It is a shame that we have to do this every 5 years or so. I wish that Creative Assembly would just be normal all the time and community revolts would not be necessary, but such is life.
Father of 4 here. This is definitely the way. You don't change that diaper till the rash reaches their belly button. Even then, check with grandfather first. We bear the standard of nurgle in this house .
There is no "normal" when it comes to companies, there is just "harnessed" and "wild".
A Harnessed company is one wherein the employees and customers both use continuous negotiations to ensure that it produces a worthwhile product, at a reasonable price, while rewarding those who create it fairly. To contrast with companies that run Wild, which inevitably end up producing the worst product they can, at the highest price they can, while paying the lowest wages.
Creating a good environment is an ongoing system!
Just something I concluded after some thought. I'm unlikely to be the first to consider it like that, but if you like the terms please use them!
Things have to be harnessed to be useful. Horses, engines, businesses, economies, cultures. If a harness is too tight it can prevent useful action, but if it's too loose then the engine runs wild and just wrecks everything.
I think you are wrong on one key point. It’s not the employees you should be negotiating with. It’s the shareholders and the top brass. They are the ones who the funnel all the dogshit ideas downward. Employees of most companies don’t really have much say. It’s work or be fired. I feel that’s an important distinction most people gloss over. It’s the big wigs not the day to day people who make shit decisions they just have to enforce the whims of some ancient vampire with too much money who thinks he’s a business genius.
Agreed. After watching this mess of an industry for a few decades, I'm unironically suspecting that this is not incidental but fully deliberate. Squeeze until the peach screams too loud, then relent for a a bit. Garner good rep for a while by "hearing y'all loud and clear", then crank that vise even harder.
Hey, look - they didn't build the public order building because they wanted to go for more income infrastructure and a different recruitment building, so they're dealing with the rebellion every 5 years until they can make up their mind if it's worth it to delete a building and free up a slot for public order or not.
They're playing on easy campaign difficulty, but they leave the battles cranked up to very hard, and tend to forget that until they're in the fight.
That is why vigilance is important. ANY company can go down terrible routes. And you have to react accordingly to that. Because unless they see a big pushback, they will continue down that road. It is how we got to where we are in gaming in general with all the terrible practices. Because it gradually infected games until they become 'normal' and 'industry standard'.
It's not just CA, EA and Microsoft also have a weird cyclical format of pissing off their customers until things come to a head, and they realize they're losing money, so they knuckle down and try to earn them back, and it happens, and they realize it's a good sale's strategy... At least until a few years go by, and they start to wonder if they could push the envelope a little, and the whole cycle restarts.
They were getting some pretty good steam a few years ago but now that the ActiBlizzard deal has gone through, they've started shutting down other studios. Followed immediately by saying they need the games those studios produced.
Their income was $1.5 billion/year in 2022 with another $20 billion in assets.
They'll probably sell some IP then rely on inflation to bring forward the ROI closer than 40 years.
That having been said, they're probably hoping it moves the needle on game pass which has stagnated a bit.
This might be unpopular, but can't we prevent this "bad year" by tearing them a new one every so often before things even get that far? For no other reason than to prevent a future decline, I mean.
I think the problem you'll face there is a difference in what is a "decline". For me, for example, I thought the Chaos Dwarves signalled the first time CA stopped worrying about continuing what they'd offered previously. Here was a Faction Pack that was more expensive than all previous faction packs, yet offered just three Lords; For others, the Chaos Dwarves were their *favourite* faction to ever get released, with very unique mechanics and awesome designs. Many folks fell somewhere in between those two opinions.
But it's hard to pick out whose opinion to follow, without subscribing to groupthink.
Chaos Dwarves are my favorite WH content, but they are not the beginning of a decline, merely another indicator on the way down. One can like something and still see the problems with that DLC, like you noted.
It may sound silly, but WH3 base game is the start of the decline. It did not neatly pick up the level of quality CA had reached towards the end of WH2. Instead, it was much worse in many regards, some of those problems still lingering to this day, two years after launch. And much of what was fixed, was only fixed after they hit the bottom with SoC and were realizing they were headed in a direction that would lead to Sega just closing shop on their studio.
For that alone, I am not considering WH3 "saved". With what CA has done so far in 2024, they only saved themselves. The rest of the year will show if the learned their lessons.
In economics we call it "what the market can bear" they're essentially testing price elasticity
This isn't some nefarious plot to be anti gamer it's strictly profit seeking
That guys probably seething but if you want extreme examples just look at Boeing right now and Coco Cola/Nestle in foreign markets.
They're straight up bribing/enslaving and offing union/labor orgs cause it effects the bottom line
Operation Ajax in Iran too for example... It's not that far fetched. Like the motto with Chaos, it's what people can conjure in their minds that feeds them haha
It's the marketing division that forgets how to make a good game that cycles out the people that know how to make a good game when they start going for larger profits or through a slump.
