Total War Attila has seen a surge in players recently, thanks to the 1.0 release of an ambitious mod that totally overhauls the game into a Lord of the Rings grand strategy experience. Titled The Dawnless Days, the mod has led to the largest peak in concurrent players for Attila in almost a decade.
The Dawnless Days, which you can download on Nexus Mods now, adds a full War of the Ring campaign to play through on a custom map on Middle Earth. It also adds a variety of playable factions that fit with the setting, as well as points of interest from throughout Tolkien’s works. As of writing, Eriador is currently barren and unplayable, though the mod team are working on it!
Looking at SteamDB, you can see that Total War Attila has seen a 24-hour concurrent player peak of 11,248. This is the largest number of concurrent players that game has seen since 2016 during a Sega strategy bundle. If the mod were to beat the all-time peak, it would need to surpass 26,346 concurrent players from back during the game’s initial release.
The Dawnless Days mod was originally uploaded to Nexus Mods back in June 2020, and has been receiving consistent updates since then. The Dawnless Days team is looking for 2D artists, 3D artists, and animators according to a recent post on the modding platform, though it’s emphasised that they cannot and will not accept donations for the project. This is likely due to copyright concerns – no one wants to see a project like this get DMCA struck, after all.
Atilla might be getting a lease of life – in a very Gandalf the White sort of way – but elsewhere Creative Assembly is pushing ahead with new Total War projects. The company only recently announced Nagash as the latest lord coming to Total War: Warhammer 3, as well as Total War: Medieval 3 during its 25th anniversary stream. Then of course, who could forget that Total War: Warhammer 40,000 was announced at The Game Awards last week.
Are you going to hop back into Total War Attila? Let us know below! While you’re down there, why not read Eurogamer’s old Total War Attila review!