Less than 24 hours after release, Creative Assembly’s real-time strategy epic Total War: Warhammer is struggling to accommodate the huge influx of launch day players eager to get stuck in. Various crashes and freezes are being reported on the game’s Steam page as well as by fans on the official Total War Twitter page.
Creative Assembly is aware of the issues frustrated fans are experiencing, but is asking them to “please have patience and wait” as the “multiplayer server is having trouble keeping up.”
Due to server load the multiplayer server is having trouble keeping up. If you click around it will crash – please have patience and wait.
— Total War (@totalwar) May 24, 2016
It’s currently unclear whether the developer intends to do anything on their end to resolve the crashes or whether the problem is expected to resolve itself, but a few workarounds have been suggested by publisher SEGA and by players. Upon launching the game for the first time, you should let it load for a good 10 minutes before trying to play, but if that doesn’t work, you can try verifying the game cache through Steam.
To do so, right-click Total War: Warhammer in your Steam library, select Properties then Local Files and choose ‘Verify Integrity of Game Cache.’ With any luck, the game will run as intended and you can finally get to slaughtering Orcs and Vampires in the name of Karl Franz.
