Total War - A Quick Death 

We want Medival Total War 3, Napoleonic and Lord of the Rings and thats it

First rule of business (and I have not been to a single business lecture in my life): Understand your audience.

It's high time for another dev to step up and take over Total War at this point. Creative knows what they're doing.

In regards to Pharaoh, their statement just reads, to me, as: "The first DLC we'll be releasing will be free as we've already got it mostly done by this point but since so few bought the game we'll never make the money back. So, we're giving it away free for some good PR before we abandon the game. We're putting the game on life support, so from here on out bug fixes is all you'll see from us. The campaign map was going to be expanded as long as you had Troy already bought to unlock the new playable characters. However, since Pharaoh has flopped so much we see no reason to continue work on it past this point, so better to release the expanded map for free and abandon further development on a good PR note." That is what the statement translates as to me. I really don't care either way. Didn't buy Troy or Pharaoh.

three kingdoms diplomacy needs to be standardized, its so fucking good

This has been going on alot more than half a year it's been happening since rome 2 released

I dont need CA to lower their prices or give DLC for free. I need them to take a serious look at what made Total War great and do that with 2023/2024 technology.

they wont make medieval 3 or empire 2 because they know they cant live up to expectations.

I think they can easily right the ship by doing a few basic things. 1. Start working on Medieval 3, the one game that the fanbase has been clamoring for the most. As part of this announcement, be transparent about DLC and make sure that the base game will have most of the major factions that fans love. For example, England, France, HRE, Byzantium, Aragon or Castile, Saracens/Turks/Moors, etc. Future DLC would include popular but more "minor" nations such as Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, Scotland, etc. as well as unique governments such as the Papacy, Republics, the Caliphates etc. This would give lots of DLC opportunity while still giving the base game a lot of content. Basic things such as the Crusades, Jihad, Mongols, etc. would be included in the base game. 2. Be transparent during the development process. Give players a chance to participate in beta testing and actually pay attention to their feedback! Be transparent with elements that will be changed or kept in the game and WHY. Be transparent with delays. If they can't say due to business reasons or trade secrets, then be upfront with that too. A lot of us who grew up as fans of the Total War series are now experienced professionals, so many of us understand this perfectly well. 3. Deliver a game that's as grand in scope as Medieval 2 was, incorporating aspects from newer games in the franchise. Personally, I'd love to see a (toned down) version of the heroes from Warhammer in Medieval 3. It'd be reminiscent of the great knights of history such as William Marshal. Give the ability to promote those knights who reach a certain level to become generals, that would be amazing. You'd be able to nurture a knight's career and ultimately award him with titles, very much in keeping with medieval Europe. 4. Campaign-wise, steal a bit from Paradox and make players invest in their Royal Line. Bring back marriage alliances, adopting generals into the Royal Family, etc. Create a risk for civil war if your faction leader dies on the battlefield without a designated heir. Put in mechanics around the Papacy, Caliphates, Crusades and Jihads so that this is a whole mechanic in its own right. For example, a Christian king can curry favor with the Pope to declare less pious monarchs as heretics and launch Crusades against them (I think you could do this in either Medieval or Medieval 2). There are so many things you can do with the Middle Ages, the possibilities are endless. These are just some basic ideas. But if CA promised a new Medieval and was transparent throughout the process of developing the game, I think most of us would quickly sign up to buy it. The key for them is a big title combined with transparency that will help mend the fences and excite fans in equal measure.

Empire 2 needs to happen. The previous one was a great game, which I still play to this day. I would love to see what they could do with the technology available now and add the American Civil War!

The problems seem to be mostly at the management level

I WANT MEDIEVAL 3 GOD DAMN IT

Would’ve loved an ASOIAF, and Medieval 3 Total war.

We have been here before with CA. Rome 2, release of War Hammer 3. I'm sure it won't be long before they are right back making the same mistakes. The bottom line is that the leadership has become greedy and focused on appeasing shareholders, while we, the fans, suffer with poor quality and lack of content, and the dev teams are put on a leash. It's unfortunate, but they have become another money hungry company at the top levels. I'm sure we will be in the same boat in another 3-5 years. However, I hope I'm wrong.

If they don’t release medieval 3 (or at least remaster 2) next, we riot!..

