The dev diary asked for feedback - so here it is, Creative Assembly

[Alpine Imposter]

I am a player who entered the Total War franchise kind of late to the party. I got Rome II a while back but didn't play it much, and my big springboard was Total Warhammer (TWH)1 late last year. I was enthralled by it, and shortly ended up buying TWH3 on sale along with the Wood Elf and Vampire Coast DLCs. A few months ago I got the Chaos Dwarves on release despite my apprehension about the price tag, along with TWH2 on sale because I wanted Skaven+Lizardmen and it means another game to attempt achievements with.

Now, for a while I've been kind of frugal about any DLC policy that looks a bit sketchy/bulky. I'm jaded by Paradox Interactive (PDX) titles like EUIV, in which I have thousands of hours and which the developers keep adding more and more content to in less and less substantive doses. You could say I've placed a lot of faith in the Total Warhammer franchise along with my wallet.

As a consequence of the above, I've become quite alarmed over the last few months, and maybe I can help you understand the mindset of a newer customer who doesn't want to risk buying your dlc:

1. I see Pharaoh announced alongside conversations that it seems to lack an apparent depth of content or strategy in favour of looking nice and focusing on lords/heroes with their abilities. I'm already wincing at the graphical improvements because my computer turns into a nuclear reactor running TWH3 on low settings. More experienced TW veterans predict it to be a continuation of Three Kingdoms (3K), which apparently fell flat due to over-focus on characters. I think to myself, I'm not opposed to lords and heroes in TWH but I have been feeling at odds with the game as I got more involved with the community and realised a lot of meta builds/easy wins are achieved through cheese with lords like Skarbrand, rather than innovative formations/manoeuvres.

I enjoy occasionally making ripples with my lord and feeling like it turned the tide of battle, but I'm definitely more of a grand plan-oriented person who treats characters as an afterthought and groups them up with front line infantry/ranged most of the time. If Pharaoh is going to lean further toward characters carrying the battle I wanted units to win, and straining my 980TI beyond its limit, I don't think I'll be playing it.

2. I chance upon some forum conversations about how it seems Creative Assembly (CA) are undermining older titles like Shogun 2 by breaking mods or unbalancing units in an attempt to push players toward buying newer titles. I've never played Shogun 2 but fully intended to get it when I caught it on sale, and probably buy most of the DLC afterward, since I'm interested in the Sengoku Period. Now I'm hesitant because I don't want to invest in a product the developers may or may not be planning the obsolescence of.

I discuss it with a friend, who assures me that it would be silly for CA to ruin their older games, but I can't shake the familiarity I have with PDX who package their updates to feel half broken unless you buy the accompanying DLC. It's not the same type of scummy, but it would be a similar level if CA were indeed nuking the past to force people into the present. I do my best to dismiss those concerns, and then a mysterious 3.1mb update comes to both TWH1 and 2 with no accompanying patch notes. I have to take the assurance of a stranger on reddit that it's probably just launcher updates. I am now genuinely concerned about planned obsolescence of older Total War titles as part of an underhanded marketing ploy.

3. Chaos Dwarves drops and I buy it for the meme but players who've bought Dark Elves immediately compare the two, saying Chaos Dwarves have their slavery mechanic but improved/deeper. In this update or the one soon after, there's a big UI fix/overhaul because a player exposed the fact that some perk tooltips were straight-up lying about which units they affected. There are also attempts at fixing siege battle AI whom apparently could be kited to make sieges trivial; something I was out of the loop for but community knowledge for months. I wonder how a development team could go for months/a year without spotting two gamebreaking problems like that. I start to wonder whether CA just just don't care/are asleep at the wheel, and when I read discussions about how some games are split between two teams with different visions/ethics, I think back to PDX.

