There’s Sand in this Box
Total Warhammer 3 and its DLCs already make it almost infinitely replayable. Taken together, there are 24 playable factions with 92 legendary lords split between them. Each faction has its own roster of units and unique game mechanics, and each legendary lord can branch off even further with mechanics of their own.
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However, it was only recently that I realized the full potential of Total Warhammer 3’s sandbox. The fact that it took me so long made me feel a little dumb.
You see, I’ve always had this small nitpick in the back of my mind about the game. Every legendary lord starts in a specific preset area, the map as large as it is, always starts the same way.
To be fair, the map is mostly dynamic after a campaign starts. Factions rise and fall differently every game. Maybe in one campaign, the Dark Elves take over the north, in another game, maybe they get wiped out. However, I couldn’t help but feel that any second playthrough of any legendary lord was going to be a bit samey. If you play Imrik of the High Elves, your first several hours are going to be dealing with Skaven and Chaos Dwarves, for example.
However, it doesn’t actually have to be that way. I had a bit of an eiphany recently as I tried, and repeatedly failed to play as Kislev, specifically as Boris Ursus. I’m not actually very good at Total Warhammer, and Boris starts in the Chao Wastes, right in between several hostile factions with very little in the way of friends nearby.
I just could not get the hang of how I was meant to survive. I was often dealing with the armies of three or more chaos factions shortly after obtaining a single province. All I could afford was a single army, and I couldn’t defend against assaults from every direction with it. The thought of further expansion was laughable, as it took everything I had just to survive.
However, I’m stubborn, so I kept trying with a new strategy each time. That just meant I failed in a new way each time. As I started my 7th try, as I sat staring at my measly starting settlement, I was wracking my brain about what I could do differently this time. A lightbulb went off in my brain, and it would forever change how I viewed Total Warhammer 3.
I could just...leave. It had never occurred to me before that I could just take my army and go somewhere else. Suddenly, the entire game, not just Boris’s campaign, looked much bigger. I could take Boris across the river and team up with Malakai Makaisson. Alternatively, I could go past Norsca and the Dwarves, and link up with the Kislev mainland, the Ice Court, and the Orthodoxy.
Heck, there’s a sea lane nearby that could take me way down south, far away from the chaos wastes. Boris’s goal may be to destroy chaos, but it doesn’t matter when. I could always return later when I’ve gotten stronger.
This realization opened my mind up to even more possibilities beyond simply moving my starting location. Immortal Empires is a sandbox, an actual sandbox.
Maybe I decided that Boris is not going to link up with the Kislev mainland, but take it over instead? Maybe by gifting a couple of settlements, I could actually team up with an evil faction, opening up new army combos by drafting some of their units?
None of this is limited to Boris. If you have a favorite legendary lord but don’t want to fight the same factions you always do for the first several hours, you can just…leave or change the narrative, fight former allies, ally with former enemies.
I haven’t tested it with all 92 legendary lords, but I imagine it works with most of them. Maybe this was always obvious for most people, but it certainly wasn’t for me, and it really hit home just how replayable Total Warhammer 3 actually is.
Changing your location or who you perceive as friends and foes also has ripple effects on the map. In my prior attempts, Malakai had always fallen to Norsca. But this time, I moved in beside Malakai and secured his flank. Now, he is thriving in the mid-game as an ally. Meanwhile, the Gore Queen wiped out the Dark Elves in the North. While Reikland got destroyed, and Slaanesh is raiding Brettonia.
It’s impossible to tell how much of this happened by random chance, or how much of it came from the ripple effect I had on the map. But I’ve never seen events play out this way. Even if I had little to no effect on these events, it certainly feels like I did, and the freshness of how this campaign is playing out is definitely making it memorable.
I feel like I was letting the victory conditions of each legendary lord chain me down. Boris is supposed to wipe out the chaos wastes, so that’s what I was stubbornly trying to do. But the thing about a sandbox is that you can forge your own path to meet those goals, if you even want to meet them at all. Total Warhammer 3 just hands you the shovel, you can choose where you dig.
This doesn’t mean you can’t do it the traditional way. A better player than I could certainly start in the Chaos Wastes with Boris and take it over. But having the option to play another way is not only great for enjoyment’s sake, but lends far more replay value to Boris’s campaign. You can simply come up with any “what if” scenario you want and follow it. I think that’s pretty brilliant.
The entire ordeal has opened up Total Warhammer 3 for me in ways that make me believe I’ll still be playing it 10 years from now, maybe longer. Now, whenever I try a new legendary lord, I remain cognizant that while I can certainly try to play them the default way. I’m never limited to just doing that, and if I want to pit my faction against factions that aren’t traditionally enemies, I can do that.
It’s a bit of a weird article, I know, but it was such an impactful revelation that I just had to share it, even if the only thing that comes from it is people pointing and laughing at how dense I can be.
However, modern games do have a tendency to really hold your hand, implement guard rails, and otherwise carefully curate your every step. When your brain is trained to expect all of those restraints, you can sometimes see guardrails that aren’t actually there, simply because your brain expects them to be there. So maybe at least one other person will read this and have that same light bulb moment that I did, and if so, the effort to write it was well worth it.
