Total War: Warhammer [official site] developers The Creative Assembly have hurried out a little hotfix to fix those launch day problems. This is what happens when you invite orcs to your launch party: they’ll keep on coming and coming and screaming “Waaagh!” until your house is bursting at the seams and some folks end up trapped in a corner with no hope of reaching the fridge. That’s a highly technical explanation of why some folks have struggled to play Total Warhammer today. In theory, that should now be fixed. You may now fetch yourself a warbeer.

The Creative Assembly explain the problem thusly in the hotfix announcement:

“We’ve had tens of thousands of people playing already, but we know some players had some early-doors issues when the game went live, due in part to a bit of unexpected server load and the way the game handles that. This was causing the game to hang too long on start-up and the multiplayer server list to become unresponsive.”

The 100Mb update they released this afternoon should fix that. It should download by itself when the games not running, but you can restart Steam if that doesn’t do it, or go full-on and verify your cache if it still refuses to come. The announcement explains how to do that, if those words sound like chaos magick to you. Folks who haven’t patched yet can’t play with those who have, of course, and they will be marked so you can avoid them:

“Once you’ve got the hotfix, and if you want to play multiplayer, any games you see listed in red are being hosted by people who don’t yet have the hotfix, and you’ll be unable to join them. Look for listings with black text.”

What’s Total Hammerwar like, anyway? Check out Wot Rob Zacny Thinks.