4. Shadows of Change (Soc)s is around the corner, with many unhappy about paying £20 for three legendary lords and what look like reskinned faction mechanics. I'm not stoked about it, but I'll probably buckle and submit to the preorder discount because the Jade Dragon dev diary teased a Kislevite Baba Yaga and I love me some Slavic mythology. Then CA issues a big ol' statement about the pricing choice. Contained within the speech is a part about how CA want to keep updating TWH3 for years to come.
Years of updates means years of DLC.



I think about Pharaoh and the speculation that both it and TWH3 are becoming more character-oriented in the wake of 3K.
I think about Shogun 2 and the speculation that CA are undermining older titles so we'll buy newer ones.
I think about those mysterious small updates to TWH1 and 2, because 3mb doesn't sound like a lot but it's enough to change some numbers in some text files.
I think about how sloppy/up-and-down the health of TWH3 seems to be with each new update.
I start to wonder whether SoC lords will one day be too poorly balanced/bugged to compete with others, because of either negligence or malicious action on the part of the developers. If that's the fate of it and all preceding DLC, why would I buy it? On top of that, should I waste time (or money) on SoC if I need that time to gun for TWH1/2 achievements before they become impossible to obtain?

Dear PR/social media employee who generously took the time to read all this,

We know what inflation is; we've had to deepthroat that word like we're on a Brazzers set ever since COVID-19 dropped. We understand that the increase in rent and salaries for a studio are bound to impact the price for the end user at some point. Where I stand, the official statement assured me I will be paying more money for the same quality/service, but right now my concern (which you need to assuage) is that I'd be giving you more money to wipe your stinky poopy butt with; which you've told me you intend to do for years to come.

Tell me you have/will never screw(ed) up Shogun 2 or TWH1/2 to make us buy newer titles. Tell me you'll never screw up Ogres/Chaos Dwarves to make us buy newer DLC. Offer the community some gesture of goodwill like addressing/investigating whatever's going on with this legacy update stuff. You could also explain how Pharaoh's dynamic weather is an innovative selling point in the face of Medieval 1.

There's a lot of concern from longer time players that you're catering to/targeting newer players like myself, and I don't have the energy to pore over 20 years worth of discussions, patch notes, videos and game content to verify that claim. People at your company are aware of whatever they've done/are doing, and I'd guess you have the means to spend a lot less time giving everybody a definitive answer if you wanted to.

The formatting for this may be kind of awful since I can't see a preview, but I'll try to fix it in post. If players read this and have thoughts, please try not to roast me too hard.

Edit: Changed "long" to "along" and clarified something about what DLC I bought early on, hoping there are no other errors

Edit 2: 25/08/2023, today there's a 250mb update for TWH2 and 190mb update for TWH1. I'd love to know how these are just "launcher ads"

[Brilliance]

Mind if I pile on mine...?

