Total War: Warhammer 3 has been released and many people are asking: When will the Blood & Gore DLC, which optionally enables blood effects, be released? Our release prediction.
Yes, the Blood DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3 is a rather difficult topic, because ultimately you spend real money to unlock some Blood & Gore in the game. This DLC has been causing contentious discussions for years with every new Total War, because many fans think it’s pretty cheeky on the developer’s part to outsource blood effects as DLC – and on the other hand, one can certainly argue that the gritty battles of Warhammer 3 are artificially deprived of atmosphere if there’s not a drop of blood to be seen in all the commotion.
But we’re not here today to judge the whole controversy, we just want to clarify the hard-hitting service question: When will the Blood DLC for Warhammer 3 be released? And do I have to buy it now, even though I already paid for it in Warhammer 1 and 2?
Warhammer 3: The release of the Blood DLC
Unfortunately, we have to start straight away with bad news: Creative Assembly has not yet communicated an official release date for the Blood DLC – but as with any new Steam sale, the clock can be set pretty accurately on a release date based on past history.
Typically, Blood DLCs for any Total War are released within a month or two of the main game’s release.
- Total War: Warhammer 2 was released on 28 September 2017, with the Blood DLC then arriving around 30 days later on 26 October 2017.
- Total War: Three Kingdoms was released on 23 May 2019 (geez, that’s another three years ago), the Blood DLC came on 27 June 2019, about two months later.
- Troy: Total War celebrated release in August 2020 – the Blood DLC then came out later in October.
So we firmly expect a release in March or April 2022 at the latest.
Warhammer 3: Who needs to buy the Blood DLC?
But there is also good news. Creative Assembly continues what was already true for Warhammer 2: If you already bought the Blood DLC for one of the Warhammer games in the past, you don’t have to do it again. Especially in view of the joint Mortal Empires mega-campaign, blood effects will be activated for you even if you already bought the blood DLC for the first Warhammer in 2016.
This of course only applies within the same platform family. Anyone who owns Warhammer 1 on Steam will most likely not be able to unlock blood effects in the Game Pass variant of Warhammer 3. Creative Assembly still has a lot of work to do to make the old Total War parts available for all platforms.
At least Warhammer 1 is already available with all DLCs via Epic. If you buy the Blood DLC there, you will also unlock the effects for the Epic version of Warhammer 3 in the long run.