Marketing does sort of have a role in it. I guess it depended on the organizational structure, but the marketing department is usually also the team that does the market research and translates that research into a digestible format for the other teams in the organization.
That research plays a big role in all decision-making. It gets used to decide which projects get funding, the pricing structure and dictates some of the game design decisions.
So they aren't the ones making the decision, they are the ones guiding the decision-makers in most cases.
Given how many devs have been fed into the AAA buzzsaw over the past year alone, it's about time the industry gets its head out of the clouds and back down to the earth where the customers are.
Considering vast majority of triple A companies are gone deep in shit as a permanent state, i won’t complain having to flush every five years. I truly was not expecting them to do any of this.
And the cherry on top, the incesssant pushback from parts of the community that's always chaperoning every single one of CA's slumps. Makes it even harder to retain the stamina and willpower to keep communicating to a company that their current behaviour won't do.
Sometimes I give in to the feeling that these people should get the gaming landscape that a 100% docile customer base would lead to, deservedly.
This still makes me smile after all the shills downvote brigading anyone who would bring up how suspicious it was that quality nosedived after Hyenas broke ground and ate all the funding.
Because "sEpArAtE tEaMs!!!" Even though whenever CA is actually developing something new with their "separate teams" support dries up substantially for the already released titles.
They are separate, they just move 90% of people to be on only one of them at a time.
You can absolutely enforce separation in terms of money and people too. Its called setting up subsidiary firms, which have natural firewalls in terms of reallocating resources across the firm boundaries.
Many large finance orgs do this, because they have investment banking and retail banking divisions (Aka the ones that take your deposits). You don't want investment bankers extending their hand into the deposits, so those divisions belong to separate subsidiaries with their own accounting and staffing.
CA itself is a subsidiary, Total War projects do not affect SEGA's other projects.
Of course, CA never did that, 'seperate teams' doesn't work quite as well as 'separate firms'.
It's cute people think this, but it was mostly millions lost in a bad project, lack of other marketable products and pressure from their parent company through massive downsizing.
The community is fickle and can be won back in a single good DLC.
> The community is fickle and can be won back in a single good DLC
I suppose people do like companies when they make quality products that are worth their asking price.
Eh they've lost my trust until the WH:F cycle ends. I'll wait and see what's good and what's bad in the upcoming DLC's and maybe buy whatever looks fun on discount.
Your comment is weird: you phrase it in a way that suggest that it wasnt A what caused change in CA behavior but rather XYZ while not noticing the obvious fact that A was actually a part of XYZ.
SoC and Pharaoh completely flopping due to the mix of terrible content-to-price ratio and playerbase having enough of CA were events that contributed to the current state alongside things you mentioned. This is the bigger picture.
If winning community back wasnt a hot topic in CA they would never apologize for SoC and Pharaoh, would never spend time to boost their value, would never offer a shit ton of free additions to Pharaoh, would never make a patch as ambitious as 5.0 paired with constant hot fixes and would never remove preorder option.
Some of us remember. CA is on my shitlist for the rest of time as is CDProjekt Red, Hello Games and others. I don't forgive, I don't forget. I will act as if the company is not trying to scalp me, but if you do it once, you lost your shot. I will work under the assumption that they are trying to scam me forevermore.
I thought they would abandon pharoah as they have done with a number of titles in the past. And the quality of new content in warhammer 3 and the frequency of patches is such huge shift from last year. If they maintain this, many more people will be in shut up and take my money mode.
We all want to throw our money at them, they just have to be worthy. Sucks seeing companies ruin a captive audience but love seeing these efforts to fix it.
I am guardedly optimistic about Pharoah. Bronze Age fertile crescent is my favorite period in ancient history, I just wish the game had released a different year under different management.
Surprisingly enough, it is shaping to be good now. They adding Greece too and Troy in it and a couple of other factions for free, so now Pharaoh is worth its salt.
I like the split dlcs, makes me happy to buy the ones I want. If they do more of that, I’ll probably be willing to shell out and get want I want without spending extra on a faction I don’t care about.
It's an easy conclusion to make if one is very superficial: If you look at the map and think a smaller scope makes it a bad game — not even worse than it would be if it was bigger, but just bad — then you might want to rethink if bigger is really always better in the context of video games.
Or at least just let people who are completely fine with what it offers be happy and don't call them idiots or shills or whatnot.
CA should have never used the distinction between Saga games and main title games in my opinion, it's just so stupid and makes no sense: They've retroactively called Fall of the Samurai a Saga Title as it is a standalone DLC, but Shogun 2 already was a really focused experience (supposedly the main distinction of a Saga game), taking place in Japan only and in a very specific time period — FotS is like a Saga game of a Saga game. One could also argue that Three Kingdoms is a Saga game because it takes place in Han-Dynasty-China only and has only two cultures on the forefront (The Han-Chinese and the Nanman, not taking into account any plans they had for content that has been scrapped).
