“Total War: Rome 2” was a game on my radar, but I was still quite skeptical because it was too awesome on the paper. Added to the fact that Creative Assembly completely lost all my trust when they promised one last big patch for Medieval 2. Sorry, I remember. This patch would have required the expansion tho, which caused a number of complaints from the user base since we were all asking improvements to the original campaign, not affected by new content. It’s not exactly a great policy to ask money for an expansion only because you’re interested about fixes for the original game. In the end the expansion was released but the promised patch never came out, expansion or not. They were already busy on the next game.

Now that Rome 2 is released it’s getting quite a negative backlash pretty much everywhere where I’m looking. People I’m following on Twitter and forums. Bad design choices, many technical problems, very bad performance and especially the tactical AI being very bad (which is is Total War signature, the bad AI that ruins potentially AWESOME games).

It’s not going well, but it could at least improve if CA acknowledged openly what is going on, and showed concrete signs of willingly to fix this mess aggressively. But their reply makes me even angrier at the Total Rhetoric they use and that they expect everyone swallows.

At Creative Assembly we are very pleased with the response to ROME II, with hundreds of thousands of players enjoying the game so far;

as with all large PC releases, the variety of hardware and general system specifications can cause issues for some people and we are urgently working to help get them the right experience.

Nope, not acknowledging any actual criticism.

As announced last month, we are also planning to tweak the balancing, AI routines and other features now that we’re getting real-time metric feedback from thousands of players.

See? They can only see AI problems now. The AI was always awesome in their tests and the engine ran silky smooth.

From my point of view, this lack of respect is worse than whatever problem the game may have.

I’ll keep my money.