They are not abandoning warhammer, they made so much money off WH1 that they made WH2 and WH3.
R3K is the property they recently shelved, didn’t sell very well
Player base is pretty eurocentric. Despite critical acclaim for Shogun Total War 2, it sold quite poorly compared to the other titles.
Oh, did it? I thought it had sold well, it’s just the DLC sales weren’t there. I know their first few DLC weren’t anything I was interested in but I didn’t follow it closely.
Yeah that’s probably it. They released a very lackluster first DLC and then were pikachu surprised nobody bought it.
Just IMO they realized that the fundamental ‘game system’ underlying all Total War games since Shogun 2 doesn’t work for the Three Kingdoms setting. Total War doesn’t have a good way to account for ‘wise councilors’ that are at the heart of Three Kingdoms, and they don’t have an underlying game system that works well with a very small number of large empires at the start of the game.
The craziness of TW:K was that the most iconic characters were superfluous (more or less) to doing well, that the underlying history never happened, and that for the life of the game system they leaned entirely into making a lot of weird, speculative start positions (where there are lots of characters starting from small holdings). TW:K almost never developed into a game about Wei vs Wu vs Shu, because of all the random noise going on as AI empires cheese each other and get lucky or unlucky.
I actually liked the direction of Eight Princes, they were clearly trying to “Rome-ize” kingdoms by exploring a bunch of random unknown start positions by relatively unexplored historic situations. But they did this at the cost of leaving the Kingdoms setting entirely.
Compared to a Koei game, CA’s attempt, like Khan, kept missing the target. And that’s (imo) because at the most extreme view there’s only been one new Total War game - Shogun 2 - and 15 years worth of official mods for it. To make a proper Kingdoms game, they need a different underlying engine, something they’re clearly, utterly loathe to do at this point - indeed, to the point it seems they’d rather go work in entirely different genres.
OTOH, they kept releasing DLC for Rome 2 for years - even past Attila.
Honestly i think they’ve just saturated their player base. After hundreds, thousands - for some maybe tens of thousands - of hours, yet another skin on the underlying engine just feels like you’re puttering around. Personally though for me there’s something about Chaos in War3 that really puts me off, and i haven’t played it but a fraction of time compared to War2. In many ways i think i still prefer War2 if i want to putter around and waste a weekend playing the same game over and over.
Hmmm I see it differently. I don’t think saturation is an issue, after all Warhammer 2 was just Warhammer 1 turned up to 11 and that was fine. The playerbase likes this stuff and has a strong history of coming back for more. Where I think Warhammer 3 fell down was from trying too hard to be different and new when the audience wanted more of the same.
CA does play its games. It knows the 20 unit stack battles suck. It tried experimental designs (Troy) where you use 6, 10 unit armies. Troy was okay. It didn’t get a lot of noise thought considering it was available at a very good price of $0.
The stupid settlement battles… well i was complaining before the game even came out. They devoted a lot of time and effort on the design and most players deal with it by not bypassing it.
Those settlement battles are so annoying (at least I find them so). It adds so much tedium without any real payoff, for me. I could maybe enjoy a handful of such battles over the course of an entire campaign but given that so many battles take place in settlements… no thanks!
The mod that turns off settlement battles if it doesn’t have walls was one of my favorites.
I’d disagree, sans settlement a 20 unit stack battle is exactly what I want out of the game. What I don’t want is endless tedious settlement battles, an AI that’s both perfectly crafty at playing keep away while strategically moronic, and artificial difficulties imposed by economic or unrest mechanics because the AI isn’t otherwise competitive and players can snowball into world conquest.
I’m half suspecting that CA realizes they messed up with TW:WH3 but it’s far too late to go back to the drawing board. So we will get some halfhearted DLC efforts to continue monetizing the remaining playerbase while they try to figure out what to do better with their next fantasy-themed Total War game.
The Chaos factions feel flat for me because their armies are all so similar. Fast melee/no ranged. Ponderously Slow Melee/no Ranged. Bloody Melee/no ranged. A Demon who can get all the melee. And Tzeentch
They all share the human (well used to be) chaos units, cultists, tier 4-5 bound spell caster, soul grinders etc. One of the reasons I have bounced off the historical total war games is the factions are so similar which is understandable because everyone is human. In W3 you have Demon armies and yet.
