Now Playing: Eight Princes (DLC)

Eight Princes was the first DLC released for Total War: Three Kingdoms. It has pretty negative reviews on Steam, but the majority of those reviews are not related so much to the quality of the content, but the fact that Eight Princes is entirely disconnected from the core 190 campaign.

Three Kingdoms had an excellent release but the main campaign desperately needed more unique units, factions and characters. So when Eight Princes was announced – an entirely separate campaign set more than 100 years following the Three Kingdoms period – it was everything that fans of the game didn’t want.

Eight Princes, at release, was the wrong content at the wrong time. Creative Assembly, it appears, realised their mistake and instead refocused their DLC plans on new content that would enhance and build upon the main campaign – Mandate of Heaven and A World Betrayed.

 

Eight Princes wasn’t the content people wanted, but does that make it bad content? Considering I’ve played and reviewed the other 3K DLC I figured I might as well give Eight Princes a spin and see what it was actually like.

Eight Princes has eight new factions, each led by – you guessed it – a Prince competing for control of the Jin Empire. Each Prince has their own unique campaign mechanics, with a couple of unique units and faction bonuses to suit their particular style of play.

The campaign victory conditions work a little differently in EP – you’ll need to either declare yourself the new Emperor – or act as Regent – by destroying or subjugating the other Princes, or by amassing prestige. Along the way you’ll receive dilemma events that allow you to build your ‘alignment’ to Spirit, Wealth, Might or Mind.

Increasing these alignments gives you additional campaign bonuses, but the dilemmas can also cause various diplomatic impacts within the campaign as you choose to either support the scheming Empress – or rally against her.

 

If there’s one good thing I can say about Eight Princes it’s that playing it now – rather than at release – did provide a pretty refreshing campaign experience. It’s a new twist on the original map. You have new factions to contend with, all of which begin in new locations. It makes Eight Princes, at least in that sense, worth picking up if you’re a little tired of the core campaign and want to try something new.

The problem is, that’s kind of all Eight Princes really has to offer. It does feel like a DLC knocked out on the cheap. Yes, there are eight new factions, but aside from the faction leaders, there are no other new, unique characters. Every new character you recruit will be from the sadly limited ‘generic’ character pool.

There simply aren’t enough new units or building types to properly separate Eight Princes from the core campaign. And the Technology Tree is, honestly, pretty pathetic – it’s just a handful of ‘new’ reforms that unlock some of the higher tier units from the core campaign.

 

I had fun playing Eight Princes, but it feels like a shadow of what it could and perhaps should have been. I guess you could argue that adding in lots of new units, characters and building types would have increased the development cost and time and resulted in a DLC more akin to a large scale expansion – and an increased price. But that’s what I think Eight Princes probably should have been – a big, fleshed out expansion released much later in the life cycle of 3K, with a much more comprehensive campaign.

That said, just like the base 190 campaign, there’s no reason Creative Assembly couldn’t release more updates to Eight Princes to flesh it out and make it more unique. I don’t expect they will – the poor sales and negative reception probably won’t justify it – but the base platform is certainly there to build upon if they are willing to do so.

Overall, Eight Princes is a limited and rather shallow DLC. It’s not bad content, but it’s also not as good as it could be. It would be nice to think that once the core 3K campaign is seen as ‘complete’ that CA will revisit EP and give it the overhaul it deserves. But in the meantime, if you really want a fresh 3K campaign experience, I’d still recommend picking it up on sale.

5/10