Dive into the Weald’s suffocating mists, confront twisted creatures, and decide how much corruption your troop can handle.
It’s incredible to see just how much care, delivered through new content and expansions, the team at Shiro Games keeps pouring into their open-world mercenary-sim RPG, Wartales.
In September, the game received The Fief DLC, introducing a territory management and base-building system. And now, a brand-new major expansion has just been announced, pulling Wartales back into the shadows with The Curse of Rigel, the third major expansion for the medieval mercenary RPG.
Set in a remote corner of Alazar, the expansion moves the action to the County of Rigel, a sheltered valley where the sun barely reaches the ground and people live in the shadow of an ancient woodland.
Locals talk about the Weald, a forest so thick and twisted that paths refuse to stay put and those who enter often come back changed, if they come back at all. As attacks grow more brutal and disappearances more frequent, the crown has already dispatched its knights to investigate.
Players join the wider campaign as yet another company of hired blades, paid to track the source of the corruption and push deeper into a region that clearly does not want them there.
The Weald is the heart of the new content and looks designed to feel hostile long before a fight even starts. Under the canopy, the forest is described as a shifting maze where orientation is fragile, time feels uncertain, and every safe patch of light becomes something you cling to.
Your lantern is not just a prop but a lifeline, cutting through the mist to reveal traces of the corruption spreading through the undergrowth. Let the darkness press in for too long and it begins to gnaw at your companions, who catch glimpses of shapes just outside their vision.
It sounds like the kind of space where Wartales’ usual risk-reward loop, push a little further for better loot, or pull back to camp, gets an extra layer of pressure from visibility and sanity.
Out in those woods, players will meet the corrupted: once-human figures reshaped by the Weald itself. Their howls carry between the trees, and the forest almost seems to breathe with them.
Surviving these encounters is only half the story, because the expansion leans into the question of what happens when your own troop starts carrying pieces of that curse. Those who live through contact with the corrupted may bring back grafts, fragments of the Weald’s power that offer new strengths at a cost.
The description hints at a constant tension between harnessing these graft-born abilities and resisting the same feral pull that wiped out so many others, blurring the line between hunter and prey as a campaign wears on.
Back at camp, that corruption becomes a subject for study. The Curse of Rigel adds new research paths built around dissecting and experimenting on these grafts.
Through alchemy and structured experimentation, players can unlock additional bonuses and improvements for their mercenaries, tying the expansion’s horror theme back into Wartales’ existing progression systems. For a game already built around upgrading gear, professions, and camp facilities, this looks like another long-term layer to tweak builds and squeeze out more efficiency from a veteran company.
Alongside the paid expansion, Shiro Games is also introducing a brand-new class: the Thaumaturge.
Emerging from Alazar’s laboratories, this is a battlefield support specialist who mixes science, fumes, and raw nerve. Wielding an incense burner and glass vials, the Thaumaturge manipulates clouds of vapour to buff allies, weaken enemies, and tilt the flow of a fight.
They can even inhale their own concoctions to ramp up their power, trading personal safety for stronger effects and walking a thin line between control and self-destruction. Importantly, the studio confirms that the Thaumaturge will arrive as a free update for all Wartales players, even those who don’t pick up The Curse of Rigel.
For anyone who has followed Wartales since its Early Access days, Rigel continues a clear pattern. Pirates of Belerion pulled companies out onto the seas with a huge archipelago region and ship-based navigation, while The Skelmar Invasion turned Ormance into a sprawling warzone overrun by united northern clans.
The Curse of Rigel steers the game in a different direction, away from large-scale warfare and economic schemes toward something more intimate and oppressive: a single cursed valley, a forest that rearranges itself, and a mercenary band slowly deciding how much corruption they are willing to carry in exchange for power.
As someone who already spent a lot of hours marching through Gosenberg’s streets and Belerion’s waters, I like that this one sounds closer to folk horror than classic campaign map territory.
Base game owners on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X|S will be able to slot the DLC into their existing sandbox, keeping their established band and simply adding Rigel to the list of places they can visit, as with earlier expansions.
The Curse of Rigel is set for December 11, 2025, on PC via Steam and consoles. Below is the announcement trailer.
