Total War: Three Kingdoms will channel Dynasty Warriors in a new survival mode
Three heroes vs. hundreds of baddies
A new wave survival mode coming to Total War: Three Kingdoms will pit three heroes against hundreds of enemy soldiers. Dynasty Mode is its name, and it's coming in a free update next week. It looks to be inspired by the more fantastical side of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms as well as, y'know, probably the Dynasty Warriors games (which are also based on the historical epic). If you want magical lords murdering a dozen men with a single swing of their blade, baby, they're coming. Have a look in the trailer below.
Three heroes, picked from five elemental classes, will fend off vast waves of baddies. Some specialise in hitting tons of units at once, others have healing, and so on. Bashing baddies earns upgrade points to power up your lords, but oh no the enemy waves grow stronger too, and bosses come every three waves, and... you know how class-based survival modes work.
To make battles even more dramatic, Dynasty Mode will have the option to increase how many soldiers make up each enemy unit - and buffing our lords to match. That should play the same but look like some real Dynasty Warriors nonsense, which I welcome. If your PC has the muscle to shoulder all those warriors.
Creative Assembly say they've made Dynasty Mode with Intel, the processor company. Supposedly it's a test bed for optimising the game's technology, though I suppose Intel wouldn't be too bothered if this made you think about replacing your CPU with something newer.
"Dynasty Mode was developed in conjunction with Intel's engineers to help the Three Kingdoms engine take better advantage of multi-core CPUs," the developers say in an FAQ. "Increasing unit sizes creates a greater CPU overhead, with more unit interactions and calculations required at the entity level. This enhanced multithreading enables superior performance the more cores the CPU has, so moving from quad-core to hex-core and eight-core processors is where you see the greatest framerate gains."
I do like the idea of a game having a "make this battle look as ridiculous my computer allows" slider to complement the usual graphics options.
Dynasty Mode is coming free for all players next Thursday, August 8th. It's launching alongside the the Eight Princes paid DLC.