Tempest Rising expansion The Veti's Wrath lands 29 September

Slipgate Ironworks will release The Veti's Wrath, the third faction expansion for Tempest Rising, on 29 September. It adds a Veti story campaign of 11 single-player missions and the faction itself: nine buildings, seven vehicles, six infantry units, five air units, five specialists, five defensive structures, five support powers and a superweapon.

A paid campaign, a free army

Only the campaign is charged for. Playing the Veti in matchmaking, custom games and skirmish matches against bots stays free for anyone who owns the base game, a split the studio chose so that a new faction does not divide the multiplayer pool behind a paywall. The Veti were first opened to everyone in a public multiplayer beta that ran from 27 May to 10 June, and a demo carrying the first two campaign missions for all three factions has been available since 9 July.

The faction sits apart from the existing GDF and Tempest Dynasty armies. Veti units are summoned through a Ziggurat and buffed by Ascension Anchors tethered to their structures, while captured thralls called Enlightened are fed into those anchors to boost attacks, hit points and build speed — an economy built on sacrificing your own units rather than protecting them.

Our opinion

Charging only for the campaign and giving the faction away in multiplayer is the sort of decision that looks obvious in hindsight and rarely gets made. It keeps every existing player in the same matchmaking pool and lets the studio sell the thing it actually built: eleven missions with a script, rather than a stat block with a price tag. The risk is the opposite one — a faction designed around sacrificing your own units has to be genuinely fun to lose with, or the free giveaway becomes a lobby full of players who try the Veti once and go back to Dynasty.