Age of Wonders 4 Eldritch Realms DLC to come in June 2024, more expansions confirmed

Plus free content to celebrate its first anniversary

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

Age of Wonders 4 is officially one year old today and celebrates by adding some free content to the game for all players. Regardless of whether you’re playing on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S, you’ll get access to standard and exotic versions of the Raptor Mount and the Dragon Scale UI skin without doing anything – usually it’s the birthday child that’s getting the presents, but I won’t complain about a cool, new ride for my characters.

That’s not all the good news, though: Triumph Studios and Paradox Interactive confirmed that the active development of Age of Wonders 4 will continue for another cycle packed with updates – of both free and premium nature. It looks like the strategy game was commercially successful enough to warrant further content, which is great to see.

However, before these future plans come into play, the final piece of the current Age of Wonders 4 roadmap must be put into place: the Eldritch Realms expansion. Triumph announced that this DLC would arrive in players’ hands – or tentacles? – in June 2024.

That means that Eldritch Realms will be out right on schedule with Triumph not being late with a single update so far – an impressive pace for the game’s post-launch support, which already saw the release of three expansions with sizable free updates accompanying each of them.

Dragon Dawn, Empires and Ashes, and Primal Fury brought loads of additional content to the game, allowing players to flesh out their adventures in many ways. Eldritch Realms is slated to be the finishing touch of the first Expansion Pass, adding new race forms, monsters, magical realms, and locations to the title. As the name implies, we expect there to be tentacled horrors aplenty. 

When we spoke to game director Lennart Sas following the game’s release one year ago, he was most excited about the possibilities that Eldritch Realms would give the team in regards to adding “something cool” to Age of Wonders 4.

For now, players can enjoy their free birthday gifts – more news around Eldritch Realms will be out in the next couple of weeks with information on the next wave of expansions set to come after the release of the next DLC.

Until then, you may want to consider playing a game as the Molekin – the poor guys have been the least popular form in Age of Wonders 4’s first year, despite over four million factions being created since the game launched. Not that I have the right of calling anyone out, since I haven’t used them either so far. 

Interestingly, the top three cultures players are all very basic: Barbarian, Feudal, and High stand on the podium with the Mortal Champion being the most popular ruler origin with a 48% pick rate. Wizard Kings follow with 28%, narrowly escaping the jaws of the Dragon Lord with 24%. It looks like many players simply wanted to enjoy some very casual strategizing: 48% of games used an Easy difficulty setting and only 6% of campaigns used Brutal.

At least the dragons won in one regard: The Tome of Evolution is the most picked starting Tome of Magic ahead of the Tome of Faith and Tome of Enchantment.