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Moreover, the other factions from TWW1 and TWW2 have all had, with the exception of Norsca, additions to their rosters since they were first introduced, some multiple times over.

All of the TWW1 factions have received additions except for Norsca. But I don't think any of the TWW2 DLC factions have received any. It's only been the core factions in TWW2. Of course, all of the DLC factions in the second game got four LLs, which left me rather surprised that none of the factions in the third game have started out with four so far.

Changeling campaign is pretty fun. Plays really different than anything else.

His dialogue is hilariously twisted/psychotic.

Mother Stank would be better served closer to Kislev. Not a fan of her starting near Morathi.

Haven’t touched Jade Dragon yet.

The dragon that Creative Assembly have been stupidly chasing (ie. wasting millions on) is finally dead.

That's right, CA's idiotic attempt to get into the hero shooter market is cancelled.

Sega wrote:SEGA SAMMY HOLDINGS INC. (the Company) hereby notifies that it has resolved to implement structural reforms in the Consumer area, mainly at its European bases at the Board of Directors meeting held on September 28, 2023 and in accordance with this decision, the Company expects to record a loss for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.

...

1) Cancelation of titles under development
In response to the lower profitability of the European region, we have reviewed the title portfolio of each development base in Europe and the resulting action will be to cancel "HYENAS" and some unannounced titles under development. Accordingly, we will implement a write-down of work-in-progress for titles under development.

Good or bad, this will be interesting for TWW going forward.

Also impending layoffs according to some insiders. Either Sega is going to refocus CA on Total War products and this will be a good thing, or they're going to end up shitcanning any further TWW3 expansions, etc. and focus on new TW titles (as expansions and DLC generally have a low ROI and are often not profitable).

TWW has been a huge money spinner for CA. Abandoning it would be very stupid.

Not only that but the 2nd game is still one of their biggest concurrent player numbers to date. Even if games like 3 Kingdoms outsold on launch, the Warhammer games have proven to have such a huge amount of long lasting power and that's a huge thing in the video game market. Esp if you consider expansions and post game support potential for more profit.

Honestly its such a huge money spinner I'd be shocked if they don't want to do Age of Sigmar with GW at some stage in the future. It would make a huge amount of sense.


I think the hope is that they realise that the review bomb along with issues with quality control in Warhammer 3 are a symptom of them trying to push into too many markets and markets they aren't used too; causing them to lose resources in their core product area. Hopefully they refocus and restructure and come out the stronger in their core market area. I'd hate to see the whole TW system suffer and even more the Warhammer side.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
TWW has been a huge money spinner for CA. Abandoning it would be very stupid.

But not out of the question. Their last public statement about SoC included a veiled threat of 'buy it or we stop supporting this game'

From what CA people had said, the bug fixing 'team' for TW3 was, for an extended period... a single person.
Not exactly a whelming commitment to the franchise.

Well , ca just curbed hyenas. The attempt to get esg money.

But i member how they dropped etw...

Voss wrote:
But not out of the question. Their last public statement about SoC included a veiled threat of 'buy it or we stop supporting this game'

A statement that was equally as stupid as chasing the hero/looter-shooter dragon.

Voss wrote:
From what CA people had said, the bug fixing 'team' for TW3 was, for an extended period... a single person.
Not exactly a whelming commitment to the franchise.

Yes, because they were throwing all their resources at a game so destined to fail, it was killed by the publisher before it could be born.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
But not out of the question. Their last public statement about SoC included a veiled threat of 'buy it or we stop supporting this game'

A statement that was equally as stupid as chasing the hero/looter-shooter dragon.

Voss wrote:
From what CA people had said, the bug fixing 'team' for TW3 was, for an extended period... a single person.
Not exactly a whelming commitment to the franchise.

Yes, because they were throwing all their resources at a game so destined to fail, it was killed by the publisher before it could be born.

Not sure what your point is here. They DID both things- its reflective of their plans and their management team.

That Sega felt forced to step in and strangle Hyenas doesn't mean that all is magically well. 'Hyenas and some unannounced titles' could very well include TW3 DLC after thrones of decay (or after the unnamed patch 6 DLC).

I doubt 'titles' would be DLC.

 Overread wrote:
Not only that but the 2nd game is still one of their biggest concurrent player numbers to date. Even if games like 3 Kingdoms outsold on launch, the Warhammer games have proven to have such a huge amount of long lasting power and that's a huge thing in the video game market. Esp if you consider expansions and post game support potential for more profit.

