Total War: Warhammer 3’s Immortal Empires redefines ‘sandbox’ video games
If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The developers at Creative Assembly seem to think so.
Immortal Empires, the DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3 that launched in beta today, is an exercise in creative abandon. It comprises an enormous fantasy map replete with dinosaurs, mammoths, vampires, and sentient terracotta statues, in which you play a small role in a far grander scheme. So many video games unfold around you, and exist only in what you can observe. But In Immortal Empires, you can only guess at the trees falling on the other side of this massive world — until you’re suddenly staring at a sea of toppled forests.
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For those who haven’t spent the better part of the year poring over every new reveal, Immortal Empires is less an expansion and more of an accumulation. It combines each of the trilogy’s three maps, and all 86 of its playable factions, into one digital facsimile of Warhammer’s “Old World” setting. It’s basically a parody of Earth:
As in the rest of the Total War series, you play half of Immortal Empires on the turn-based campaign map, in a Civilization-esque game of city construction and economy management. Once your armies clash with those of an opposing faction, however, you’re dropped into real-time strategy battles between hundreds, sometimes thousands of troops. As opposed to Warhammer 3’s base
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