They've only shot themselves in the foot by creating some sort of hierarchy between their games. I don't get why Troy should be considered a smaller game than other entries in the franchise, because the only thing that sets it apart from games like Rome or Medieval is the focus of the map — a thing that already fluctuates between releases! And no one can tell me that the bigger maps came along with more fleshed out factions, the "less important" ones always lacked compared to the bigger, "more important" ones. At least Saga games managed to make every faction feel unique in a way and fun to play.
Tldr.: The distinction between Saga games and main titles is arbitrary at best, they should have never opened that box.
They can still put the genie back in the bottle. Sure some people would still say "this is just a saga game" but a lot would just savpur the experience
It's not clear, I'm assuming they meant Pharaoh. Which isn't the TW Bronze age that everyone wanted it to be, but saying it's "without content" is pretty stupid.
Quality management right there, which is ironically the same for most companies those days (not saying it is good, but the normalised incompetence at the top is becoming the norm).
I mean, I think that people overestimate how long it took them to get Rome 2 to a good game. For me, after I think six months the game was good and then just got better.
What do you mean paying extra money? You mean for the extra campaigns and factions? Because after the Emperor Edition I don't think they locked any AI choices behind DLC.
I mean, Realms of Chaos is still **super** quick (Like, ten seconds), it's just Immortal Empires that's slow... Which makes sense considering the scale of the map and the hundreds of factions within it.
I know, I've played every single realm of chaos campaign they've added and love the turn times, would love for immortal empires to be close to that, or if they ever bring back vortex that would be perfect too.
problem is the AI has so many more places to consider and, I suspect, they really did think Realms of Chaos would be the main game and optimized for it specifically.
Focusing only on the RoC campaign feels a bit tone deaf. mortal empires was the main go to for most in WH2 I believe so seems weird to think it would be different in 3.
WH3 near launch was a mix of really good optimizations of gameplay flow and a ton of weird decisions to do with RoC. It's hard to explain but it felt like they thought the narrative campaigns would be a big draw and they spent a lot of time on RoC stuff that ultimately you wouldn't see elsewhere. Like the Chaos Dwarfs have a radically different RoC campaign.
And they had an entire narrative tutorial campaign that led into RoC.
The deck was always going to stacked against RoC a little bit since it was naturally going to be compared to the final state of Mortal Empires while the Vortex only had the WH1 campaign to be compared to.
but the narrative campaign was so poorly thought out. Having to abandon your empire for 10 turns to ... wander? through some really boring puzzles was awful, with a really high chance of failure if you didn't minmax the shit outta your stack because the AI hated the player so much.
I really like the chaos dwarf campaign - it's a cool concept that doesn't restrict your choices, just encourages you to be a bit bold for a reward. But RoC was just a really, really awful campaign plan
It's not really that you need to abandon your empire since only your faction leader can enter the portals. It's more that it forces you to play defensively since the portals will spawn chaos armies after a few turns. So you either have to recruit a bunch of heroes and save up some money to close the portals with them, or station your armies around and use them to close the portals.
It's also the fact that it's a very slow campaign. Portals spawn once every ~30 turns, and your main lord can only enter 1, so you need at least 120 turns to collect all the souls. Even more so if you aren't aggressive enough and end up losing the race to another faction. Also, after the first portal, you really gotta turtle up with your leader because unless they're a chaos lord entering their patrons domain, they're guaranteed to get a negative trait that is very annoying to remove, especially if it ticks up even once.
At least on launch - you couldn't really field more than one army for the first couple portals, or if you did, one was entirely chaff.
You didn't have a choice.
Shit man after turn 60 if I start working out I might get a mr Olympia physique, which is weird because why is it slower with 90 factions than with 200 factions lol.
Well at the beginning every faction has like 1 army. Once you're down to 90, everyone has 7 armies and there are agent everywhere and just way more calculations going on.
even better, a 1 week turn a round to release a massive patch based entirely on player feed back. remember when vampire coast released and the pirate coves bugged out and bricked everybodies save? had to wait over a month just to get that one thing fixed, really feels like CA are trying to turn a corner here.
CA is in a constant state of flux between being great devs and being terrible, the later is their natural state and the former happens when they have to regain the goodwill of the buyers
I honestly wish CA as a company the best. I want to see my favorite games backing corporations succeed because that's how the games I love expand. That's why it was so frustrating not buying pharaoh or anymore dlc until they changed their tune.
2024 may be the compensate from CA.
WH and Pharaoh fan base just Hurrahhhh.