Honestly its such a huge money spinner I'd be shocked if they don't want to do Age of Sigmar with GW at some stage in the future. It would make a huge amount of sense.


I think the hope is that they realise that the review bomb along with issues with quality control in Warhammer 3 are a symptom of them trying to push into too many markets and markets they aren't used too; causing them to lose resources in their core product area. Hopefully they refocus and restructure and come out the stronger in their core market area. I'd hate to see the whole TW system suffer and even more the Warhammer side.

Lots of people playing a game that released 5 years ago or whatever doesn't make CA/Sega any money today.

The expansions also don't generate a lot of revenue/sales. It is known and has been known for a long time. The percentage of people who purchase DLC is always a fraction of the people who purchase the base game.

Total War Age of Sigmar won't happen, at least anytime soon. Frontier Developments has exclusive rights to AAA Age of Sigmar strategy games on PC for the next ~10 years.

Do we know that Frontier Developments has exclusive rights? If memory serves GW has never signed exclusive rights like that in recent times. Granted they aren't a tiny developer (though they aren't one I'd consider a forefront of RTS design); so they could have paid a fortune for that.

Same time it would seem short sighted of GW unless they know that CA were going to be at least 10 years away from developing/starting another big GW project or one that would require access to a new fantasy IP.



As for lots of people playing an old game not making any money that might be true. However it does show that that game is popular and if you can recapture that format and formula then you've got a winner. Paradox seems to make a good enough profit for expansions to run several games for years on expansions alone before reaching for sequels.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I doubt 'titles' would be DLC.

Agreed. My speculation would be cancelling more planned Bronze Age titles (the reception for the upcoming Pharaoh has been *very* underwhelming), and /or the T3K title that CA said they would be working on when they cancelled all development on the one that they had already released.

Or Empire II and Medieval III, of course.

I'm still somewhat baffled that the CA team won't make a Medieval 3 considering that every single time they make a new game one of the biggest complaints is that its not Medieval 3.

It just seems like silly easy money/marketing for them to go for that title. Esp as it requires the exact same amount of work as any other historical period main project game that they already make.

 Overread wrote:
I'm still somewhat baffled that the CA team won't make a Medieval 3 considering that every single time they make a new game one of the biggest complaints is that its not Medieval 3.

It just seems like silly easy money/marketing for them to go for that title. Esp as it requires the exact same amount of work as any other historical period main project game that they already make.

They may well retreat to Medieval now. They've announced heavy 'consolidation' and 'redundancy consultation' in their UK offices.

https://www.pcgamer.com/sega-has-scrapped-hyenas-a-mere-2-weeks-after-its-open-beta/ (they updated the hyena story)

 Overread wrote:
Do we know that Frontier Developments has exclusive rights? If memory serves GW has never signed exclusive rights like that in recent times. Granted they aren't a tiny developer (though they aren't one I'd consider a forefront of RTS design); so they could have paid a fortune for that.

Same time it would seem short sighted of GW unless they know that CA were going to be at least 10 years away from developing/starting another big GW project or one that would require access to a new fantasy IP.



As for lots of people playing an old game not making any money that might be true. However it does show that that game is popular and if you can recapture that format and formula then you've got a winner. Paradox seems to make a good enough profit for expansions to run several games for years on expansions alone before reaching for sequels.

The original press release indicated they had exclusive rights, yeah. Likewise Creative Assembly had 10 year exclusivity for AAA WHFB RTS titles on PC and console.

Paradoxes expansions are generally more cost efficient and not a good basis for comparison. Paradoxes games are not graphics intensive and are more often than not relatively straightforward modifications to code and database additions (given that the games are predominantly text based). A very small team can crank them out in a relatively short timeframe (which is why there are so many of them) and quickly recover the cost of development. Total War DLCs often require additional modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, on top of UI and UX development and modification, sometimes fairly significant code structure changes, on top of all the writing and coding involved. They require larger teams and take longer to develop, and consequently cost more to produce and need to sell more to make it worthwhile.

Now this is interesting...

And take it with a MASSIVE pile of salt...

Rumor-monger Valrak posted a video today in which he stated that he has heard rumors of a 40K game by Creative Assembly. Note that he was NOT wearing his foil hat when he said this (the foil hat is for the "THIS IS DEFINITELY COMING!" announcements he makes, such as when he predicted the Epic preview, and that the game would be released by the end of the year), and he repeatedly made comments suggesting that viewers should be very cautious in accepting this rumor.

