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Total War Three Kingdoms

Trenacker said:
I'm just very disappointed we won't get the western regions, Korea, or Vietnam sooner, and I hope modders take up the call
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The map is unmoddable, unfortunately for that.

Trenacker said:
Does anyone know if the game sold especially poorly, leading them to do this a cost-saving measure?
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Far as I'm aware, initial sales were the strongest CA's ever seen. Possibly the last DLC sold poorly? This definitely doesn't seem something they've been planning a while, they wouldn't have suggested they were doing a Northern Expansion if that was the case.
 
I didn't realize that the map was unmoddable. That's a terrible shame. It also explains why, after more than a year on hiatus from the game, I returned to find the collection Workshop Mods not much different than when I'd left.

It almost sounded as if they discovered some kind of broken element at the very core of the original game, prompting them to rebuild from the ground up.
 
Trenacker said:
Does anyone know if the game sold especially poorly, leading them to do this a cost-saving measure?
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Base game is currently the best selling title CA has yet released. DLC, not enough data to determine. It was presumably selling enough for long enough for them to keep doing it and plan to do a northern expansion.

This almost feels like a corporate mandate from on high than a dev head decision unless some technical or financial reality forced their hand.

But, guess we'll see. Best case scenario is if we get the WH2 style expandalone that simply picked up where this game left off and retroactively provides content from this game that people already own, with further DLC expanding it out more. But what we've been told renders that hope... shaky, sadly.
 
This screams of them wanting to do something with further expansion, but once they went in to try and implement them they found something in the game's code that would render it untenable and requiring a complete reworking from the ground up.
 
The Steam active player numbers are unfavorable for how new a game it is. Now, the game was crazy popular in Asia on release and those numbers aren't necessarily reflected in Steam, but it could be a heavily contributing factor for why development was stopped.
 
If they're pulling this BS there had better damn well be naval battles added.
 
Spectrum said:
The Steam active player numbers are unfavorable for how new a game it is. Now, the game was crazy popular in Asia on release and those numbers aren't necessarily reflected in Steam, but it could be a heavily contributing factor for why development was stopped.
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There may be a chasm between "sold exceptionally well upon release" and "continued to carry a significant fan base thereafter." The YouTube Havoc released a video today in which he referenced a lack of community support for the game that contradicted his and others' descriptions of its sales strength.

Based on what I'm hearing, I deduce that some or all of the following are true:
  • TW3K didn't yield the level of sustained community interest typical of other strong-selling titles, but the game's original sales were too big to ignore. This led to a decision to reboot.
  • A "fatal" flaw has been discovered in the game's technical design that prevents meaningful changes from here forward. (The DLCs always seemed underwhelming to me, aside from The Furious Wild, and this could explain why. Maybe it's an issue with the map?) This seems to be supported by the fact that we're now told that there isn't going to be any linkage between TW3K and TW3K2.
  • CA concluded that they botched the narrative and story elements in TW3K and a sufficiently large consensus was achieved within the development team to support a reassessment in the form of a second, complete game. There have been fan complaints that the game was more "the road to Three Kingdoms" than a simulation of the conflict between Wei, Shu, and Wu, which is true. Possibly they sacked a lot of the team responsible for the DLCs?
  • Politics. Havoc speculates that CA may have wanted to back off a China-focused game in light of the current allegations about the lab in Wuhan. I guess it is also possible that CA might have felt there was a potential to offend their large Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese audiences in how they originally intended to present the Western Regions, the Korean kingdoms, and the Vietnamese kingdoms. This would explain why they would refocus on the core game again.
  • CA leadership believes that mythological games combining historically-inspired unit types and polities with fantasy magic are the way to go. This would, I think, align with the speculation in the first bullet, and feels almost unavoidably true. I've felt like they've flogged TWWH2 excessively compared to TW3K.
 
Backing off from a China-focused game before proceeding into another China-focused game while also having a China-inspired faction as one of the headliners for their most important sub-series?

Not sure the math checks out.
 
Creticus said:
Backing off from a China-focused game before proceeding into another China-focused game while also having a China-inspired faction as one of the headliners for their most important sub-series?

Not sure the math checks out.
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No timeline was offered for the next game. It may be part of a strategy of stepping back from explicitly China-themed content.
 
While it's rather blasphemous from a Total War purist standpoint, in another timeline I was kinda hoping that a well received and wrapped up TW3K could have opened the door to a more fantastical treatment for a Shogun 3/side game.
 
The Sengoku period would be one of the better options for that kind of treatment.

It's not quite as romanticized as the 3K period. However, it's not that far off from it. For instance, see everything about ninjas.
 
Tbf, I feel like if they want to go for a mix of real and fantasy, they should do an arthurian total war. Kind of in between rome and medieval, but with magic and super knights.
 
I'd love to see a full-blown Arthurian Total War.

As in, angels and valkyries dog-fighting while knights and huscarls hammer it out on the shores.

Not very historical, but the archaeological evidence doesn't support an organized invasion of post-Roman Britain anyways, so whatever.

Edit:

You could justify quite a number of major factions with Arthuriana. The post-Roman Brits. The Picts. The Irish. The Germanic invaders. The French/proto-French/whatever. The Western Roman Empire with a wide range of foreign auxiliaries.
 
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total war and peace, a mythologized version of the Napoleonic Wars based off of the collection of literature written about it. Rzhevsky and Horatio Hornblower as legendary heroes. no I'm not just saying this because I want them to remake Napoleon.
 
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Creticus said:
The Sengoku period would be one of the better options for that kind of treatment.

It's not quite as romanticized as the 3K period. However, it's not that far off from it. For instance, see everything about ninjas.
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Yes, exactly. Yukimura Sanada and the 10 Braves etc. There's potential there!

Renu said:
Tbf, I feel like if they want to go for a mix of real and fantasy, they should do an arthurian total war. Kind of in between rome and medieval, but with magic and super knights.
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It's not CA but...it exists!




I've beaten a campaign of the original but only put a few hours into the sequel.
 
Spectrum said:
While it's rather blasphemous from a Total War purist standpoint, in another timeline I was kinda hoping that a well received and wrapped up TW3K could have opened the door to a more fantastical treatment for a Shogun 3/side game.
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What I feel could make such a game interesting: Interference from Japanese deities, along with Yokai. Imagine being able to (if assume same agent types) get a Kitsune Geisha agent with some effort/faction specific thing, for example?
 
RandomPlayers said:
What I feel could make such a game interesting: Interference from Japanese deities, along with Yokai. Imagine being able to (if assume same agent types) get a Kitsune Geisha agent with some effort/faction specific thing, for example?
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Cue Takeda shrieking.

For context, there's a story about Katsuyori's mother being a kitsune, who was a wee bit pissed about Shingen's Shingen-ness.
 
Renu said:
Tbf, I feel like if they want to go for a mix of real and fantasy, they should do an arthurian total war. Kind of in between rome and medieval, but with magic and super knights.
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ChineseDrone said:
total war and peace, a mythologized version of the Napoleonic Wars based off of the collection of literature written about it. Rzhevsky and Horatio Hornblower as legendary heroes. no I'm not just saying this because I want them to remake Napoleon.
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TBH I was enjoying the break from Europe and would rather the next non-3K historical (or historicalish) project do something like India or Persia or whatnot.
 
Troy 2 total war. With full throated Greek deities getting their dicks stuck in the mess, metaphorically and literally (looking at you Zeus.) They dropped the ball by chickening out on the mythology.
 
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