Need a napoleon 2 and empire 2 and I’ll be happy Like hell a empire/ napoleon with a bigger map would be awesome

Quite sure Troy was free on Epic for 24 hours and was a epic exclusive for a year

How can it be so hard for them to make the decision to develop Medieval 3 or Empire 2 instead of these fantasy «historical» games in settings nobody asked for

I won't lie, historical TW titles are my most played games on Steam, I grew up with the series so I may be a little more sympathetic than most. That said, I have been disappointed with their quality since Attila... haven't bought any of them since at full price. I liked some of the mechanics from Troy, like the resources system, but like you said, the UI was very hard to adjust to, which is sad coming from a seasoned TW player like myself. I simply could not bring myself to pay $60 for Pharaoh, since we all knew it was a Saga title and should've been $40 to begin with. I've been very worried about the fate of TW/CA in the past year with all the drama, so I must say that I was quite relieved when I saw this blogpost. Call it a corporate PR move all you want, but I think it's a step in the right direction for them to admit their fault, lower the price and partially refund those who paid full price. Furthermore, at $40 and the promises of free DLC (regardless of what it is) and the free map/culture expansions, that is a good enough value for me. It's still too early to say they're off the hook, but again, this is a step in a right direction and I like to think that I'm encouraging this type of pro-consumer behavior by buying it after this apology. Although, I do recognize that's probably exactly what they wanted. Either way, we'll have to see what next year brings before passing any more judgement. P.S. Pharaoh is better than Troy, IMO. The god/favor system is more balanced, the outpost and court mechanics are interesting, as well as the new fire/dynamic weather mechanics. It's not my favorite setting/period, because I would take an Empire 2 or Medieval 3 over anything, but it's still a solid historical title.

I dont care about any of this. I just want a good game to play. It feels like they are talking to children. Almost every company does this. They dont realise most of us are already adults and can see through all their crap. When their next title is out and i like the setting i will watch some gameplay online and than make a dicision to buy it or not. Bcs thats what everyone should do. If they continue with their nonsense they dont get my money. If they make a good game they will.

They really haven't understood what led to their downfall if they think offering more slop for a reduced price is going to change anything.

Man can't they just fire people? Get the actual talent back? Were their ranks all 'Me Too'd'?

Can we get Empire 2, a game close to modern like fall of samurai , medieval 3?

Hears RTW sound track...."Dang here we go again" *pulls up steam*

People just need to stop paying for trash. But they won't. 🤷‍♂️

They were definitely vague in this statement about whats coming for SOC but they also said they would have the Game Director discuss what is coming once they get back from the holiday break

I love the background music 🎵

Medieval, Empire or Victoria

'we are sorry we tried to ripp you off, consistently for a few years now.. making games with the fraction of content we usually make for the same money.' Just not good enough. 40 pounds for a game that has one fifth the contect of the usual total war games is not honest either. They have succesfully lowered the standard and pretend they are the good guys know.

How many final chance has it been now?

It's all just corporate PR speak. It means nothing at all. Nothing will change and nothing will be done. They'll still release half baked games and rake us over the coals for essential features sold after the fact as DLC. Gone are the days of expansions, games coming out with tons of content. Haven't even made a real historical Total War game for a decade, it's freaking NUTS.

I see Rome 2 in the background, right? I don't remember it having such neat looking siege things around the city. I know they had planned on it, to make the sieges look like they'd been going on for a while, but I never saw it when I played the game.

Anybody checked the total war figures compared to bannerlord to see if there is any correlation of bannerlord taking total war concurrent players? 👀

It's sad to look at the Total War series struggling like that. I was with it since the first Shogun. IMHO the series reach peak with Empire/Napoleon TW.

I see no light at the end of this tunnel, maybe they are going to make another „historical“ total war but it will have the same problems as the other new TW games (focus of dlc, bare bones gameplay, old engine,…) Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

CA being a professional victim before go to holiday, pathetic

No Pharoah is not what people wanted the total war fans have been asking for the amazing Medieval 3

Their words mean nothing. No action has been taken that would make me have any faith in CA.

what's the music in this background at 6:40?

so many good ideas they will not ever get to even try

There is this thing known as the currency of goodwill, and i have no more for this series. I no longer care, just make a good game on day 1 and ill come back.

We actually already know what the pharaoh dlc will be - it's a sea people culture with 2 playable factions

I juat Don't want the studio to close, as much as i dislike the Recent CA work, finger cross they can keep going. Let's hope its BIG lesson for them, and they learned from it.

In my experience, whenever someone says they are going to be more transparent, they always aren't. It is a tag line / talking point.

Ah greed, a lovely feature in games

The only thing i want before i die is a new Empire or Napoleonic

It's far more than half a year man, This has been brewing for a long time now and at least since the release of Warhammer 3

Ha they only talk to us when they see there losing money.

whenever i see them announcing a new game and its not releasing total war medieval 3, i dont care

Honestly, I think a partial refund + merging of the editions of the game is a quick way to give something to the fanbase while other harder shit that takes time is being worked on. A sort of, placeholder imo. Can't expect revolutionary change over night.

