Creative Assembly apologise for "mistakes" with Total Warhammer 3 and Pharaoh, offering part-refunds and free DLC

15.12.2023 - 12:15 / rockpapershotgun.com

I haven’t been keeping up with player reaction to the latest Twar and Twarhammer games, but it seems players are none too pleased with Creative Assembly right now. In a rather dramatic open letter, the company's vice president Roger Collum has acknowledged that Total War: Warhammer 3’s Shadows of Change add-on and the recent historical strategy outing Total War: Pharaoh did not ship in a desirable state, with complaints ranging from wobbly execution to overpricing. The studio will try to make things right by offering partial refunds to Pharaoh owners and giving away DLC on top of the usual updates.

“It has been a difficult few months, and we recognize that we have made mistakes when it comes to our relationship with you all,” Collum wrote in the letter. “It’s been a constant conversation internally on how we can get back to solid ground. What’s clear is that it won’t be easy and that it will take time and effort.

“We see the confusion, the frustration, and the distrust of us across the community and honestly, it breaks our hearts. We make games to bring you joy, to inspire a love of history, of fantasy, and strategy games. Total War is our everything, we care about it as deeply as you. Recently, it’s clear that we have failed to demonstrate that in our actions.”

Collum unveiled a range of corrective measures, which will spill over into the next year. First of all, the developers are working on “a major update” for the Shadows of Change DLC that will hopefully release in February 2024. “That launch date is our ambition, but this isn’t concrete,” Collum hedged. “It may move, and as soon as those plans are finalised, we’ll let you know and we’ll keep you in the know as we get closer to its release.” We’ll hear more from game director Richard Aldridge next year.

The Total War: Warhammer 3 team will also delay the release of the next expansion Thrones of Decay to April 2024, “to make sure that we don’t repeat our past mistakes, and to give you the amount of content that you rightly expect from us at these price points.” Creative Assembly are promising to let “you know exactly what’s coming in Thrones of Decay before pre-orders are available, and make sure that you have full transparency around the content before you see ‘Buy Now’ buttons.”

All that’s in addition to smaller hotfixes and additions, of which there have been ten since the game’s 4.0 update. “It’s an increase in the number of game updates that we’d usually release, and we want to keep this cadence of releases going forward,” Collum noted, though he cautioned that the developers can’t commit to a certain number per month.

Thus the situation with Twarhammer 3. As for Pharaoh - which Nic Reuben summarised as "a towering monument to a