Most people were too busy laughing at HYENAS they probably forgotten that Creative Assembly were even releasing another Total War game.
It has gone from bad to worse for Creative Assembly after a hilarious spectacle that has unfolded over the past few weeks, what with their woke space heist shooter, HYENAS being canceled mere months before release, which apparently was SEGA’s largest budget title ever.
I made the quip that Creative Assembly would be losing SEGA even more money with the release of Total War: Pharaoh, but even I couldn’t have foreseen the game being such a catastrophic flop.
Aside from the obvious, as to how Creative Assembly are seemingly disassociating themselves from reality (and history) by wrongfully portraying ancient Egyptians as being dark skinned, the game itself launched on October 11th to an unceremonious whisper and quite literally the worst game in the franchises entire history.
Total War: Pharaoh is yet another story of greedy developers underperforming, underdelivering, failing to meet consumer expectations and selling them unfinished or half baked products for large amounts of money.
But before that a little context, the Total War series of games is as you’d probably guess is a Total War (Simulator), featuring both turn based and real-time strategic battles, the franchise consists of many different titles that have their own unique setting in terms of which time period they take place in as well as additional or revised gameplay mechanics.
But we can break the Total War franchise into three different types of games, those being Warhammer which are entirely fantasy based with its own set of rich and enticing lore.
Then you obviously have the realism junkies, various Total War games have been made that depict real life battle simulations, games that take place within the Roman Republic era, the Three Kingdoms era, the Bronze age, and even as recent as the 18th century with Empire: Total War.
Then you have the “Saga” games, nobody really likes these, Total War Saga titles are merely glorified DLC expansions sold as a standalone game, if you think people are generally outraged about that you wouldn’t even know the half of it, especially when Total War Saga: Troy was made free on the Epic Game Store (because it was a receptive failure), before being repackaged and sold as Mythos.
Back to Pharaoh, it launched almost a week ago to yawns all around, with the game peaking with little over 5,400 concurrent players on launch day however that number quickly fell to around 3,400 as your maximum daily average.
In comparison, Total War: Pharaoh falls short of daily player peaks found from earlier releases….. much earlier releases, with 2006’s Total War: Medieval 2 garnering daily peaks of 4,500 on the worst of days.
2013’s Total War Rome 2 manages to achieve nearly double the concurrent player counts of Pharoah.
And over 8,600 players are playing Total War Three Kingdoms on any given day.
So the realism junkies don’t want Pharaoh, what about if we were to compare it with the fantasy buffs? Total War Warhammer 3 has made quite a lot of people rightfully pissed off just recently actually, with Creative Assembly trying to peddle overpriced DLC expansions with far less content than the norm for their beloved war simulation series.
In terms of concurrent players though? Warhammer 3 smashes Pharaoh, with the game regularly netting in well over five times the number of players at any given point in time 24/7.
And don’t even get me fucking started on all time peaks either.
But why aren’t players happy with Pharaoh? Surely it has to extend far beyond bastardizing ancient history in the vain of blackwashing.
The game just fucking sucks.
Shocking I know, well respecting fans of the series have seemingly been spat in their faces by Creative Assembly who are trying to pawn off a half baked DLC expansion pack as a respective $60 installment with its own outlandishly priced DLC components later onwards.
In the modern era of video games with more consumers than ever before entering the space and essentially forking over their worthless cash to buy just about anything, for a supposedly full fledged Total War game to muster mere thousands of copies sold in just the first week is beyond catastrophic, people don’t even care enough to actually leave criticism or feedback on Steam reviews with there being less than a thousand reviews posted to date, with the game getting a “MIXED” 60% rating.
Many critics of the game have highlighted the similarities between Total War: Pharaoh and Total War: Troy. The new mechanics introduced in Pharaoh lack creativity, with the new sandstorm weather effect simply resulting in a stamina penalty. Additionally, the game’s AI has been criticized for being more artificial rather than showcasing any form of intelligence.
Creative Assembly continues to alienate its customer base through repetitive installments to the Total War franchise that are seemingly inferior and more creatively bankrupt each and every time, with large potions of Pharaoh’s map seemingly being empty, obviously to service as additional DLC expansions later onwards, consumers are constantly being fed lower quantities of garbage as Creative Assembly and SEGA expect more money and gratitude in return.
Creative Assembly are on the brink of collapse most likely, with HYENAS canceled and Total War: Pharaoh being yet another receptive and financial failure, the last thing they really aught to be doing right about now would be to force feed Warhammer 3 players with outlandish DLC packages that provide very little content for a high price.
Total War: Pharaoh essentially boils down to more bronze age Total War, and yet you could hardly call it nuanced as the entire game, its setting, its features and even its battle depictions is just uncreative, boring and lazy.
You are being sold what’s basically a continuation of Troy, a Saga title which services as a beta testing playground for new features and yet Total War: Pharaoh still feels half arsed and hardly worth $60 and thankfully consumers aren’t buying into this garbage by the dozen as consumers more often tend to do for games that aught to be left abandoned and their developers being closed down entirely, like Payday 3 for example.