CA, this parts to your managers and business people, please pass it along if someone from the company is listening. If not, I can always raise my voice (all gods bless copy/paste):
You ask us to trust you, to pay ever more for the future of the game, and if we just give you what you ask for, some day it'll be really good? Yeah, I remember the same promises since WH1. After 1,5 years after launch, major update no. 4 mostly still giving quantity instead of the needed quality improvements, and the game IMO still barely reaching WH2 as a whole? At least first give me a ballpark number of how many more payments are we looking at to get to the point where at least the core mechanics are working nicely?
Or how about this: You put your resources into what will make the game great for the players, as originally promised, instead of what will make the most profit during the next 2 fiscal quarters? Explain to your business managers they'll ♥♥♥♥ up both their mid-to-long term sales as well as the company's reputation if they pull the plug and leave us with an unfinished and mediocre product we have paid huge amounts over the years to support. For the very least, forget any multipart projects in the future after that, nobody's gonna buy a damn thing before the last chapter is out, and either absolutely brilliant to begin with, or at least received over 2 years of active patches...
But let's do some basic math, so business people understand the plot... Ok, you need X amount of customers willing to spend $25 for the DLC to make future development profitable? I'm guessing it's mostly not the guys who had never played a TW-game before this. No, it's guys who have each provided your company with likely at least from a couple to few hundred dollars worth of sales income during the last decade, many much more. So, for every one of us you lose as a future customer (or who even moves to sticking to sales while waiting a few years to see if you will actually deliver a finished product that time), you'll need to save that $25 maybe around 5-10x, maybe even 20-40x, from this game's development costs, over the next years and future game developments, assuming similar release schedule. Make financial sense? Lose more than a few of us, and you'll lose more income than you can possibly cut in any costs. Hell, you may actually have to start a new game project or two just to shut them down to find enough cost savings to make the math work.
In addition, firstly, you'll make sure the current ♥♥♥♥♥♥ reviews stay there, and your future WH3 sales take a hit. Second, not one penny from any future WH3 DLC, and less from the earlier ones down the road. Third, you'll likely need to spend more on TW-title development in the future to keep the franchise going and convince people of the product quality in the future. If you let your flagship product be viewed as a messy disappointment that you didn't bother to fix, because short-term profits were more important to you than your customers, that reputation will follow you around the internet and the steam reviews of future TW-titles for years unless you work hard to fix it. Just check some of Paradox's reviews after they started releasing incomplete and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ games that need $100 worth of DLC to make them playable. I used to buy a lot of their stuff, not anymore. It's much easier to lose your reputation than to gain it.
Now, unless your business people failed basic calculus, you'll support, fix and finish the game, even if you're losing money doing it. If you don't, you'll lose much, much more in the future, and realize giving the $25 DLC to everyone for free would've been a cheaper alternative.

Why? Because many of us have supported you and been with you through every step of this trilogy. and many for years before that, and have paid easily at least $150, even close to $400 to support this game and it's development over the years already. So you don't just get to say that huge sum we've paid for the game has already been written off as last years company profits, it's all gone, and the 4-8x top-AAA price tag we've paid you just isn't worth it to you to keep spending resources on it anymore. We paid it with the understanding and promise, that if we pay you for the development in advance payments for fractions of the game, before the complete and final WH3 version of the game is ready, you'll deliver something amazing worth the money and the wait. We paid you for 100% of the work, but now you're saying you'll only do 50% of the job, unless we pay even more? What do you think will happen? Go ahead, FAFO.

[Foxrun]

CA, you should drop support and move on. Let the community roil themselves in it and dont look back. No more Warhammer is for the best.

[Filthy Pollo 🐔]

Originally posted by Foxrun:

CA, you should drop support and move on. Let the community roil themselves in it and dont look back. No more Warhammer is for the best.

Wait a minute, do you own WH3?

[Foxrun]

Originally posted by Filthy Pollo:

Originally posted by Foxrun:

CA, you should drop support and move on. Let the community roil themselves in it and dont look back. No more Warhammer is for the best.

Wait a minute, do you own WH3?

All of it baby, and the last DLC to boot.

[Filthy Pollo 🐔]

Originally posted by Foxrun:

Originally posted by Filthy Pollo:

Wait a minute, do you own WH3?

All of it baby, and the last DLC to boot.

No wonder you want to kill the game for free.

[Human bean]

Huh, this is the best critique yet. All the other naysayers should read this and then take a cold shower (or two)

[Foxrun]

Originally posted by Filthy Pollo:

Originally posted by Foxrun:

All of it baby, and the last DLC to boot.

No wonder you want to kill the game for free.

The community wants to kill the game because it's a 'buggy pos' that has never been fixed, I say let the modders take over and have the community rejoice at free DLC from the community. How is that not a win?

There is only a skeleton crew left for the game because Sega is ready to pull the plug lol

[Filthy Pollo 🐔]

Originally posted by Foxrun:

Originally posted by Filthy Pollo:

No wonder you want to kill the game for free.

The community wants to kill the game because it's a 'buggy pos' that has never been fixed, I say let the modders take over and have the community rejoice at free DLC from the community. How is that not a win?

There is only a skeleton crew left for the game because Sega is ready to pull the plug lol

1) The community is stubborn and toxic.