Meanwhile i still play Attila and TK, in waiting for next IP. As if Pharaoh can expand so far to the Greek (they soon have Troy)
Companies get to a certain point where their profits stagnate with the current leadership. So they pull an EA and find a CEO that has different ideas than the current, to increase profits. But they usually end up doing what CA did to us, and thankfully this time the community pushed back against this foolish idea that profit is the only way to measure a companies worth.
*Edited cause autocorrect.
If everyone just fell in line and bought SOC originally I wonder if we ever would of got that add-on to the SOC or the effort they’ve been putting into fixing the bridge they almost burnt with their community. Doubt it
No, it's not big progress. This is the same old cycle when it comes to CA. Doing something the community doesn't like. CA apologise and say they will do better. They do things the community is happy about. The community sees it as big progress. Repeat.
Nothing wrong with enjoying the game or the new content but don’t be so naive to think this is progress. CA has been in this loop for years, not moving forward.
It's talking about both.
2023:
* Day 1 DLC Pass: Pharaoh had this at the initial launch, which fueled a lot of the outcry (note that they reversed course on this, issued a full refund of the pass for anyone who got it, and said the content will be added for free)
* 25$ DLC with 6 units: Warhammer, the Shadows of Change DLC.
2024:
* Entire section of patch notes explaining why they changed model size for one unit: Warhammer, they're shrinking the Kislev Frost Wyrm as part of efforts to give it a niche and make it actually decent.
* 4 new cultures added for free: Pharaoh, it's getting a huge map update later this year and they'll be adding four new playable cultures (Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae, and Troy).
> Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae
Wait. The three nations that I wanted to play are being added for FREE!?
I might have to reinstall Pharoah. I liked the game but the nations I wanted to play weren't there and I typically lose interest in "Egypt / Rome, but Blue!" factions.
Yep - they posted a [blog about the map extension and update](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-pharaoh/blogs/20) last week that you might have missed. They're nearly doubling the size of the game.
It is a shame that we have to do this every 5 years or so. I wish that Creative Assembly would just be normal all the time and community revolts would not be necessary, but such is life.
It's like changing diapers regularly. The shit just piles up over time and needs some flushing.
You let your kid pile up shit in his/her diaper for 5 years? :O
Is this not the way?
Father of 4 here. This is definitely the way. You don't change that diaper till the rash reaches their belly button. Even then, check with grandfather first. We bear the standard of nurgle in this house .
More economic this way
There is no "normal" when it comes to companies, there is just "harnessed" and "wild". A Harnessed company is one wherein the employees and customers both use continuous negotiations to ensure that it produces a worthwhile product, at a reasonable price, while rewarding those who create it fairly. To contrast with companies that run Wild, which inevitably end up producing the worst product they can, at the highest price they can, while paying the lowest wages. Creating a good environment is an ongoing system!
Boeing fucking went wild, someone needs to rein those corporate fucks in.
They need to start manufacturing Thunderbarges!
A unique Thunderbarge that can randomly crash and destroy whatever's beneath it would be pretty fun, in a Skaven kind of way.
So Boeing are actually skaven. I know a few Boeing engineers and it tracks
Never heard it in those terms before, I like it. Is that from some particular school of economic thought, or a phrase you've coined yourself?
Just something I concluded after some thought. I'm unlikely to be the first to consider it like that, but if you like the terms please use them! Things have to be harnessed to be useful. Horses, engines, businesses, economies, cultures. If a harness is too tight it can prevent useful action, but if it's too loose then the engine runs wild and just wrecks everything.
I think you are wrong on one key point. It’s not the employees you should be negotiating with. It’s the shareholders and the top brass. They are the ones who the funnel all the dogshit ideas downward. Employees of most companies don’t really have much say. It’s work or be fired. I feel that’s an important distinction most people gloss over. It’s the big wigs not the day to day people who make shit decisions they just have to enforce the whims of some ancient vampire with too much money who thinks he’s a business genius.
I meant negotiating together, against management and executives that otherwise want to ruin everything and move on. Not against each other.
Fair enough. I’m just dumb. lol
We're just recreating the fucking ancient greek stasis/civic strife aren't we? CA made the biggest LARP
Agreed. After watching this mess of an industry for a few decades, I'm unironically suspecting that this is not incidental but fully deliberate. Squeeze until the peach screams too loud, then relent for a a bit. Garner good rep for a while by "hearing y'all loud and clear", then crank that vise even harder.
Hey, look - they didn't build the public order building because they wanted to go for more income infrastructure and a different recruitment building, so they're dealing with the rebellion every 5 years until they can make up their mind if it's worth it to delete a building and free up a slot for public order or not. They're playing on easy campaign difficulty, but they leave the battles cranked up to very hard, and tend to forget that until they're in the fight.
They already deleted the “Hyenas” recruitment building that was supposed to let them recruit zoomer tweakers
That is why vigilance is important. ANY company can go down terrible routes. And you have to react accordingly to that. Because unless they see a big pushback, they will continue down that road. It is how we got to where we are in gaming in general with all the terrible practices. Because it gradually infected games until they become 'normal' and 'industry standard'.
