Creative Assembly, and specifically the Total War leadership team, posted a lengthy message to the series’ community today recognizing their own missteps while promising adjustments and course corrections, especially in regards to Total War: Pharaoh and Total War: Warhammer 3.
I’m a fan of the Total War series and Warhammer 3 in particular, but I’m clearly out of the loop. I checked into what caused this and, wow, it’s quite the beehive. In terms of Pharaoh, the game has largely been seen as not really iterating on the series and generally being disappointing overall. For Total War: Warhammer 3, a lot of discontent has been brewing under the pricing scheme for the game’s terrifyingly abundant content packs.
However, with Warhammer, it seemed to come to a head in October when Creative Assembly posted “Moderation Guidelines” in the Steam discussion board, which included such galling statements as the frequently quoted “The right to discuss is a privilege—it is not an entitlement you earn by playing the game.” Look, I get it. The Steam discussion boards are a horrible cesspit that will quickly cause you to lose all faith in humanity’s continued survival, but that statement is aggressively dismissive and offensively false.
In order to actually address—rather than dismiss—criticism, the team promises a free update to the Shadows of Change expansion to make its consent more meaningful and perhaps worth the price. They acknowledge that they “failed to meet your expectations of what a DLC should be” and are looking to address this. The update for the expansion is expected in February 2024, but they say, “That launch date is our ambition, but this isn’t concrete.”
Because of this, Thrones of Decay, which was supposed to launch in Winter 2023, has been pushed back to April 2024. They also promise fixes to balance and bugs, stating that “over these last few months, we’ve released a game update roughly every two weeks and where we can, we’d like to stick to that through 2024.”
For Total War: Pharaoh, the team has decided to drop the price for the game to $39.99 USD. To help make amends and smooth things over, they’ll be issuing a refund for the difference to everyone who already owns the game.
In addition to this, the team had planned on releasing paid DLC in Early 2024. Now, however, they are going to be releasing it for free. They also add that they’re “not closing the door on other, more ambitious updates to the game in the future.”
Finally, the team states that they plan to better communicate and respond to the fanbase’s feedback. The post states:
“Our goal is to invest more in our player channels moving forward, introducing more voices from the studio who can speak to you directly about their work and how that relates to what you want from our titles, and most importantly, to keep listening to your feedback. This will all be a work in progress, so do bear with us, but this is our direction moving forward.”
There are a lot of promises here, but it’s going to depend on them to keep them. Managing such a large fanbase is a very tricky thing, and it’s plain to see that Creative Assembly and the Total War team haven’t been doing that correctly. At the very least, they’ve heard the outcry. I’m sure some fans will appreciate that over being told, “Doomsaying, calling for boycotts, or starting arguments based on misinformation contributes nothing to our community.” If they forgive will be another matter. A lot of goodwill has been burned, and it’s a difficult thing to gain back after you’ve lost it.
You can read the full release right here.
