Total War: Three Kingdoms, as of the weekend, is an “Overwhelmingly Negative” game on Steam. An organised review bombing has seen fans react somewhat negatively to the news that the 2019 game will receive no further updates, least of all a promised “building out the North of the map.”
Creative Assembly, which releases approximately forty-seven Total War games a year, explained that the game’s most recent update — 1.7.1 — would be its last. Two years since release, and with the developer announcing a new game in the Three Kingdoms world is in pre-production, they figured it was safe to move on.
Furious fans, who say the game is still bug-ridden and that previous promises have not been fulfilled, are responding by review bombing the game on Steam. It’s flipped from “Mostly Positive” to “Overwhelmingly Negative” since the 27th, with commenters declaring that they have been “betrayed”, “abandoned”, and of course those with 250+ hours on record explaining how the game has never offered enough content.
The core of the issue seems to be that many bugs will now go unfixed (although it’s fair to say an awful lot are addressed in this last patch), and most particularly that a promised map update now seems unlikely to happen. In July 2020, Creative Assembly noted that they’d put a mountain in the wrong place in previous update, and were planning to address it soon, and its correction would “come with the second Expansion Pack DLC that will focus on building out the North of the map.” While the weekend’s patch does finally relocate the errant hill, it doesn’t feature that “building out” players were looking forward to. Which isn’t great.
I get it. It sucks to be promised fixes and expansions for a game you love, and then find out they’re not coming. Review bombing is certainly an effective means of getting a developer/publisher’s attention. No one wants their big-name game sporting that forbidding orange text at the top of the store page. And while these things tend to equal out after a bruhaha is over, it’ll certainly have inspired a meeting at Creative Assembly that no one was planning on having.
Meanwhile, the Very Old Man in me wants to shake everyone and point out they haven’t lived, and in my day you bought the game in a box and whatever was in that box was what you got forever, so they should just be grateful and really think about starting a pension and stop wearing jeans with so many holes people can see your underwear in those.
(h/t PC Gamer)
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