Total War: Warhammer 3 released last week to a generally positive reception, though there have been some quibbles over its performance and stability. (The gods of Chaos really don't like when players alt-tab, it seems.) As Creative Assembly announced today, a series of hotfixes for various issues are on the way and the first is scheduled for this week, though with the caps-heavy caveat, "NOTE THAT THIS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE based on NUMEROUS factors—some of which are out of our control".
The current plan is for this initial hotfix to deal with problems players running DirectX 12 have had, framerate issues connected to Intel CPUs, and a problem with multiplayer lobbies, which refresh so quickly it's difficult to actually select one before the list refreshes again.
Performance issues are a high priority for the run of hotfixes Creative Assembly has planned, as "Beyond the crashes and other critical issues we're working to solve, we very much understand—as gamers ourselves—that the game's performance is a cornerstone of your ability to enjoy it."
- Total War: Warhammer 3's next patch will overhaul its Kislev faction, which Creative Assembly has 'identified as the most in need of a deep review and rethink'
- Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero
Rather than wait to put together a large patch that solves numerous problems, the plan is to "take a surgical approach to address them: deploying smaller hotfixes at a faster rate rather than waiting to compile fixes into a large update that smashes multiple issues at once." One reason for that is to ensure fixes are fully tested and don't cause further stability issues before they're bundled together, and also because "The more fixes in a build, the more risk that it can cause problems with other elements in the game or with the platforms where the game is released."
Later updates will apparently make more significant changes, once this run of smaller hotfixes are out of the way. "When we have solid dates for the current, next, and next-next hotfixes, we'll let you know so you can look forward to them", Creative Assembly says.
In the meantime, running Warhammer 3 in windowed mode has reduced the number of crashes for me, though I had to quit out then restart after changing that option to make the game properly line up with my actual screen.
