Creative Assembly look to really be going all-out for Total War: WARHAMMER III, with so many mechanics getting big improvements and recently they talked about battles with a new video.
These are primarily quality of life improvements, aimed to making battles feel a little better to engage in overall so don't go expecting anything too game-changing. Still, there's a huge amount of tweaks that will be coming with it. Some of it includes a toggle to get flying units off the ground, idle unit hotkeys, better formation options taken from Three Kingdoms, new "lazy" health bars to indicate incoming damage, a full unit browser page, healing is now a percantage of max health per-second rather than a flat value and much more.
Check out the video highlights below:
Direct Link
Additionally, for those of you excited by the Ogre Kingdoms, which you get free in you pre-order or purchase within the first week of release - Creative Assembly has now detailed the full roster.
There's also yet another new 3 minute trailer, check it out:
Direct Link
It's releasing in February 2022, with Linux support continuing from porter Feral Interactive. We still don't know if their native build will offer cross-platform multiplayer, as Feral did not reply to our email on it.
Available to pre-order on Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The "narration" on the gameplay-related videos I find pretty cringy, tbh.
They are telling you about mechanics and improvements, but make it sound like they are narrating some dark grand dark adventure.
Wtf? Just have a normal person tell me normally about gameplay improvements. I don't know if it only triggers ME that much, but I find it really, REALLY odd.
When the game comes out, I don't know if I'll be playing the Linux native version much.
With WH2, you basically had only disadvantages from it. The ports were always weeks behind the Windows version (which also made mods unusable since those move with the Windows versions obviously), the communication from Feral was... not good, to put it mildly, and performance-wise I just don't see that much of a difference. Maybe 10% better on the Linux native version (and definitely faster loading, for some reason).
Cross-play is not something I personally care about a lot, but obviously going to be a dealbreaker for others if it won't be supported.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 22 November 2021 at 12:59 pm UTC
When the game comes out, I don't know if I'll be playing the Linux native version much.
With WH2, you basically had only disadvantages from it. The ports were always weeks behind the Windows version (which also made mods unusable since those move with the Windows versions obviously), the communication from Feral was... not good, to put it mildly, and performance-wise I just don't see that much of a difference. Maybe 10% better on the Linux native version (and definitely faster loading, for some reason).
Cross-play is not something I personally care about a lot, but obviously going to be a dealbreaker for others if it won't be supported.
I haven't really noticed any difference perfomance-wise between native or Proton. Mine is running mostly fine; there's one graphical setting, either anti aliasing or SSAO I believe, that when enabled eats up too much video memory for me and tanks the FPS dramatically. Otherwise it runs on 60 whether on the native version or in Proton.
Except for those damn loading times, though. Native or Proton, the campaign loading times are annoyingly long. A battle loads reasonably well within a minute or so, but the campaign takes about 5+ minutes straight. I was wondering whether you have your game installed on a SSD drive? It is too large for mine so I figure that's the main reason for mine being so long, but perhaps it's just normal that it takes ages to load into the campaign map. I hope the devs add a "restart battle" button in battle game menu. It's really annoying to take like half an hour to surrender, load into campaign, load campaign again by loading a save and then load battle again.
I was wondering whether you have your game installed on a SSD drive?Of course.
Frankly, gaming on anything but SSD is insanity nowadays, at least for large diskspace games.
And SSDs aren't really that expensive anymore. I got my 2TB one for 200-300€. Not sure if the current shortage also affect those prices, though.
Either way, you are right that the loading times are still unacceptable, especially the fact that they unload everything on scene change.
So what happens is:
1. Load campaign - takes forever
2. Enter battle.
3. Unload campaign.
4. Load battle.
5. Finish battle.
6. Unload battle.
7. Load campaign (only necessary because 3. happens) - takes forever.
3. should never happen, the campaign should always remain in memory. That's just bad software architecture, leading to bad user experience. Other games with similarly large memory footprint manage just fine to keep both campaign and battle in memory, so that's not an argument.
I do expect that there will be a restart battle button in WH3, though. Mostly because Three Kingdoms has that feature.
Similarly, I had the impression that loading times were improved in Three Kingdoms as well - not sure if the game just didn't have as much to load, though...
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 24 November 2021 at 10:23 am UTC
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