I absolutely love Total War games, but with ETW it turned out to be a love and hate relationship. I still think CA had a marvelous plan with Empire and after patch 1.4 it looks more like what they probably intended to offer us in the beginning.

Would it have been economically sustainable for SEGA/CA to take an extra year to develop and polish the game and to release it as it is now? I doubt that. But I believe much of the grief and disappointment they probably resent over the community's reaction could have been appeased by starting early a blog (or several) and communicating with people web 2.0 style long time ago. It goes with our grief and disappointment as well.

It's hard to understand why a company that designs software has so much trouble to interact with their software users in a time when anybody interacts with everybody on www.

It also puzzles me why they didn't react faster to the gamers disappointment after the 1.0 ETW release. The crisis was obvious and quick reaction was a must. I'm sure the fellows at CA put lots of hard work and imagination in fixing the game - and I bet they had some quite depressing moments, that they really don't deserve, after all.

The blog comes quite late in this relationship, but better late than never.