Total War: Warhammer 3 fans think the Lords of the End Times DLC worked a miracle and managed to show a sane version of the End Times

Some storylines fans don't forgive for decades, and The End Times from the Warhammer universe has long held a place of honor on that list. Games Workshop literally blew up its own world, the one several generations of players grew up on. That makes it all the more surprising that something good has come out of the catastrophe.

The new Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC is behind it, with Creative Assembly gathering the key figures of that era. Nagash, grey seer Thanquol, Count of Middenheim Boris, vampire queen Neferata, and the Glottkin brothers from Nurgle's host all got their own mechanics. The cherry on top is a trailer where Thanquol delivers a villain monologue to a tied-up Gotrek and Felix. One commenter pointed out that it missed the signature joke from the books, where the heroes admit they have no idea who he is.

To appreciate the scale of the achievement, it helps to remember the source material. In 2014–2015, Games Workshop released a series of books and novels that ended with the Old World destroyed and Age of Sigmar rising from its ruins. The story was bold on its own, but the execution let it down: characters lost their minds, entire factions were wiped out in a couple of lines, and legendary heroes like Eltharion died without any fanfare. Commenters recalled that the novels were written at breakneck speed, though "The Rise of Nagash" and "The Fall of Altdorf" still have their defenders.

Creative Assembly's recipe is simple. The studio took the characters, atmosphere, and concepts from The End Times, but tossed out the script with its fifty deaths and ignored the book about Khaine entirely. One player put it bluntly:

I mean yeah, when you take the entire narrative of the end times out of the end times and allow people to make their own end times that doesn't have like 50 anticlimactic deaths, you'll get something better than the end times lmao.

There is a fly in the ointment. Steam reviews for most of the content are mixed, even though the DLC has the highest player count in the history of the game. The complaints are mostly technical:

• missions and unique mechanics of the new lords don't work in multiplayer campaigns, including Thanquol masterplans

• the AI of several factions has gotten noticeably worse since the update

• the Teutogen Guard, Ulric's elite hammer-wielders, underperform because of their swing animation, and the developers have already acknowledged the problem

• next to the Guard, Neferata's Lahmian Handmaidens look downright overpowered

For those who want to dive into the era without the apocalypse, commenters brought up Vermintide, the co-op game from Fatshark that also takes place during The End Times. Though the skaven there could just as easily be dropped into any other period, and nobody would notice the difference.

Games Workshop once destroyed the Old World, and Creative Assembly handed players the right to destroy it in their own way.