In the end, I'm looking forward to playing Total War because Creative Assembly is one of the only development teams I fully respect and admire both for their work as well as the way they treat their fans. I've played their games for years and they always get me to come back when their new incarnation of lovely historic entertainment. I was talking with my father recently about when I began playing video games and how without games like Civilisation, Age of Empires and Total War I'd not have been drawn into the intrigue and spectacle that history holds.

Past games may have frustrated me at times but truth be told, many of those annoyances were likely born from the over-skeptical viewpoint the internet fosters. Heck, I still don't enjoy playing RTW without the EB mod; perhaps I'm too picky now that I've been indoctrinated into the mindset that the game has to be a certain way, a certain balance, flawless, etc. Anyway, I'd likely not even notice various flaws in the game if I played it first before shuddering at the threads of issues declaring "XYZ is unbalanced! ABC is glitchy!" because only once I've read such things do I peer at them in a new, negative light, where they were once nearly imperceptible. Kind of like that squeaky door you barely noticed until someone mentioned it to you and now it grates on your nerves.

In short, I'm looking forward to being enveloped in the atmosphere of the campaign map, marching my troops into battle, smiling at the drifting smoke of freshly fired muskets and relishing the lingering echoes of fleeing foes!