I think that’s a valid criticism though it doesn’t bother me to the same degree. I have long-ago cherished memories of being a teenager and playing Games Workshop tabletop stuff so I’m happy to see a faithful rendition of Nurgle/Khorne/Tzeentch/Slaanesh armies to play on the battlefield. It’s just playing those factions on the strategic layer that is seriously un-fun. Well actually I think in IE that Tzeentch has such an easy starting position that the poor economy is a non-issue but I can’t stand playing the others.
Makes me wonder why on Earth they did that. No one likes it so why did they double down on them during development and early release?
Convinced that they could win people over and if they just tweaked them enough, the fans would like them. That’s my guess.
Maybe a bit too confident in their design. 🙂
Because all during War1 and War2 everyone complained at how boring settlement battles were. Monkey’s Paw curls and all that.
The fact that Nurgle’s tech tree is still a travesty says a lot imo.
Basically all the mono-gods have significant issues. The roster is the roster, so that’s whatever, but stuff like Faction and Lord effects? The tech tree? These are things you could fix in a couple of weeks or months.
Tzeentch basically doesn’t have any Faction or Lord effects.
Nurgle basically doesn’t have a tech tree. Or an economy.
Khorne is mostly fine provided you can keep rampaging. Tech tree is meh.
Slaanesh is mostly okay and mechanically the most interesting in a lot of ways.
Daniel is still dogshit. Extra dogshit really since Be’lakor does his thing better than he does and is Fucking Be’lakor.
Ogres are just bad. Greasus is garbage and Skrag is a butcher. Mechanics as a whole are just bad.
Cathay is okay, but feels incomplete.
Kislev is alright at least.
WoC are just brokenly OP, but could easily be tweaked to be interesting.
Basically all the new races trend from “okay” to “not fun/terrible”.
The DLC team has always been the better team at CA, but we really saw it this time around. They’ve spent months trying to turn lead into gold and don’t have much to show for it so far.
The change to “giant, rare patches that make huge changes” over “smaller, frequent patches that mostly tweak stuff” is really failing them imo. If something doesn’t work well, expect to live with it for 6 months or more. Or hope a modder can make changes to it, in which case it might take a week.
I think my main problem with the game in general is that the AI is complete crap. For example, I had the skaven end game crisis happen around turn 130. Then I watched over the next 20 turns or so the AI squander the skaven armies and all but one drop out of the top slots in rankings and two of them were destroyed.
To put it another way, if your playing decently and have 3 or 4 provinces under your control, you have pretty much beaten the game. All the rest is just busy work. All of the challenge is in the early game.
As far as WoC and Slaanesh, my issues with them are the vassals. The vassals are fucking useless other than paying some small tribute and running interference. They vassals do not effectively conquer territory (in a manner where they keep it and simply do not lose whatever they have taken in a few turns). They also do not support or work together.
Good vassals would be hideously overpowered.
I am sure there is a balance between OP vassals and nearly worthless vassals.
I like vassals as Warriors of Chaos, especially from factions that also cause Chaos corruption, but only because they give me handy replenishment and recruitment zones in territory where I can’t get any profit from taking the settlements myself.
The vassals can be of some help, but overall they accomplish little. The run their armies all over the place without actually accomplishing much. If they were slowly taking over the world without my help, then I would be ok with it, but in my experience they do not do this.
For example playing as Belekorm his starting vassal was hell bent on attacking the elves across the ocean. It might capture a city, but it could never hold anything. Also it pissed off the elves and that was yet another faction to deal with.
I had other vassals attacking stuff near Kislev, and they never made any real progress without my help. Then there were a bunch of vassals in the norther wastes who had no enemies around them and they did fuck all. They just sat around rather than sending their armies into the empire area, orc area, or any direction except north.
I would spend allegiance points to tell them to take cities and stuff and they ignored it most of the time.
They were nothing more then drunken frat boys wandering around aimlessly, who occasionally picked fights with their enemies.
That is what needs to be fixed, although in general the AI of WH3 is aweful.
I don’t think so. There are various new endgame crisis instead, and each faction has different victory objectives.