these as rapidly as we are able without compromising the current stability or performance of the game.
  
  
• We are aiming to release the first hotfix later this week! NOTE THAT THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE based on NUMEROUS factors—some of which are out of our control (outlined below).
  
  
• We will keep you updated about our long-term hotfix schedule as we establish a solid timeline. When we have solid dates for the current, next, and next-next hotfixes, we’ll let you know so you can look forward to them.
  
  
• We MAY leverage the Steam beta feature to make specific changes available early. The goal will be to determine whether they fix the more nuanced issues that certain players are experiencing. (More on this plan in the future...)

Now the longer version...

HOTFIX PLAN: EXPLAINED

On a positive note, over the past several days, many players with a variety of hardware specs have already found success in playing and enjoying the game the way it was intended, which is *fantastic* to hear! Tech-savvy members of the community have even been helping to identify numerous settings, software tweaks, and problematic systems impacting the experience over the past several days; many of their discoveries and efforts have even helped open the door for other players to enjoy the game, which has been immensely successful!

The unfortunate news is that this has not been the case for everyone—and worse is the fact that there is no single culprit for the variety of issues being reported. This is an understandable source of frustration for those affected, and a complicated landscape for us as we navigate and explore the many possible causes with many possible fixes for the different problems at hand.

We’ve already identified numerous actionable options, but each one will only improve things for a *specific* group of users rather than everyone at once. As a result, we’ve decided to take a surgical approach to address them: deploying smaller hotfixes at a faster rate rather than waiting to compile fixes into a large update that smashes multiple issues at once. We are determined to make improvements as quickly and safely as possible, but it’s crucial that we avoid rushing the process at the expense of the game’s stability.

The first of these hotfix releases is targeted for later this week; HOWEVER, it is important to note that this depends and may shift depending on several factors:

• Fixes need to be implemented, tested, and verified by both our team and our external partners. This can take several days to get the “all clear” from all stakeholders.
  
  
• The more fixes in a build, the more risk that it can cause problems with other elements in the game or with the platforms where the game is released. This is another reason we’re keeping the builds as narrow and focused as possible.
  
  
• If a fix fails to meet the criteria of anyone—be it CA or one of our partners—it can delay our ability to release the build.

The focus of this first build is to address some of the multiplayer lobby issues, the DirectX problems we’ve seen from players running DX12, and hopeful framerate improvements for players using modern Intel CPU’s. The EXACT contents of the release will be announced as plans solidify, so keep your eyes open here for that news—as well as any changes to the schedule as we learn them—coming your way soon.

OPTIMIZATION AND PERFORMANCE FIXES

As mentioned previously, the optimization and performance issues reported by many users remain one of our top priorities. Beyond the crashes and other critical issues we’re working to solve, we very much understand—as gamers ourselves—that the game’s performance is a cornerstone of your ability to enjoy it.

Implementing solutions, however, is going to take time: not only as we work across multiple technical disciplines to identify where the most meaningful changes can be made, but work with all of you to understand what aspects of the game are the most impactful on your experience. At first, you can expect to see small, targeted improvements to specific areas of the game. Then, in later updates, we’ll be able to make larger improvements to the stability and other important areas of the game. This is a long-term project—one we expect to be a priority for the foreseeable future!

Again: as we learn more, we will strive to communicate and work with you to be a part of that process! For now, we ask that you be patient, continue experimenting with the specific hardware and software settings of your system, and share what works (or doesn’t work) so others can contribute to the discussion. The more people are working to solve problems and communicate solutions, the easier it is for us to identify the areas of concern that lead to permanent solutions

LOOKING FORWARD

That’s all we have for now, but you can expect more communication from us as our next steps take shape. Creative Assembly is dedicated to making Total War: WARHAMMER III the best game it is and was always intended to be, which means we’ll be working hard to address the concerns and issues brought to our attention.

We also know that some of you are super keen on getting information about our upcoming content plans and roadmap into the future, which we’re also excited to share with you! For now, we want to focus on making sure we are helping those who are having a less fun time with WARHAMMER III as we establish a strong baseline for the game. We haven’t forgotten about the roadmap and will come back to our originally planned updates as soon as possible!

—The Total War Team

[76561199238047981]

You can also read up on our previous updates and workarounds to common issues, here:

• Total War: WARHAMMER III - CA Recap and Day 1 Report
  
• Total War: WARHAMMER III – CA Recap and Day 2 Report
  
• Total War: WARHAMMER III – CA Recap and Weekend Report

[KillaMando]

Blood for the blood god would be nice for those of us who can actually run the game but cant enjoy the true WARHAMMER experience.

[Jack Greedy]

We love You CA, have Your time to fix game optimization.

Game is really great, for me it is game of my life.

Keep updating us about a progress it is fantastic that You communicate with us.
This game simply deserves to be greatest TW title ever.
And in the future please give us Warhammer 40K Total War.

Also please release Blood dlc.

[Beta Ray Jim]

This is FANTASTIC news!

Thank you for being transparent and forthcoming with this information.

[Darth Alpharius]

Originally posted by CalesTheVigilant:

Blood for the blood god would be nice for those of us who can actually run the game but cant enjoy the true WARHAMMER experience.

you mean the same blood DLC thats poorly made and kinda pointless.

[Realhollow]

Originally posted by Darth Alpharius:

Originally posted by CalesTheVigilant:

Blood for the blood god would be nice for those of us who can actually run the game but cant enjoy the true WARHAMMER experience.

you mean the same blood DLC thats poorly made and kinda pointless.

Not when you play Khorne XD

[76561199238047981]

Originally posted by CalesTheVigilant:

Blood for the blood god would be nice for those of us who can actually run the game but cant enjoy the true WARHAMMER experience.

This is absolutely still in the works! Our focus right now is on establishing a strong baseline for the core game, but we can't wait to share the other cool stuff we have planned once we've done just that!

[Zoie Shales]

Oh good, looking forward to these fixes, thank you.

[Bomjus]

i hope gamepass co op is on the list of things to hotfix. i have attempted to play with 5 different people, 50% of the time we crash just in the lobby, the other 50% of the time they crash before even being able to auto resolve.

i also can't crossplay with any of them, none of them can join my steam hosted lobby and i can't join theirs. i have to play the game on gamepass.

[Solist]

Excellent news!

[Captain]

i'd love an option to not have to race against the AI to collect souls. I don't mind it as a player thing, but I'm losing my campaign to something I can't control, and only workaround is to start all over and try again? that's neither fun nor endearing...

[VesperSB]

glad to see an update is finally coming maybe this week lol. No reason it shouldve been released so poorly optimized to begin with, without at least a day 0 or day 1 patch.

[Artfactial]

Very clear and transparent communication, thank you and good luck!

[Feelgood Citrus]

Thank you, transparency and communication is always great to have so that we know what's happening.

[Mogul ✠]

Thanks for the informations.
Hopefully the “disbanded Lord” upkeep bug gets fixed as soon as possible too :)
That one is really annoying :(