The rock paper scissors style you said wasn't a thing in older total wars. In Shogun 1 - Empire it wasn't there at all.

All the fans want Medieval 3 but they just keep making some irrelevant era. Don’t know why they have this strong deaf tone to the fanbase.

dude CA just need to make napoleon, medieval, or empire to revive the total war, that the only ways for them to revive total war.

Oh how I wish they brought back Arena

Creative Dis-assembly.

I want the next 3 games to be Medieval, Lotr and Rome 3 I also want shogun 3. But the need to buckle down and actually make some advancements

Telling you right now that they have no real plan. Too much pressure from shareholders / stakeholders wanting money back from the past really really bad games… Their only real hope is medieval 3. Go back to their roots and actually focus on a good base game. So many gaming studios are trying to copy Paradox (kings of dlc) business model but they fail to make a video game. We all just want a good game. Good products will sell themselves bc nobody else is willing or can do so.

I don't know when this price change was supposed to take effect, but its still $60 Australian dollars

I just want the battles similar to medieval 2 or shogun 2 again 😢

They really missed a chance with troy, they could've made a historical/warhammer hybrid by starting a Total war Mythology series. Same idea as warhammer but with real world map and their respective mythologies brought out as units and spells

I still play medival 2 regularly.. if they made a medival 3 or maybe a LOTR spinoff I might buy one of the new ones again

Lord of the rings total war needs to happen, and then all is forgiven 😂

They have to follow up on this statement with good content or all goodwill will be lost.

I Have been let down to many times when I was a kid I was ok with this but now I'm done I wont buy anymore Ill always check up on it but after pharos I'm just tired of being let down

Man all I want is Medieval 2 remastered

We need Mesopotamia and Greece to finish Pharaoh off.

So Creative Assembly are basically the Bethesda of RTS's.

If they have no plans to ever make Medieval Total War 3, than I have no plans to purchase a Creative Assembly game ever again. My theory behind that decision is that they know if they did make an MTW 3, it would be just as shit as anything made after Rome 2. They know the player base wouldn't like it, and the destruction a bad Empire 2 or MTW 3 would have could possibly kill the company. Likely incorrect but with how they have handled anything after Rome 2, they don't have the magic touch any more.

It's the gameplay and AI seems similar over another TW genre, unless they bring new game mechanic I don't see any future the best TW game for was when they release medieval 2

Total War is dead. I've since moved onto Warno and Wargame: Red Dragon. I recommend you check out those two titles, Warno being the newest iteration as it's imo the next step in the Total War sphere.

One thing I know about business owners, is they never change and are always greedy

What we want is Medieval 3 or a new Empire with that being said I got my $20 refund. So Atleast they put some money where their mouth is. I hope for good thing from them.

I talked this with a friend before. The apology was nice and all, but actions are what matters in the end. As long as the shadows of change price stands where it's currently at, it's going to remain the same. If I pay for a DLC that's half the price of the game, I expect there to be 50% + content of what the current game has. My calculations may be wrong, but that's how I feel.

Let them make Medieval total war 3, Empire Total War 2 or even something ww1 related...I would buy them all without hesitation.

Empire 2 !

They lost me with all the fantasy setting garbage and the new engine which just tended to turn battles into blob fights. Also what annoyed me was they seemed to tack on more and more AI cheats over time. The last TW game I enjoyed was Shogun 2.

they should be sorry as they can be replaced eventualy at least where there are gaps in the market opportunists will try and fill it.

Crumbling? Good, I love it.

How about actually making a game instead of overprice lack lusterd DLC's and copy pasted video games. A ''am sowwy'' wont cut it anymore. Empire 2 Medieval III or a Victorian total war anything else is a easy ticket to boycott city.

Naaaahhhhhh Total war 1,2 and 3 smashed it all lol, they may have one or two poopers but then there will be another legend launched

I got into total war 4 years ago, when i found an old disc with a pirated copy of shogun 2 that belonged to a cousin. Fell in love with the game, like how the fuck i didn't know about this franchise before, and started looking for more content. Found the newest game at that time 3K, and bought it. And surprise, surprise... It sucked... I still play shogun 2 and the medieval 1212 mod on Attila, and recently jumped into medieval 2, what a good game.

yea no, this is damage control, theyre not going to change, they'll abandon Pharaoh and then move onto the next game, the same shit theyve been doing for the past 10 years, if they actually gave a shit, three kingdoms, troy, and pharaoh would have never came out, we would have seen something new, hell they could have taken the time and effort from those three games and remastered Medieval 2 or even made Medieval 3 or another time period that had some soul put into it, but nah. Were just going to see more garbage.