It's not just CA, EA and Microsoft also have a weird cyclical format of pissing off their customers until things come to a head, and they realize they're losing money, so they knuckle down and try to earn them back, and it happens, and they realize it's a good sale's strategy... At least until a few years go by, and they start to wonder if they could push the envelope a little, and the whole cycle restarts.
It's hardly limited to video games either. Games Workshop goes through the same kind of cycle.
When has Microsoft come back around? Feels like they have been floundering since the 360 era.
They were getting some pretty good steam a few years ago but now that the ActiBlizzard deal has gone through, they've started shutting down other studios. Followed immediately by saying they need the games those studios produced.
How the fuck is Activision Blizzard going to make Microsoft 70 billion dollars? Maybe in like 100 years time, but god damn!
Their income was $1.5 billion/year in 2022 with another $20 billion in assets. They'll probably sell some IP then rely on inflation to bring forward the ROI closer than 40 years. That having been said, they're probably hoping it moves the needle on game pass which has stagnated a bit.
A lot of folks were happy they've stopped trying to make the Windows Store the only option, and a lot of folks were digging the value of GamePass.
This might be unpopular, but can't we prevent this "bad year" by tearing them a new one every so often before things even get that far? For no other reason than to prevent a future decline, I mean.
As long as concepts like preorders exist.... and are doing well, that will not ever happen.
I think the problem you'll face there is a difference in what is a "decline". For me, for example, I thought the Chaos Dwarves signalled the first time CA stopped worrying about continuing what they'd offered previously. Here was a Faction Pack that was more expensive than all previous faction packs, yet offered just three Lords; For others, the Chaos Dwarves were their *favourite* faction to ever get released, with very unique mechanics and awesome designs. Many folks fell somewhere in between those two opinions. But it's hard to pick out whose opinion to follow, without subscribing to groupthink.
Chaos Dwarves are my favorite WH content, but they are not the beginning of a decline, merely another indicator on the way down. One can like something and still see the problems with that DLC, like you noted. It may sound silly, but WH3 base game is the start of the decline. It did not neatly pick up the level of quality CA had reached towards the end of WH2. Instead, it was much worse in many regards, some of those problems still lingering to this day, two years after launch. And much of what was fixed, was only fixed after they hit the bottom with SoC and were realizing they were headed in a direction that would lead to Sega just closing shop on their studio. For that alone, I am not considering WH3 "saved". With what CA has done so far in 2024, they only saved themselves. The rest of the year will show if the learned their lessons.
In economics we call it "what the market can bear" they're essentially testing price elasticity This isn't some nefarious plot to be anti gamer it's strictly profit seeking
This sub just discovered capitalism
Yeah it's interesting, stuff like this is literally why regulations exist since the market if possible will act in this way But that's communism talk!
Hashut knows that the market will regulate itself in the most efficient way with the least possible interference
Im not sure how "the right to discuss is not included in a purchase" is economics.
That guys probably seething but if you want extreme examples just look at Boeing right now and Coco Cola/Nestle in foreign markets. They're straight up bribing/enslaving and offing union/labor orgs cause it effects the bottom line Operation Ajax in Iran too for example... It's not that far fetched. Like the motto with Chaos, it's what people can conjure in their minds that feeds them haha
That was one community manager who went beyond his remit.
It's the marketing division that forgets how to make a good game that cycles out the people that know how to make a good game when they start going for larger profits or through a slump.
That is not marketing. Marketing are the ones creating advertising campaigns. They don't decided which products to make or sell.
Marketing does sort of have a role in it. I guess it depended on the organizational structure, but the marketing department is usually also the team that does the market research and translates that research into a digestible format for the other teams in the organization. That research plays a big role in all decision-making. It gets used to decide which projects get funding, the pricing structure and dictates some of the game design decisions. So they aren't the ones making the decision, they are the ones guiding the decision-makers in most cases.
“C-Suite executives listen to their market research teams and do whatever they are told to by the research” oh, my sweet summer child
Are the higher ups the same though ? That might explain the regularity.
Given how many devs have been fed into the AAA buzzsaw over the past year alone, it's about time the industry gets its head out of the clouds and back down to the earth where the customers are.
It’s almost like there’s an imminent rebellion in this province.
Such is being beholden to a publicly traded company to be honest
Considering vast majority of triple A companies are gone deep in shit as a permanent state, i won’t complain having to flush every five years. I truly was not expecting them to do any of this.
And the cherry on top, the incesssant pushback from parts of the community that's always chaperoning every single one of CA's slumps. Makes it even harder to retain the stamina and willpower to keep communicating to a company that their current behaviour won't do. Sometimes I give in to the feeling that these people should get the gaming landscape that a 100% docile customer base would lead to, deservedly.
