Total War: Warhammer III Lords of the End Times DLC Lands September 24 With Four Legendary Lords

Creative Assembly just put a date on its biggest swing yet. Total War: Warhammer III Lords of the End Times launches September 24, a four Legendary Lord pack that the studio calls the largest piece of DLC in the series' 10-year history. The pack lands alongside a free, game-changing update that reworks the Vampire Counts, overhauls Archaon, retunes victory conditions across Immortal Empires, and adds new endgame scenarios. Anyone who has wished Creative Assembly would stop milking the trilogy and start closing it out now has a calendar box circled in red.

What is actually in Lords of the End Times

Four Legendary Lords headline the paid pack, and they were not picked for brand recognition alone. The first is Nagash, the Great Necromancer, returning as a dedicated Legendary Lord rather than a vanilla campaign buff. He brings a full suite of undead faction mechanics tuned around the Mortarch and the cursed land of Nehekhara. Second is Thanquol, the fan-favorite Skaven Grey Seer, finally breaking out of the workshop role he has had since the first game and leading his own verminous sub-faction. Third is Boris Todbringer, the Reiksguard-anchored Empire general whose return has been the loudest community request since Thrones of Decay. The fourth is the Glottkin, the three-headed Chaos Nurgle daemon prince trio packaged as a single Legendary Lord slot. Each one is sold individually or as a bundle with a 15 percent discount, so the price for going all in is meaningfully lower than four single packs.

The free update is the more strategically interesting half. Buying any single piece of Lords of the End Times now unlocks the full Immortal Empires mega-campaign without owning Total War: Warhammer, Total War: Warhammer II, or even the base of Total War: Warhammer III. It is the first time in the series that Immortal Empires has not required every prior game, and Creative Assembly is pitching it as the entry point for new players. That move has been a long time coming and it trims a real complaint from the trilogy: a friend who liked your Total War: Warhammer III save in 2023 could not jump in without buying two earlier games and waiting through mandatory Mortal Empires unlocks.

Why this is bigger than Thrones of Decay or Shadows of Change

For context, the previous two major Immortal Empires expansions were Thrones of Decay in 2024 and Shadows of Change in 2023. Each added three Legendary Lords. Lords of the End Times adds four, and the trio of Chaos-flavored units, Empire state troops, undead elites, and Skaven swarms that ship with them push the unit roster past 250 playable lords and well over 1,000 units once you count regimental variants. Creative Assembly is also being unusually candid about scale: the new endgame scenarios in the free update are designed to be campaign-defining, not optional side content. Victory condition reworks should shorten the late-game slog in long Immortal Empires runs, where turn 150 has historically meant an order-of-magnitude more turns of fiddly mid-battle micro than actual grand strategy.

The Vampire Counts rework is the part veteran players will care about most. Vampire Counts have had the same skeleton-and-zombie skeleton (pun intended) since 2016, and the complaints about Raise Dead RNG and lack of a research tree have grown louder every patch that did not touch them. Free, in this DLC, does the heavy lifting CA has avoided for nine years. The Archaon overhaul is the second-most important: Everchosen players have had a faction that was functional but visually and mechanically stranded from the rest of the Chaos roster, and a free update that pulls him forward matters.

Community reaction: cautious excitement, with the usual gripes

Reaction on launch day has been mostly positive but not unconditional. IGN, PC Gamer, and Shacknews all framed it as the natural endpoint for the trilogy, and the comments under those posts skew toward long-time players who have been waiting since The End Times was a tabletop event in 2014. The Thanquol reveal drove the loudest single reaction, with Skaven fans noting that the studio has finally given him a full Legendary Lord campaign rather than a hero roost. Boris Todbringer is the second-loudest pick, with the Empire community pointing to months of unit roster stagnation. The Glottkin is the most divisive: some players love the trio-as-single-Lord concept, others want them split across three slots for multiplayer balance. Nagash is the most predictable reveal, and the reaction there is mostly that it was about time.

The gripes are familiar. The 15 percent bundle discount is meaningfully lower than the 20 or 25 percent discounts CA has used on past flagship packs, and a few long-time Warhammer players have already called it out as greedy given that Nagash, Thanquol, and the Glottkin were heavily requested content for years. The Vampire Counts free rework, while welcome, is also being read as CA finally catching up to community wishlists it has had since 2022. None of this is a dealbreaker, but it is the same publisher-vs-player pattern that has defined Total War: Warhammer III for four years: ship the right thing eventually, after saying no for as long as possible, and price the bundle just enough to sting.

The Critical Pixel take

Lords of the End Times is the right DLC at the right time, even if the price tag is slightly higher than veterans want. A ten-year strategy trilogy deserves an actual finale, and Creative Assembly has not been shy about calling this one. New players finally get a clean on-ramp into Immortal Empires, and the free rework of Vampire Counts and Archaon is the kind of foundational work that should have shipped a year ago. The September 24 release date lines up with the studio's pre-Thanksgiving strategy window and gives the team the full autumn to milk the marketing cycle. If you own Total War: Warhammer III already, this is a buy-on-day-one for the free update alone. If you do not, the new bundle entry point is the cheapest it has ever been to start.