Seems pretty good, full price is a tough ask for me personally though.
Yeah, it just doesn’t feel like a $60 game. That might not be fair of me, but it is what it is. Just doesn’t seem to have the content that similarly priced games (even TW games) have had.
The campaign seems good and significantly better than what they shipped with Warhammer 3, but having units that are all slight variations around 3 archetypes vs. the wildly varied factions of Warhammer does decrease the value proposition (even though I am glad they didn’t go into the fantastical). $40 and I might have jumped day 1.
Forty clams, solid maybe, yeah.
If you’re not familiar with the Bronze Age, I’ve written a Steam guide introducing the peoples, lands and key characters of the game, with some Ancient Egyptian vocabulary as a bonus:
Historical background of TW Pharaoh
Months of reading and note-taking condensed on a single page. Enjoy!
That’s very cool Scylla, thanks!
Fun write-up, I enjoyed reading that. As one Steam user said in a reply, it does make you miss the days of PC games arriving with those old thick manuals.
Nice! CA are also posting some history vids about the period. You love to see it.
Steam reviews are very mixed with alot of complaints about it being dull or something related. It’s a shame CA didn’t try something fundamentally different with the campaign or battles to compensate for the (necessary) lack of unit variation relative to all the fantastical titles they are putting out (troy, three kingdoms, of course warhammer).
I haven’t played it yet, but going by reviews and videos it seems to do exactly what it says on the tin: the same total war you’ve played for many years, but this time in egypt (with a couple of twists along the way). Looking forward to it but again doesn’t seem (to me personally) to warrant $60 especially with all the other good games around at the moment.
“terrible boring Troy re-skin”
-0.2 hours played. Product refunded.
Why bother?
Thanks! I had an early access to the game and felt like the era needed a proper introduction. Knowing who’s who provides more meaning the decisions of the player.
And yeah, there’s been a lot of trolling yesterday. Some of the hardcore fans of TW are pissed off since the latest DLC of Warhammer III and, being reasonable adults, have decided to ruin the whole series. They’ve purchased Pharaoh only to post a negative review and get a refund.
I mean, I find the era fascinating. But I don’t have GamePass (not enough time to play much beyond my own backlog) and I don’t think sixty dollars is a good price-point for the game (for me at least). Come a sale, which will happen because these games always go on sale, maybe.
CA really didn’t do themselves any favors with that DLC launch and it’s a shame it’s hurting their product stack in general. While I am waiting for a good sale on this, I hope it gets a decent run.
The most common complaint I’ve heard so far is just that coming off of Warhammer, Egyptian period battles just aren’t as interesting. A creaky battle system with far less variety seems to have left the people who enjoy it wanting more.
Safe to say CA has had themselves an interesting last couple of months.
Don’t honestly recall the last time I saw a development studio decide to issue partial refund to those who bought their game, but that’s what they’ve done with Pharaoh:
It sounds like they made decisions to try and fleece players and extract maximum profit, and in so doing not only damaged their brands value ended up reducing profit.
As far as walkbacks go it looks pretty real. Partial refunds for all buyers? Thats pretty amazing. I did feel sorry for those folks that bought it full price, although I definitely plan to pick it up on a good sale.
Disappointingly it means the current state of the game is also its end-state. I thought the game was supposed to be decent, just needs some extra work? This is now the new 3 Kingdoms (or Imperator), but never getting to the point of being popular.
That’s not what the update says at all
Our next update, and what was originally our first paid DLC will release early in 2024 as a free update for everyone who owns the game. We’ll have plenty to show you about this now free addition to PHARAOH in the new year.
We have now begun the process of reassessing what comes next for PHARAOH, and while we don’t have all the answers today, we want to make it clear to you that we’re not closing the door on other, more ambitious updates to the game in the future. We’ve still got big plans, but we want to be honest with you in saying that we need to spend more time with them before putting them out on show
Now of course that could all be a lie, but it seems stupid to make such a big blatantly false promise when you’re trying to repair your reputation pretty frantically.
This is corporate speak. They are very carefully not committing to any DLC. Furthermore they refunded not only the $20 difference in the base game, but the upgrade cost for anyone that purchased a SKU that entitled them to future DLC. It seems very, very unlikely there will be much additional support for Pharaoh beyond the work that’s already in progress.
TBH at this point it seems unlikely Pharaoh even has the install base to support investment in DLC. Obviously we’ll see how things play out with the price drop & the upcoming FreeLC, maybe they can pull in a bunch of new players and that changes the calculus.
Yeah, I’ll grant CA the credit for doing an apology and a pre-emptive refund. While they’ve really shot themselves in the foot this past year and I don’t know how well they’ll be able to walk it off, it’s a decent first step.