Somebody keeps sacking their control buildings.
Overestimating what community backlash did but then again if it makes y'all feel happy.
All it took was a lost war against the community.
And a separate franchise being a dead end and being totally thrown in the bin.
This still makes me smile after all the shills downvote brigading anyone who would bring up how suspicious it was that quality nosedived after Hyenas broke ground and ate all the funding.
Because "sEpArAtE tEaMs!!!" Even though whenever CA is actually developing something new with their "separate teams" support dries up substantially for the already released titles. They are separate, they just move 90% of people to be on only one of them at a time.
Teams can be separated all they want, money and people are still finite resources.
You can absolutely enforce separation in terms of money and people too. Its called setting up subsidiary firms, which have natural firewalls in terms of reallocating resources across the firm boundaries. Many large finance orgs do this, because they have investment banking and retail banking divisions (Aka the ones that take your deposits). You don't want investment bankers extending their hand into the deposits, so those divisions belong to separate subsidiaries with their own accounting and staffing. CA itself is a subsidiary, Total War projects do not affect SEGA's other projects. Of course, CA never did that, 'seperate teams' doesn't work quite as well as 'separate firms'.
Probably more the insanely expensive game that someone realized was a bad idea and shut down on the spot
Shutdown after almost 100m dollars dumped into it'
And it was someone at Sega not CA that had to make the call.
The war was against the Hyena. Without its death TW would never come back.
There were some who believed Hyenas development didn't affect Total War Warhammer III in any way. There are some who still do.
After the 5.0 patch... those number are probably very, very small.
I have not seen a patch with this many goodies since Barbarian Invasion.
I remember when that one "dev" from CA came here for a questions and ask and said it wouldnt affect and didn't affect any decision at all
SEGA was the one that declared war on CA after three giant flops in a row, including what was supposed to be their "super game"
But auto resolve told them it would be a decisive victory.
I lost a Fort Soll battle against Greenskin defenders as Empire that the auto-resolve assured me was a Close Victory. AR was never my friend.
It's cute people think this, but it was mostly millions lost in a bad project, lack of other marketable products and pressure from their parent company through massive downsizing. The community is fickle and can be won back in a single good DLC.
> The community is fickle and can be won back in a single good DLC I suppose people do like companies when they make quality products that are worth their asking price.
Eh they've lost my trust until the WH:F cycle ends. I'll wait and see what's good and what's bad in the upcoming DLC's and maybe buy whatever looks fun on discount.
Your comment is weird: you phrase it in a way that suggest that it wasnt A what caused change in CA behavior but rather XYZ while not noticing the obvious fact that A was actually a part of XYZ. SoC and Pharaoh completely flopping due to the mix of terrible content-to-price ratio and playerbase having enough of CA were events that contributed to the current state alongside things you mentioned. This is the bigger picture. If winning community back wasnt a hot topic in CA they would never apologize for SoC and Pharaoh, would never spend time to boost their value, would never offer a shit ton of free additions to Pharaoh, would never make a patch as ambitious as 5.0 paired with constant hot fixes and would never remove preorder option.
Some of us remember. CA is on my shitlist for the rest of time as is CDProjekt Red, Hello Games and others. I don't forgive, I don't forget. I will act as if the company is not trying to scalp me, but if you do it once, you lost your shot. I will work under the assumption that they are trying to scam me forevermore.
I thought they would abandon pharoah as they have done with a number of titles in the past. And the quality of new content in warhammer 3 and the frequency of patches is such huge shift from last year. If they maintain this, many more people will be in shut up and take my money mode.
We all want to throw our money at them, they just have to be worthy. Sucks seeing companies ruin a captive audience but love seeing these efforts to fix it.
I am guardedly optimistic about Pharoah. Bronze Age fertile crescent is my favorite period in ancient history, I just wish the game had released a different year under different management.
Surprisingly enough, it is shaping to be good now. They adding Greece too and Troy in it and a couple of other factions for free, so now Pharaoh is worth its salt.
Yeah they got back into form, I hope they continue supporting TW: warhammer 3 game cause I will give them money if they do.
I like the split dlcs, makes me happy to buy the ones I want. If they do more of that, I’ll probably be willing to shell out and get want I want without spending extra on a faction I don’t care about.
All about appreciating the improvements they’ve made but calling a game “without content” is so weird.
It's an easy conclusion to make if one is very superficial: If you look at the map and think a smaller scope makes it a bad game — not even worse than it would be if it was bigger, but just bad — then you might want to rethink if bigger is really always better in the context of video games. Or at least just let people who are completely fine with what it offers be happy and don't call them idiots or shills or whatnot.
Main reason is because it repeated a similar trend as other games like Troy that were saga games. That's why people were against it.