He tied the very little info that he's heard about the game to rumors that he heard a week ago that CA was about to announce some very bad news - which it did today, of course. And that's why he felt confident enough to post a video about it. Unfortunately -

1.) He's not familiar with Total War: Warhammer, or Fantasy in general, so he's not really familiar with how those games play.
2.) The only detail that he really had about the possible game is that it's definitely 40K, and not HH.
3.) Again, he repeatedly stressed that viewers should be very cautious about this particular rumor, and as I mentioned above he was not wearing his foil hat.



My own personal comment -

Even if Valrak is accurate here (and I've noted his own comments about the strength of this rumor above), it's entirely possible that the game was one of the titles that is being cancelled. I would think that a 40K game would be one that they'd be more inclined to release due to the success of TW:WH. But if the gameplay (which Valrak stressed multiple times he knows nothing about) were to diverge too much from the standard Total War formula, Sega might shoot it down as too risky.


Anyway, I thought I'd mention this particular item.


For those curious about Valrak's accuracy, I think there's actually a thread somewhere around here that tracks his success rate in making predictions (with and without the foil hat).

Thing is besides being somewhat more shooty, 40K would certainly work with TW style games. The only thing they might introduce would be the concept of trenching, which was also used in ancient warfare too.

I could certainly see them doing 40K and doing well at it with their engine. It would be a pretty big shift, but Fantasy was already a huge shift and it did amazingly well and they could certainly do a sci-fi game without issue after having seen what they can do in Warhammer

I think the team they had for TW2 could do it. I'm a lot more skeptical of the TW3 team.

The base game wasn't good, and the DLC teams aren't enough. And who knows how the 'redundancy consultation' will cull them more.

4.1 came out recently, with some changes to sieges.




Seems like weekly/bi-weekly patches/hotfixes recently as well.

I think after the review bombing and other issues earlier in the year, they are trying to really push attention on W3 and get the community back on board. Considering that W2 is still one of their biggest ever games in popularity it makes sense to try and carry that over into W3 now that they've hit a bit of a roadblock and lost a lot of money on an aborted FPS game.


It might also be that with the aborted game they've got developers freed up who can work on W3 much more so than in the past.

Got to say I like the idea of gate being tougher, they were feeling really quick to bash through (esp for any army that had monsters or big things to just throw at the gate so you didn't even have to wait a turn to get a ram)

it does nothing, because it doesn't solve the unterlying issues of TW.
It also still is no propper appology of CA for what they did on the steam forums.

Honestly from what I could see the steam forums were the result of a lack of management followed by a heavy handed missmanagement that resulted in an utter mess on both sides and now its just a hotbed of hostility.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly from what I could see the steam forums were the result of a lack of management followed by a heavy handed missmanagement that resulted in an utter mess on both sides and now its just a hotbed of hostility.

no. This was squarly CA once again.

No, it's not a privilege to air problems and discuss the leaks of your company. Not as a paying custommer.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Honestly from what I could see the steam forums were the result of a lack of management followed by a heavy handed missmanagement that resulted in an utter mess on both sides and now its just a hotbed of hostility.

no. This was squarly CA once again.

No, it's not a privilege to air problems and discuss the leaks of your company. Not as a paying custommer.

Naw I also saw a lot of mindless hostility and aggression thrown around. There is a line between airing criticisms and going hostile and the steam forums went hostile. I'm by no means saying that CA didn't do wrong things - as I said lack of management and then missmanagement of the situation fuelled the fire. Their approach was wrong, but that doesn't mean that there weren't also bad agents on the community side also fuelling the fire (some of which have been around for a long while fuelling the fire ever since CA did some things like putting women commanders into Rome 2 - or was it Atilla? And not releasing a Medieval 3 which seems to be a huge huge thing for some).

Again there were wrongs on both sides, but CA certainly dropped the ball in how to manage the situation.

 Overread wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Honestly from what I could see the steam forums were the result of a lack of management followed by a heavy handed missmanagement that resulted in an utter mess on both sides and now its just a hotbed of hostility.

no. This was squarly CA once again.

No, it's not a privilege to air problems and discuss the leaks of your company. Not as a paying custommer.

