The final announcement blog post for Total War: Warhammer 3's Shadows of Change update ends with a strikingly clever bit of marketing: an image with a before and after slider to show all the new units being added. It isn't quite double the units (despite what the devious placement of Katarin's new sled might initially suggest), but there are a great deal of impressive, shiny toys. Now, imagine an image where the second half contained, say, just the new heroes, but also a bunch of numbers and UI screens gesturing at faction updates for Kislev and the older Cathay lords. I estimate this probably would have been roughly 74% less visually impressive, despite being much closer to what the game actually needs right now.
So, here's the conundrum. Toys sell content. Toys say sorry. But toys, at least in this quantity, are not what Total Warhammer 3 needs half as much as it needs campaigns with the same sort of character as Grom and Eltharion, Rakarth, Snikch, Marcus Wulfhart, or (insert your favourite that I missed.) Campaigns that funnel all those top tier assets and lore and voice lines through the context and flavour they need to keep me clicking long after the point where I've unlocked all the new bits, had a couple of battles, and subsequently had my fill. Changeling aside, who has other problems, the DLC's other campaigns feel lacking in both context and momentum, and the update does little to change that.
