Creative Assembly has wrapped up work on Total War: Three Kingdoms.

The 1.7.1 patch, which goes live today, marks the end of the British studio's post-launch support for the popular strategy game, which saw seven DLC releases over the course of two years.

The development team has transitioned onto another project based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, Creative Assembly said in a video to fans, below.

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Total War: Three Kingdoms' first expansion comes out 3rd September 2020, Creative Assembly has announced.

The Furious Wild is set in the jungles around Southern China, and adds four new factions to the strategy game as well as an extension to the map.

Tribal warlords Meng Huo, King Mulu, Lady Zhurong, and King Shamole are playable, as are over 25 new units, including flaming mace and blowpipe units, and elephants and tigers.

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With spin-off A Total War Saga: Troy a matter of months away you may want to practice settling back into your role as armchair general with some cheap Total War games from Games Planet.

The PC digital retailer is currently running a Total War Promo across a range of games and DLC from across the entire series. There are some massive discounts of up to 78 per cent up for grabs, whether you're looking for something new or old.

Let's start with the two entries from the Total War: Warhammer series. These adaptations of the long-running tabletop sensation mix classic turn-based strategy sections with tactical real-time battles. Various races are also present, each with their own campaign and play style. Other Lords and campaigns are also available as DLC at up to 56 per cent off, too!

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Valve, alongside its business partner in China, Perfect World, has given us an update on the progress of Steam China today, after both companies had been silent on the topic for over a year.

Eurogamer attended the brief presentation, given by Perfect World CEO Dr. Robert H. Xiao in Shanghai, where a small number of local and international press were told the companies were "one more step closer" to launching Steam China, which will be separate from the international version of Steam. A handful of launch games were revealed, including Dota 2 and Dota Underlords. There were no actual launch dates or broader windows mentioned for Steam China itself, mind, nor a look at how that storefront may shape up or any details on its features, barring the fact it'll support VR, multiplayer games, interesting games with "innovative, creative ideas," and "single-player games with abundant storylines". As far as we could tell, none of the non-Chinese launch games had official approval just yet, either.

In Xiao's words, "the Steam China project is undergoing solidly and smoothly" - but what is it, exactly? As it stands, Steam is actually widely available for Chinese players already. As of right now we've tested and confirmed it's possible to buy, download and play games through the Steam store in China as usual, with no issues - and no need for a VPN. Community features, such as discussion forums, are unavailable, but otherwise the platform as it stands still acts as a huge loophole in the Chinese government's strict regulation of games. Where it might take many months of admin and applications for a game to get through the approval process - if it gets through at all - or many revisions to a game's content to ensure it meets the various Chinese standards, that same game can already be bought and played in China, unfiltered, unregistered and unchanged, on regular old Steam.

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Creative Assembly has made a glut of announcements focused on the Chinese market.

First up is Total War: Elysium, a collectible card game (CCG) for PC and mobile. We don't know much about the game, although official art shows Napoleon playing a card game against Sun Ren, so I expect you'll be able to pick from a selection of famous generals throughout history.

Creative Assembly said Total War: Elysium launches in China first with the help of NetEase, "but we hope to bring it to players worldwide before too long."

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Mod support has launched for Total War: Three Kingdoms - and Creative Assembly has made it clear what is and isn't appropriate.

In a blog post, the developer said it will curate the Steam Workshop and remove any mods that breach the modding terms found in the game's EULA.

"Please refrain from creating mods that are designed to provoke, intimidate, or antagonise other groups, reference other IP, or create content of a sexual nature," Creative Assembly said.

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The blood pack for Total War: Three Kingdoms comes out 27th June.

The Reign of Blood Effects Pack for Creative Assembly's superb strategy game costs 1.99 / $2.99 / €2.99.

It adds several new gory and mature-rated effects, animations and kill-moves to the game in both Campaign and Battle. Expect to see limbs lop off, beheading and charred corpses "in sadistic detail". Yum.

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Total War: Three Kingdoms has set a concurrent player record for the series on Steam.

At the time of publication, 147,496 people are playing Creative Assembly's latest strategy game on Valve's platform.

Creative Assembly confirmed to Eurogamer that Three Kingdoms has indeed set the series record.

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Let me just say this: I am an absolute sucker for a big idea. A grand philosophy, or some big unifying theory of everything, that seeps under the skin and wraps around the bones of a game to tie it all together. Everything refers back to something else and informs it, all the dangling threads of design brought tidily back in line. Bliss. I love it. Very neat, very satisfying, very, very difficult to pull off.

Total War: Three Kingdoms is absolutely swimming in big ideas - plural - to its detriment and its strength, which is probably inevitable given the deeply, intrinsically philosophical era in which it's set. Three Kingdoms China starts with the fall of the Han Dynasty, around the late 100s to early 200s CE, and predictably it's a time of fractured alliances and political upheaval - so far so Total War. But it's also a time of mystery, and mythology, and romance, all intertwined with other capital-letter ideas like Confucianism and Wu Xing and Guanxi to make a big, slightly headache-inducing but vastly ambitious soup of design.

The one at the heart of it, though, is that trade-off, between a commitment to accuracy and the romanticised telling of the story that people are more likely to know. Creative Assembly has beaten the drum of Records-versus-Romance half to death by now but, if you weren't already aware, they're essentially two accounts of the period that can be reduced down to two books, Records of the Three Kingdoms and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the developer has - correctly - relied heavily on both.

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Sega and Creative Assembly have announced a two-and-a-half month delay to Total War: Three Kingdoms.

The strategy game was due out 7th March. It'll now launch 23rd May.

In a development update posted on the Total War website, Rob Bartholomew, studio brand director at Creative Assembly said: "With Three Kingdoms, we set out to create a new level of complexity. As such, we need a little more time to make sure these systems deliver as intended and give you the Total War experience you've waited so patiently for.

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