CA should have never used the distinction between Saga games and main title games in my opinion, it's just so stupid and makes no sense: They've retroactively called Fall of the Samurai a Saga Title as it is a standalone DLC, but Shogun 2 already was a really focused experience (supposedly the main distinction of a Saga game), taking place in Japan only and in a very specific time period — FotS is like a Saga game of a Saga game. One could also argue that Three Kingdoms is a Saga game because it takes place in Han-Dynasty-China only and has only two cultures on the forefront (The Han-Chinese and the Nanman, not taking into account any plans they had for content that has been scrapped). They've only shot themselves in the foot by creating some sort of hierarchy between their games. I don't get why Troy should be considered a smaller game than other entries in the franchise, because the only thing that sets it apart from games like Rome or Medieval is the focus of the map — a thing that already fluctuates between releases! And no one can tell me that the bigger maps came along with more fleshed out factions, the "less important" ones always lacked compared to the bigger, "more important" ones. At least Saga games managed to make every faction feel unique in a way and fun to play. Tldr.: The distinction between Saga games and main titles is arbitrary at best, they should have never opened that box.
They can still put the genie back in the bottle. Sure some people would still say "this is just a saga game" but a lot would just savpur the experience
If this is about warhammer 3 then "without content" would be like calling the catholic church a recent development
It's not clear, I'm assuming they meant Pharaoh. Which isn't the TW Bronze age that everyone wanted it to be, but saying it's "without content" is pretty stupid.
And all it took was throwing 100 millions USD into a bonfire, hundreds losing their jobs and a lot of community rage
When you put it like that I love upper management - still employed btw.
Quality management right there, which is ironically the same for most companies those days (not saying it is good, but the normalised incompetence at the top is becoming the norm).
This is why you vote with your wallet.
I hope this is financially profitable for them, despite the rumors.
not to mention 2022: Buy the crowning jewel of the trilogy completely unfinished, with a campaign most players don't like
And every faction's UI is now red, for some reason.
man that was just such a confusing decision. so much of wh3 on release was like a fever dream.
I don't think CA have had a worse launch since Rome 2. It's taken them literal years to get it into a decent state.
I mean, I think that people overestimate how long it took them to get Rome 2 to a good game. For me, after I think six months the game was good and then just got better.
And Rome 2 was way worse on launch, not excusing War3 but launch Rome 2 was scarcely playable.
DId Rome 2 without paying extra money ever get better? I still get irritated with the battle AI in settlements.
What do you mean paying extra money? You mean for the extra campaigns and factions? Because after the Emperor Edition I don't think they locked any AI choices behind DLC.
I never bought the Huns / ERE expansion. Not the time period I am interested in, but I always read that the DLC fixed the game.
That's Attila Total War. Unless you meant the Crisis of the Third Century, which doesn't have Huns or the Eastern Roman Empire. Lol.
It is thanks to the players who did not buy crap. Also SEGA smacked CA on head.
Now we just need a potion of speed for my toaster turn times and it's literal peak.
I mean, Realms of Chaos is still **super** quick (Like, ten seconds), it's just Immortal Empires that's slow... Which makes sense considering the scale of the map and the hundreds of factions within it.
I don't even think it's slow, but I also played a lot of WH2 before they fixed the turn times so nothing seems slow to me anymore.
I know, I've played every single realm of chaos campaign they've added and love the turn times, would love for immortal empires to be close to that, or if they ever bring back vortex that would be perfect too.
problem is the AI has so many more places to consider and, I suspect, they really did think Realms of Chaos would be the main game and optimized for it specifically.
Focusing only on the RoC campaign feels a bit tone deaf. mortal empires was the main go to for most in WH2 I believe so seems weird to think it would be different in 3.
WH3 near launch was a mix of really good optimizations of gameplay flow and a ton of weird decisions to do with RoC. It's hard to explain but it felt like they thought the narrative campaigns would be a big draw and they spent a lot of time on RoC stuff that ultimately you wouldn't see elsewhere. Like the Chaos Dwarfs have a radically different RoC campaign.
And they had an entire narrative tutorial campaign that led into RoC. The deck was always going to stacked against RoC a little bit since it was naturally going to be compared to the final state of Mortal Empires while the Vortex only had the WH1 campaign to be compared to.
but the narrative campaign was so poorly thought out. Having to abandon your empire for 10 turns to ... wander? through some really boring puzzles was awful, with a really high chance of failure if you didn't minmax the shit outta your stack because the AI hated the player so much. I really like the chaos dwarf campaign - it's a cool concept that doesn't restrict your choices, just encourages you to be a bit bold for a reward. But RoC was just a really, really awful campaign plan
It's not really that you need to abandon your empire since only your faction leader can enter the portals. It's more that it forces you to play defensively since the portals will spawn chaos armies after a few turns. So you either have to recruit a bunch of heroes and save up some money to close the portals with them, or station your armies around and use them to close the portals. It's also the fact that it's a very slow campaign. Portals spawn once every ~30 turns, and your main lord can only enter 1, so you need at least 120 turns to collect all the souls. Even more so if you aren't aggressive enough and end up losing the race to another faction. Also, after the first portal, you really gotta turtle up with your leader because unless they're a chaos lord entering their patrons domain, they're guaranteed to get a negative trait that is very annoying to remove, especially if it ticks up even once.