2) Modders can't fix everything.

3) Don't give them your ideas on how to kill the game.

[Human bean]

Originally posted by Foxrun:

Originally posted by Filthy Pollo:

No wonder you want to kill the game for free.

The community wants to kill the game because it's a 'buggy pos' that has never been fixed, I say let the modders take over and have the community rejoice at free DLC from the community. How is that not a win?

There is only a skeleton crew left for the game because Sega is ready to pull the plug lol

No. The community does not want to kill the game. Only a few individuals wants that

[Pönnukaka]

Sadly, reality is pretty tough. Unless this reaction of players and ongoing fires in community will change the mind of some executive people in CA, this might be our slow downfall. But question remains. Should you stick to your guns and not buy it? Or maybe you should. I leave that to you.

My decision, with current state of the game vs the price vs the work we were waiting for - I am not buying it. I will check how the game works in new patch without DLC. Seems like there were some small improvements. I have a friend with whom I will play co-op or head to head to test some things. But the burning passion I had for this game is slowing going out.

[Many-Named]

Originally posted by Foxrun:

CA, you should drop support and move on. Let the community roil themselves in it and dont look back. No more Warhammer is for the best.

With that kind of support CA can stop right now and we will take up the mantle the moment it drops. Looking at Troy and Pharaoh you can see that Warhammer is the magnum opus and and it's only downhill from here, i couldnt care less about CA and its faulty support.

Also, CA, if you can't make reasonable content for reasonable price (understand a reasonable ratio between the two) then time to move on or close, again I couldn't care less if this is the best you can do.

Yep, capitalism works for us too, graveyards are full of ''essential'' people, the world never stopped turning tho.

[Darklordnj]

I read through this and stopped at the "undermine old games" part. What kind stuff are you on OP?

Also those 3mb updates are Launcher updates, typically for advertisements in the launcher screen, it's been known for a long while what those are.

[Alpine Imposter]

Originally posted by Arti_Sel:

Hey OP you seem to have an inquisitive mind. As you probably know if you want the full story it's often best to look at both sides.

Last year when I did some research on CA's sexual assault scandal I found this guy. He is an old historical fan of CA. The people on this forum treated me like a leper after I linked his video. Here is a video he made about how CA is messing with their old historical games. He can be a bit meandering but he brings good sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1glOY2S4Bc

Originally posted by Darklordnj:

I read through this and stopped at the "undermine old games" part. What kind stuff are you on OP?

Also those 3mb updates are Launcher updates, typically for advertisements in the launcher screen, it's been known for a long while what those are.

The duality of forum comments

[Alpine Imposter]

Originally posted by Darklordnj:

I read through this and stopped at the "undermine old games" part. What kind stuff are you on OP?

Also those 3mb updates are Launcher updates, typically for advertisements in the launcher screen, it's been known for a long while what those are.

The stuff I'm on is reddit/steam threads and youtube videos I happen across, and I'd hoped the context I gave would explain why I don't know things that have "been known for a long while". Common knowledge aside, I think it's healthy to be a bit sceptical of updates that have no patch info when some other games I play will make a small statement for so much as a "fixed a tooltip typo"

[somethingoffensive]

The amount of content and balance of factions is low. TW2 is better and less buggy. Many factions are in dire need of updates and most in game spells and abilities are super generic and have not evolved since TW1. I don't like that every faction has fodder factions at start as it makes the world feel more artificial. The world need to be a lot bigger to support growth of the game. I need to be able to play without the game crashing every hour. Also, the flow of DLC has been super slow and I don't think redoing the single player campaign this late was the best use of resources, regardless of what we as players wanted. Most of us are going to be exclusive to Immortal Empires. Also, we need to make this strange system of random factions declaring war on you a thing of the past. The game needs to be more strategic and less "50 factions war dec'd me for no reason". Have an aggressive expansion mechanic if that balances it. Have AI be smarter when declaring war and be more friendly when threatened even if they don't like the faction.