Total War: Pharaoh getting four new factions as part of free update

Sega and Creative Assembly have announced a collection of new features and cultures coming to Total War: Pharaoh as part of an upcoming free update.

The game’s campaign experience will be reworked to “improve existing gameplay foundations while providing players with a host of new content to better experience the turbulence of the Bronze-Age collapse”, the Total War: Pharaoh team said today.

This reworking will include an expansion of the campaign’s map, which will soon see the Mesopotamia and Aegean regions added to the conflict. And, as you would expect, these regions will be bringing their playable facts with them, as well. These are: Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae, and Troy.

As well as the above, Creative Assembly is also adding a number of improvements to Total War: Pharaoh’s strategic campaign layer. This includes the Dynasty system, which the developer says will add mortality and succession to your faction leaders’ quest. This will all help for the various leaders to “leave behind a legacy that will survive the ages”, which is nice.

Meanwhile, within the battle layer of the game, the developer has promised “over 80 new units” for the Mesopotamian factions. These are included alongside “over 70 reworked units for Mycenae and Troy”, which we first saw introduced in the franchise’s earlier subseries entry, Total War Saga: Troy.

The team has said players will be able to find more on Total War: Pharaoh’s development and this update over the coming weeks, thanks to an upcoming series of blogs and Q&As. These will begin “next week,” Sega and Creative Assembly said, starting with a “focus on the expansion of the campaign map and how the development teams are aiming to bring this long-lost world to life.”

If this doesn’t really sound like your thing, and you like things as they are, the developer has assured its community that Total War: Pharaoh’s original campaign prior to the update will still be playable. The studio will share more information in a future blog.

Eurogamer’s Total War: Pharaoh review awarded the game three out of five stars, with Tom Senior describing it as a “dependable great strategy game” even though the warfare was “dull”.