Total War: WARHAMMER - Blood for the Blood God

Blood for the Blood God DLC was developed by Creative Assembly, published by SEGA and released 20 June 2016.

About the Game

Blood for The Blood God brings a number of gory new mature-rated effects to Total War: WARHAMMER:

Blood spurts

Gory spatter on unit models

Limb and head dismemberment (humanoids and non-legendary characters)

Zombies, skeletons and Grave Guard may continue to fight after dismemberment!

Explosive Gibbing from deadly mid-torso strikes

Blood-drenched UI elements

New random, global campaign events that generate greater carnage in battle

Skills and Experience

The 'Blood Pack' DLC is always a little bit controversial. Some players think it should be free. We make this kind of DLC separate from the main game for Age Ratings purposes. Usually we want the main game to be a PEGI 16 / M rating, and this gory content would push it up to a PEGI 18. Some customers understand that is why it is separate, but think we are exploiting them by charging for it. However this content isn't free to make, and wasn't developed in the main game. We developed it after the main game, and it needed new design, art, animations, audio and code, just like any other piece of DLC we develop.

On the Rome II and ATTILA Blood Packs, animators placed metadata in each animation rig to nominate where blood would spray from and where limbs would be chopped up. This was not a good solution for Blood For the Blood God, because in Warhammer, there are lots of different shaped characters of different scales with different numbers of limbs etc. Much more variation than the humans in our previous games. To overcome this, a designer came up with the idea of 'procedural generated blood' (as we called it). An animation programmer set up some code that found the nearest limb, neck or waste to an attack animation, and these were the positions where blood was sprayed for or dismemberment happened.

We also had a more generic 'Explosive Gibbing' to cover large impacts e.g. a giant hitting a human. Artists still had to add stump models to the positions where arms, legs and necks were chopped off, and we had to add these to future character models when they were added, so there's a longer term cost to Blood for the Blood God. With the Gibbing, we had a lot of discussion about how accurate the pieces had to be when they hit the floor, we eventually settled for the game adding blood decals roughly where they hit the floor, and didn't need the detail of pieces of flesh bouncing off the floor and surfaces.

Overall Blood for the Blood God was the best 'Blood Pack' implementation that we have done to date. It's slightly less realistic than in previous versions, but fits with the fantasy theme of the game.