Total War: Warhammer 3 – Thrones of Decay release date delayed to 2024

DLC roadmap pushed back, more content for Shadows of Change

Creative Assembly has announced that the highly anticipated Total War: Warhammer 3 Thrones of Decay DLC will be delayed into 2024, pushing back the timeline of the Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC roadmap. Thrones of Decay was originally set for a “Winter 2023” launch.

However, several events since the roadmap’s release have changed the general picture: CA has been hit with a restructuring program ordered by Sega after the cancellation of Hyenas, a costly live-service shooter that was very close to being released, and the Shadows of Change DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3 was not well received by the community due to its high pricing and a perceived lack of adequate content.

Thrones of Decay will have to wait, but there's good news as well / Creative Assembly

The Total War: Warhammer 3 team has tried its best to bridge the divide this has caused with the series’ loyal community, pushing out a consistent string of updates to fix bugs plaguing the game for a long time. These hotfixes were well-received by the players and taken as a sign of things going in the right direction.

Update with more Shadows of Change content

It seems like the developers want to hold that positive course, reaching out to the community with another olive branch: a content update for the Shadows of Change DLC, which will bring owners of the expansion some additional content for free and make the pack a more enticing offer for potential buyers, who have been holding off on getting it.

This update is planned to come in February 2024.

A statement made by the company’s vice president, Roger Collum, says the following:

We have listened to your feedback on Shadows of Change and we know that we failed to meet your expectations of what a DLC should be. To address that, we are enhancing our offer for everyone who purchased Shadows of Change with more content and a commitment to ensuring that we better meet your expectations going forward.

We’re targeting a major update to Shadows of Change which will arrive free for everyone who owns it. We have the goal of releasing this update in February 2024, at which point it will become part of the package for everyone who buys it in the future.

That launch date is our ambition, but this isn’t concrete. It may move, and as soon as those plans are finalized, we’ll let you know and we’ll keep you in the know as we get closer to its release.

We also have more work to do on Thrones of Decay to make sure that we don’t repeat our past mistakes, and to give you the amount of content that you rightly expect from us at these price points. Once we’ve launched our free update to Shadows of Change, we’ll talk more about what this next DLC will offer and how it will add to your experiences of WARHAMMER III. We’ll make sure that you know exactly what’s coming in Thrones of Decay before pre-orders are available, and make sure that you have full transparency around the content before you see ‘Buy Now’ buttons.

After Thrones of Decay releases, we’ll reveal what the next series of content for WARHAMMER III looks like. Our work on this beloved series isn’t finished yet.

Recently, Sega stated that it wants Creative Assembly to focus on Total War again, which seems to be very much in line with this latest move.

In a Total War: Warhammer 3 developer interview earlier this year, game director Rich Aldridge hinted towards legendary Nurgle daemon Tamurkhan being included in Thrones of Decay.