Why play it on GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet
Enjoy truly titanic battles at their best with the benefits of a Priority membership. Total War Warhammer 3 is a game that will see you losing hours upon hours to it. So that 6-hour play session isn’t going to seem so infinite after all when you need to take one more region and deal with one more army. Enjoy it at its peak with Priority’s high-power gaming, rendering thousands of warriors taking to the battlefield at a time that would wage a veritable siege on any lesser hardware.
So, if you hadn’t guessed from my spotlight on Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, I’m a bit of a nut for Warhammer. I’ve been painting since I was eight years old and nearly won some state competitions. I have libraries full of Warhammer fiction, and my dog was named after one of Warhammer’s greatest heroes (Felix), but I’ve never really gotten into playing the war game. Why would I want to risk my beautiful models being damaged to and from the store, or letting gamers get their filthy mitts on them?
Enter stage left, the Total War: Warhammer trilogy
The answer to my prayers. A subseries of the Total War series of 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) Grand Strategy games focusing on the world of Warhammer Fantasy. They put you in the shoes of one of the legendary heroes (or villains) of the old world to lead your faction to total world domination.
Split between a turn-based campaign on a gigantic world map, and real-time battles zooming in on individual cities, forests and plans, the game sees you recruit armies, manage settlements, engage in diplomacy with your neighbours or crush them under your heel as you aim to expand your empire to be the strongest in the world.
I had never played a Total War game before but fell instantly in love when I first picked up the first entry in the series. Every race is distinct, their mechanics making the game fresh and new as you fight through their particular story or take to the sandbox and aim to rule the world one province at a time.
The Rogues Gallery
The first Total War: Warhammer focused on the ‘classics’ of Warhammer Fantasy; the Empire, dwarves, orcs, vampires, and later chaos, beastmen and wood elves.
As the Empire, you might find yourself embroiled in civil war while desperately holding mountain passes to keep the teeming hordes of orcs from civilised lands, protecting and politicking. Meanwhile, as the beastmen, you’ll be razing the world.
Total War: Warhammer 2 sent us west to the lands of the Elves and the teeming jungles of Lustria, bringing in the rat-like Skaven, the High Elves and Dark Elves, and the Lizardmen in a race to control a magical vortex. Later two would add the Viking Norscans, mummified Tomb Kings, and the jaunty Vampire Coast pirates.
Finally, in Total War: Warhammer 3, the focus went to the lands of the north and east, with factions for each of the Chaos Gods, a customisable Chaos faction, the frosty Kislev nation, the Ogre Kingdoms, and the eternal Dragon Empire of far Cathay.
The third game’s primary campaign focuses on a race between the empires to save or kill a god, diving into the dizzying realms of chaos to find their way to him. It was also the first game in the trilogy to have a tutorial campaign detailing the fall of the Kislev Boyar Yuri as he ventured into the chaos wastes, only to return as the Daemon Prince leader of the chaos faction of the main game.
Across all three games, there’s quite a catalogued roster. Imagine if you put them all together, on a single gigantic map, the ultimate sandbox, surely an idea too good to be true… unless?
Immortal Empires
The ultimate fusion of all three games and what many fans of the series, myself included, are really here for. Immortal Empires is a game mod that combines all three games, combining all of their maps, redesigning them and recreating them in the improved (in my opinion) art style of Total War: Warhammer 3, then puts every single race from all three games (22 in total, with 86 Legendary Lords to play as if you own all the DLC, each with their own unique twist on their race) in that gigantic sandbox to fight for supremacy.
The Immortal Empires game mode is a true achievement in gaming. The sheer scale of the map and the replayability of having so many factions on offer are without comparison. You might finish a campaign without seeing even half the world, leaving so much to discover. With so much on offer, it can be hard to know where to start, though veterans of the series like myself often have favourites they can’t help but return to over and over.
For me, it’s Ikit Claw, Chief Warlock Engineer of Clan Skryre, a fiendish clan of insane Skaven inventors who come to the battlefield with everything from weaponised hamster wheels to actual, god as my witness, nuclear warheads. Kind of hard to put them down after picking them up. Much like the plagues the Skaven carry, really.
Will you find yourself a favourite? Or will you be one of those committed few who travel across factions and races every game, sampling something new every time and seeing all the Old World has to offer? We’ll never know until you dive into Total War: Warhammer 3 on GeForce NOW Powered by Pentanet.
The opinions expressed here are those of Pentanet team member “Motley” and do not represent Pentanet or NVIDIA.
