Creative Assembly & the current negative situation

**Xantan** · 10-28-2023, 13:50

Unfortunately for us Total War fans, the last couple of months for Creative Assembly and the Total War series have been very damaging. And that's to put it mildly.

With the release of the DLC for Warhammer 3 that was horrendously overpriced, and the release of Pharaoh Total War for a rather big sum as well with very few players, there's been a lot of negativity and criticism sent towards Creative Assembly. The DLC is now listed as Mostly Negative / Overwhelmingly Negative in terms of reviews, whilst Pharaoh TW has less than 3000 active players which is extremely disappointing since this was billed as a historical game. At best, Pharaoh Total War might make up the development costs but with this being the equivalent of a Saga game and the pricing being 60 EUR / USD, with the Dynasty Edition being 100 EUR / 100 USD, it's going to be a very hard sell given the amount of content. The low amount, unfortunately.

Worse than that, with all of the barrage of criticism, they started banning people left and right on the official forums and even the Steam forums, adding fuel to the fire. There's LegendOfTotalWar's video right down below that addresses this, and it's not a good look at all.

At this point, there's a lot of questions that need to be raised, and one of the main questions & doubts is - do we want a new historical Total War with the situation that CA is in right now?

**Turkoman** · 10-28-2023, 17:40

Damn I didn't know the situation was that bad.

I just joined and knew the series is in a downward spiral, but didn't think the developers were banning people left, right and center.

Perhaps they should remaster some of their older games. Gives less room to f up. Konami is doing the same with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

**hoom** · 11-03-2023, 09:04

Nobody even bothered to make a Pharoah section here at the .org...

I will buy a Shogun 1/Medieval 1 4K remaster instantly if they announce it.

A lot of players never experienced the awesome that is their simultaneous turn, drag & drop between provinces Campaign map & its reinforcement/withdrawal mechanics.
They should be given the chance & a lot of CA developers should be forced to play it to understand what brought them the fanatical fanbase that TW once had.

I never really liked the Rome1 campaign map mechanics & they've just been tarting up the sows ear since, even going backwards since now we have this crappy 4-slot nonsense & the campaigns turned into a cartoony sub-scale horror.

Rome2 learned the lesson of historical units/factions vs Rome1 but I've just been totally uninterested to play any of the subsequent games.

**Xantan** · 11-21-2023, 20:15

I've played a bit of Pharaoh Total War, to get a glimpse of it - while the UX / UI is superb, very beautiful overall, it's a reskinned Troy which was not to my taste. Too much mythology and not enough realism and history.

**edyzmedieval** · 12-01-2023, 12:52

I've purchased Pharaoh Total War, with the boxed edition Limited Edition that comes also with a map of the campaign. Let's see how it goes.

**edyzmedieval** · 12-01-2023, 12:56

And this is how the boxed edition looks like.

Click image for larger version.

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**magistermilitum** · 12-05-2023, 08:49

I did it to

**magistermilitum** · 12-05-2023, 08:50

Great game for me

**hoom** · 12-20-2023, 07:03

This happened
https://www.totalwar.com/blog/messag...ship-dec-2023/

Partial refunds on what have probably been not many sales & price reduction/SKU simplification, promises to do better at talking to/feedback from community.

But also they've apparently killed existing creator program, might be the start of improvements or just consequences of bad sales.

I saw a video talking about some of the internal stuff like they had 80 staff on DLCs but put out less content for more $$$, apparently the engine is a bit of a shambles with the main engineer guys having gone & leaving a poorly documented kludge on hotfix on workaround kind of thing where a lot of things are really manual & hard to do.

If thats true it explains why the Campaign has just felt like tarted up Rome and sadly I don't think we can really hope for a major transformation in the direction I'd be wanting to see.
IMO the only real hope is with the team who did the mobile versions & Rome Remastered since they got into the guts of the engine to work out how to unlimit a bunch of hard limited stuff -> implies they have at least one person who really understands how that works, need to get them into the guts of the current engine working out how it works & fixing stuff.
But with presumably pretty bad sales of Rome Remastered I got the impression they're not really in the showing anymore

**edyzmedieval** · 12-24-2023, 14:17

This is a step in the right direction, and I appreciate the fact that they know there are issues to be solved and they are actively working with the community.

Despite me enjoying a bit of Pharaoh Total War, the sales for the game have been very negative and clearly it will impact the whole situation moving forward. It depends whether they're working on a new engine or just fixing existing things, but right now, it's not the best time to be a Total War fan. Fortunately for us, we still have a lot of the old games around to play and enjoy but hey, a lot of them are quite old by now...