By Joshua Waddles
20 Aug. 2023
Since its release in February of 2022, “Total War: Warhammer III” has received a mixed reception to say the least. The launch of the game resulted in a borderline disaster for Creative Assembly with mountains of bugs and crashes, not to mention price issues which made the game very much inaccessible for new players. In order to play the full game, players (originally) had to buy “Warhammer” I and II. But the generic “Realms of Chaos” campaign was so awful, Creative Assembly had to release the full “Immortal Empires” map to all players for free just to retain their players.
Conflicts between the community, content creators and CA continued, but the game steadily increased in quality. While many, many, many glaring issues remained and still remain in the game, Warhammer III improved enough to bring back its player base and Steam reviews changed from Mixed to Mostly Positive.
Then came the “Shadows of Change” DLC. Influencers and fans felt mostly positive about the upcoming DLC, until CA announced the price of said DLC. This decision did to “Warhammer III’s” reviews what the Greenskins do to one of your building slots whenever they sack one of your cities.
At $25 USD, “Shadows of Change” costs the same as the “Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs” DLC, which was released in April. The Chorfs DLC didn’t generate nearly as much of a backlash, but the difference was that the Chorfs DLC was an entire race-pack with tons of content. While some of the units were reskinned and most of the mechanics were recycled, developers clearly put a ton of effort into this DLC.
“Shadows of Change,” on the other hand, is a lord pack. It unlocks three factions, rather than the typical two. These DLCs, with their two factions, used to cost $10 USD. So the cost of the “Shadows of Change” DLC has gone up 150 percent over the addition of just one extra faction. In addition, only one faction gets a new generic lord unit (not including the legendary lord) and this faction (The Jade Court) does not get a new generic hero.
Following the backlash, Chief Product Officer Rob Bartholomew released a statement about the price increase. In this statement, Bartholomew partially blamed inflation and partially blamed the increased production costs. He said it’s up to each individual to decide whether the price is worth it for them, but he added:
“Of course, we want more people to play, we want to continue to deliver content you’re excited to see, and we want to do that for as long as we can.”
This statement did not go over well with the Total War community. Many Reddit users and content creators felt that the quoted statement was a veiled threat to stop support on the game, just as CA had done with “Total War: Three Kingdoms” in 2021.
The community’s reaction was swift and hilarious.
Content creators couldn’t wait to shoot down Creative Assembly’s explanation on “increased costs.” Legend of Total War told his viewers about Creative Assembly’s expansion attempts. The company is expanding and opening another office in England while focusing on their new game, Hyena. Legend and other creators accused CA of charging exorbitant prices to “Warhammer III” fans in order to support a business expansion, and a game, which has nothing to do with “Warhammer III.”
Creative Assembly still has its supporters. Other commenters felt that this statement was not meant as a threat and that the community was reading too much into it. Legend of Total War, in his video discussing the controversy, said that there is basically zero chance of Creative Assembly abandoning “Warhammer III” because “WarIII” is currently the only game in their franchise which makes money.
He added that the main reason CA dropped support for Three Kingdoms was because they had another cash cow in “Total War: Warhammer II” which was making much more money. He said as long as “Warhammer III” has no real competition, CA is not likely to drop support of the game. Neither “Total War: Pharaoh” nor “Hyenas” have been released yet. Legend said he does not expect “Pharaoh” to be the game that destroys Warhammer III when it does come out (early access players had very few positive things to say about the game). As for “Hyenas,” he said he had no idea how that game might go over. “Hyenas” is a multiplayer first person shooter, a very different game for the company which carved out its niche market in grand strategy.
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