Naw I also saw a lot of mindless hostility and aggression thrown around. There is a line between airing criticisms and going hostile and the steam forums went hostile. I'm by no means saying that CA didn't do wrong things - as I said lack of management and then missmanagement of the situation fuelled the fire. Their approach was wrong, but that doesn't mean that there weren't also bad agents on the community side also fuelling the fire (some of which have been around for a long while fuelling the fire ever since CA did some things like putting women commanders into Rome 2 - or was it Atilla? And not releasing a Medieval 3 which seems to be a huge huge thing for some).

Again there were wrongs on both sides, but CA certainly dropped the ball in how to manage the situation.

the whole of RTW 2 was mismanaged tho. Attila got dropped at the first sign of a hat and one of the most outspoken critics got DMCA0d attempted, which youtube of all things nipped in the bud.
Sorry, at this stage CA has everything done to turn the community hostile and got the correct ammount of flak for it.

FWIW i also think any other company would've fired long since their non-pr team, and their middle and upper management which rather blew over 100 mio pounds in a extraction shooter,

Ahh I only really haunted the steam forums during the Warhammer games; mostly just bought into the other games but didn't really worry about the forum side of things.

I don't follow the forums, but it got to the point where it was spilling over on to YT where there's a few TW streamers that I'm subscribed to. Even some relatively pro-CA YTers were begging CA to stop making statements instead of digging themselves a bigger hole.

There was the stuff with Hyenas, TWW3 DLC prices going up, CA making a statement of "buy it or we'll stop supporting it", Pharaoh being a saga game but being priced as a full game. Then there was stuff coming out from people who claimed to work there ranging from bullying to poor management of assets and blaming employees for not being able to deal with it all the way to the claims of covering up SA. Then it sounded like they were laying off a bunch of people separate to the issues with Hyenas.

Then on top of that there was the stuff with the forums and Steam community pages, with many innocent and constructive posts deleted and absolutely tone deaf responses from CA. I think one said it was a privilege to be able to discuss the games at all. There was the DMCA take downs of videos on YT that were being critical of them. Maybe other things I've missed.

It definitely seemed like CA nuked themselves and it would have been obvious to Blind Freddy that those actions were going to get backlash from the community.

Overread wrote:Ahh I only really haunted the steam forums during the Warhammer games; mostly just bought into the other games but didn't really worry about the forum side of things.

The problem is, CA has a massive issue with it's community on a fundamental level. Well mostly the regard of their community. Because they have them hostage due to the monopolistic position in their niche with high initial investion protecting them from competition and a community they could for the longest time sell basically what older TW's once got as free mods.
They also manipulated and lowered the modding tool quality since ETW especially on the campaign map side of things to then sell DLC that was in quality lower than the average TW mod seen sofar. NVM clear P2W unit packs aswell.
To this day the memory leak issue plaguing the engine with the implementation of it since ETW hasn't been resolved either.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:I don't follow the forums, but it got to the point where it was spilling over on to YT where there's a few TW streamers that I'm subscribed to. Even some relatively pro-CA YTers were begging CA to stop making statements instead of digging themselves a bigger hole.

There was the stuff with Hyenas, TWW3 DLC prices going up, CA making a statement of "buy it or we'll stop supporting it", Pharaoh being a saga game but being priced as a full game. Then there was stuff coming out from people who claimed to work there ranging from bullying to poor management of assets and blaming employees for not being able to deal with it all the way to the claims of covering up SA. Then it sounded like they were laying off a bunch of people separate to the issues with Hyenas.

Then on top of that there was the stuff with the forums and Steam community pages, with many innocent and constructive posts deleted and absolutely tone deaf responses from CA. I think one said it was a privilege to be able to discuss the games at all. There was the DMCA take downs of videos on YT that were being critical of them. Maybe other things I've missed.

It definitely seemed like CA nuked themselves and it would have been obvious to Blind Freddy that those actions were going to get backlash from the community.

Another issue to swallow is, how many of those Youtubers have been bought out to shill for CA. They are part of the issue, because they couldn't realistically criticise the hand that feeds them, and perpetuated a cicle of stagnation. In general such sponsorships should not be allowed but sadly they are nowadays the norm for game reviewers and ytbers in specific niches. Hence why if you want actual quality reviews the ammount of companies blacklisting the reviewer is a mark of quality and the ammount of prerelease access a mark of a reviewers corruption.