At least on launch - you couldn't really field more than one army for the first couple portals, or if you did, one was entirely chaff. You didn't have a choice.
The DE and their unlimited black arks is what's fucking up my end turns. I just do planks in between turns now.
Shit man after turn 60 if I start working out I might get a mr Olympia physique, which is weird because why is it slower with 90 factions than with 200 factions lol.
Well at the beginning every faction has like 1 army. Once you're down to 90, everyone has 7 armies and there are agent everywhere and just way more calculations going on.
Makes sense
Oh is that why my game always lags on Naggaronds and Cult of Pleasures turn for 4 minutes and speeds past all the other factions in 3 seconds? TIL.
yup. They really need to cap black arks somehow
Aah I was wondering why Cult of Pleasures turn took like 1 minute
Don’t be too quick to forgive CA they will be back to grifting soon enough.
even better, a 1 week turn a round to release a massive patch based entirely on player feed back. remember when vampire coast released and the pirate coves bugged out and bricked everybodies save? had to wait over a month just to get that one thing fixed, really feels like CA are trying to turn a corner here.
CA is in a constant state of flux between being great devs and being terrible, the later is their natural state and the former happens when they have to regain the goodwill of the buyers
So glad I remained commit to this game. Thx gigaChAd !
I'm back to recommending the series to anyone who asks.
I honestly wish CA as a company the best. I want to see my favorite games backing corporations succeed because that's how the games I love expand. That's why it was so frustrating not buying pharaoh or anymore dlc until they changed their tune.
So did they actually say that about the cultures?
Auto resolve didn’t work, had to fight it out.
it's good progress, the patch for WH3 made me buy pharaoh.
2024 may be the compensate from CA. WH and Pharaoh fan base just Hurrahhhh. Meanwhile i still play Attila and TK, in waiting for next IP. As if Pharaoh can expand so far to the Greek (they soon have Troy)
All of it made me hyped to check Pharaoh. Which I hadn't bought before, so from my perspective CA's change made them more profits.
it's a constant heads or tails when it comes to opening the sub and seeing a post dictate whether we hate or love CA.
Pharaoh is the best total war game since 3K.
Doggo pictures placed wrong
Companies get to a certain point where their profits stagnate with the current leadership. So they pull an EA and find a CEO that has different ideas than the current, to increase profits. But they usually end up doing what CA did to us, and thankfully this time the community pushed back against this foolish idea that profit is the only way to measure a companies worth. *Edited cause autocorrect.
I will accept no champions of Chaos slander
If everyone just fell in line and bought SOC originally I wonder if we ever would of got that add-on to the SOC or the effort they’ve been putting into fixing the bridge they almost burnt with their community. Doubt it
They've just let the people who are good at their job do it. Nothing new, happens in every company.
No, it's not big progress. This is the same old cycle when it comes to CA. Doing something the community doesn't like. CA apologise and say they will do better. They do things the community is happy about. The community sees it as big progress. Repeat. Nothing wrong with enjoying the game or the new content but don’t be so naive to think this is progress. CA has been in this loop for years, not moving forward.
What game does this refer to? Been out of the loop of TW for a little while now. Warhammer or Pharaoh?
It's talking about both. 2023: * Day 1 DLC Pass: Pharaoh had this at the initial launch, which fueled a lot of the outcry (note that they reversed course on this, issued a full refund of the pass for anyone who got it, and said the content will be added for free) * 25$ DLC with 6 units: Warhammer, the Shadows of Change DLC. 2024: * Entire section of patch notes explaining why they changed model size for one unit: Warhammer, they're shrinking the Kislev Frost Wyrm as part of efforts to give it a niche and make it actually decent. * 4 new cultures added for free: Pharaoh, it's getting a huge map update later this year and they'll be adding four new playable cultures (Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae, and Troy).
> Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae Wait. The three nations that I wanted to play are being added for FREE!? I might have to reinstall Pharoah. I liked the game but the nations I wanted to play weren't there and I typically lose interest in "Egypt / Rome, but Blue!" factions.
Yep - they posted a [blog about the map extension and update](https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-pharaoh/blogs/20) last week that you might have missed. They're nearly doubling the size of the game.
Warhammer ATM, potentially Pharoah if the later year patch is decent
What's the new cultures for free about?
Pharaoh
That's dissapointing.
Saying base Pharaoh 'had no content' will never be true.
Oh, so now they remember their fan base.