This is not an apology. Just suits trying to get you to spend your money on shit games. Until they release a good game they will not be getting anything from me. If they make anything else before going out of business it needs to be incredible or else the company will die eigther way.

They can release remake medieval total war 2 just to get some of the mob of them and do a time line when new historical or mythical games are inline next for release would help and stop doing the minor transaction of patches you know well should of been out since release

Pharaoh was DOA for me, and nothing about the free DLC makes me want to actually pick up the game. I don't even think CA is capable of making a grand scale TW game on the scale of Rome 2 or even Shogun 2 any more. I found 3K somewhat bland and homogeneous (and cringey with the hero characters), and their design philosophy has been marred by the Warhammer fantasy titles bleeding into the historical titles to the point where their historical releases aren't even worth checking out for me any more. I would be pleasantly surprised with a Medieval 3 or even an Empire 2 announcement but knowing CA's track record of buggy mess games (remember Rome 2 at launch?), combined with their utterly lackluster bite-sized historical titles they've been attempting to pass on as full-sized titles, I just don't think they can even make a full-scale historical game that we're all clamoring for any more. Hopefully the grand scale historical battle RTS torch can be picked up by some other competent developer, because lord knows CA ain't it.

یلدا مبارک

I just don’t care about ancient Egypt really, it’s very dull from a military history point of view. I bet most guys in to the subject can’t name a famous battle or great general or an elite unit of the top of there head. We just don’t know enough about that period, and it gives CA licence to just make shit up.

If they stop with all the price gouging with DLC's and put cheat codes back in their games, then I'll give them a go again.

Actions speak louder than words, I'm not convinced of anything they have said or done recently , they don't care about the players or the game that's proven in all of the last titles for the last 10 years.

Creative assembly just need to stop with the scam DLCs and actually make the games people want, make empire total war, make medieval

Good. Good.

Just bring in the guys from dawnless days and third age and make them build the game that we all need and deserve, give them the fokin money

The lenovo DRM, how bad and broken rome 2 was, Warhammer dlc and games high price with less content, less historical more arcade and fantasy, spamming totalwar just kinda slowly killed their playerbase. I only look forward for manorlords but CA should go to a realistic WW2 scenario.

Honestly I don't think it's something that needs fixing. In my opinion, it's Creative assembly deciding what is their Identity. Are they going to be a fantasy strategy game or historical. At this point they need to just choose one.

Make a new ground breaking game engine, release the world wars series. Everything would be peachy again.

Just combined paradox & total war :> three kingdoms 2 & Medieval 3 plz

it shares so many similarities with EA / Dice and Battlefront 2042 flop. Even though the game was there recovered after years of support and content release so now it's actually fun and playable, initial damage was done and it pushed people off. Same here, can't really predict people will stay for Pharaoh, it's on life support. Only a new project may actually turn things over. but this all is just another example of company trying to get rich quickly, milking the cow to the point where cow dies, barn is on fire and no one is coming to the rescue lol

Rome 3 but new engine not empire engine thst they have used for all except rome tw and older and medieval 2 s

If they just announced work on M3 theyd be out of this mess. The only thing that can save CA is going back to their roots. Honestly I think the WH community is partially to blame for this. Those games were super successful but simply brought in a large audience that doesnt really understand the history of TW and tends to demand a lot from CA on just their titles. They often seem to push CA in the wrong direction by demanding a lot of the mechanics that do work in a WH title in all TW titles. But at the same time any hardcore fandom theyre generally fanatical and tunnel visioned. I think CA, based on community feedback, did legitimately think games like Troy and Pharaoh could appease both audiences. However whats become clear is CA has a silent majority of older historical title fans that dont tend to post on places like reddit, or discord, or any social media. They simply play the games and either buy them or dont. It seems very typical of game devs to get ruined by listening to their own community. Community input is good but it cant dictate the overall direction of your projects. Almost everytime a game dev tries to appease the popular sentiment on sites like reddit, it backfires in their face hard. What they dont seem to realize is online gaming communities are often populated by people simply interested in the games or simply not very experienced with them and trying to reach out to the community to improve their skills. Theres also a large segment of these communities where users joined simply to complain about one thing they dont like in the game. But to put it simply as time goes on you get new people coming in. Newer people tend to dominate the online social spaces surrounding the game and basically fill the devs head with terrible ideas. They often have a loose understanding of the mechanics overall and demand changes that effect just the popular factions and playstyles. Then the dev has a worse problem. A sociological problem. If they ignore the community the communities now mad because the dev didnt listen even though the games good. If they listen to the community the game flops because they used a reddit sub as a lead project designer.

i just dont care about anything creative assembly came out with for a while