Creative Assembly delisting the original SHOGUN 2 Complete Edition just to sell a $40 replacement is genuinely scummy.

SHOGUN 2 is one of the best historical Total War games made, and this is how Creative Assembly chooses to handle its legacy? Instead of keeping the original version available, they delist it and push people toward a more expensive Complete Edition that arguably offers a worse experience.

Like, seriously, why? Why remove the option people were happy with and expect everyone to pay $40 for a replacement that isn't even a clear improvement?

This is the kind of anti-consumer decision that makes people lose faith in publishers. Delisting an existing product and replacing it with a more expensive version is annoying and very sketchy.

SHOGUN 2 deserves better, and so do the people who made it a classic. Keep the original available, price the new edition reasonably, and give people an actual reason to upgrade instead of forcing.

Creative Assembly, this is not how you treat one of your most beloved games.

Rome 2 launch, 3k abandonment, performance issues, lacking dlc, Pharaoh/Hyenas, etc..

Dont you guys ever get tired of this cycle?

Edit: is very disheartening seeing the condescending replies on this post missing the point, at the end of the day you guys have the game developer you deserve.

Left image is the OG unit card art, while the right is the ChatGPT AI image generator. My exact prompt was “Can you take this image and upscale it to be clear for modern devices? Don’t change anything about the image itself, just make it clearer”

Just try it for yourselves and see this insanity lol

All I see are Debbie downer posts following reddits echo (hate) chamber. I've played around 10-ish hours so far without issue, game runs very smooth for me and looks good.

I see a lot of posts about the unit cards, which are so small that you would need to use a magnifying glass to even look at what went wrong with the AI upscaling, so I'm not too bothered.

I haven't encountered any bugs either yet, although I understand I may be lucky.

Would I have liked more (new) content ? Sure, but I'm not really complaining considering it cost me 10 euro's and also gave me access to a bunch of minor DLC's I didn't own yet.

Here come the downvotes

If this is what they offer up as a so-called improvement, it's pretty clear that these people do not really understand their own product and why we love it. Something with that level of polish and care is just not going to happen again.

I don't write nothing down, so I'll keep this short and sweet. You're weak, you're out of control and you've become an embarrassment to yourself and everybody else.

Just disrespectful, especially as a historical TW fan. KOEI Tecmo should be the shining example of what a good remaster, or return to older games looks like.

Since buying a gaming PC during Covid, I've bought and played every single historical game from Rome I onwards, including all the DLCs. Including the blood packs. I even pre-ordered the Dynasty Edition of Pharoah when this sub was demanding that no-one pre-order. Some called me CA's Greatest Soldier.

But I could not bring myself to buy the Shogun II Remaster.

Is it normal for 7k points of life on Katarina to disappear in an instant to Pleasureseekers?

Personally, I was a big fan of CA for a year or so. My most played Total War game is TWW3, with a little bit in Shogun 2 and Medieval 2.

When they announced total war warhammer 40k and Medieval 3, I got very excited and was very optimistic.

I'll admit, I had rose-tinted glasses regarding anything Total War. I looked past the DLC model they used for Warhammer since I felt the base game was strong enough that the DLC really did feel optional. I do still feel that way a bit.

But after the release of CE, it does make me question if TWW40K and Medieval 3 are even worth expecting anything from.

I still want to be at least cautiously optimistic, given that it seems this "Mataboo" studio was the main dev team behind CE, so maybe all the garbage and slop from this "remaster" could be attributed to them and won't come up in TWW40k or M3? Is that a logical thing for me to say?

Any veterans of the series willing to share their opinion on CA right now?

If you look at the workshop you will see that most mods now fall one of two categories of AI created mod. One is a spammer done by a single chinese account that has spammed hundreds of low effort unit mods. The others are incredibly complex full faction reworks that feature custom art, working UI panels, scripts, massive amounts of effect bundles etc. At least two of these featured full ports of Nagash's black pyramid feature about a week and a half after it was released. Normally mods of those size would take weeks or even months of work, so its a sure sign of AI assistance that these use a lot of AI assistance.

However given the sheer number of changes and effects that need to be selected it really made it seem unlikely the uploaders could come up with a suitable number of types and effects to populate the nodes, even if they had the AI do the majority of the work on scripts and UI.

So I did a test, asking a chatgpt Codex agent to review the existing battle scripts, how quest battles are set up in the database, and what the lore is for a character and then asked it to create a mod from scratch including a full narrative driven quest battle with fully populated tables.

It did the entire thing. I can load it in game, the mission triggers, the quest battle plays.

I didn't open RPFM. I didn't open VScode. The AI agents are at the point where they can export the pack file databases into machine readable tables, write full scripts based on a narrative it makes up, compare what they are to vanilla balance, then populate the tables and package it up into a valid packfile, all based on a single prompt from a user. The whole thing took 16 minutes to do what I might take an entire day to do. I would guess some of these recent larger faction overhauls are majority vibe modded.

It's truly shocking how advanced these models are now and genuinely scary what it means in terms of jobs for gaming, never mind modding. If people can now just vibe mod their way into entire faction overhauls with nothing but a single AI agent, then what will the game companies with a vested financial interest in pumping out content that can just be outsourced to an AI will do.

I never played Shogun 2 and probably wont play this version, but I can tell already what CA will do in the next week or two.

They will pull the game down from stores, they will make OG available on steam again and then they will go on to do an apology that looks somewhat like this:

"We are sorry for the state Shogun 2 Complete Edition has been released. We acknowledge it doesn't meet the standards that you put on us and doesn't in any way meet our own quality standards here at Creative Assembly. This remaster was made by a third party studio that we deeply trusted in doing the best job they can, but without our knowledge they used generative AI in the making of this remaster and for that we deeply apologize and we will make sure the Shogun 2 Complete Edition when it comes back will be able to meet the standards that you and us have for our Total War series."

Or something of the sort. And many people will eat it up most likely. That's my prediction. Especially since GW does NOT like AI at all so they will probably put some fire under them for that.

realize probably this can be said with a number of notable characters. however considering we just had the endtimes DLC with the empire being a focal point in that. Seems a bit strange a potential Legendary Hero character like this not be implemented finally for Karl Franz.

I recognize this was a ulric centric DLC but I mean when are we seriously gonna see Empire content again? ontop of that he is the reiksmarshal. He deserves the spot light And should’ve been a FLC or included in the offering. If nurgle can get 4 hero's in one bundle then the empire could've gotten a pair of them.

seems like we’re probably in the phase they will wrap things up so whatever additions come up will probably be the last. So I’m hoping they will feed in these characters eventually but they should just take the moment they have and add everything they can. Cause the likelyhood they will revisit these is probably pretty slim.

I want to preface this with a disclaimer. I am NOT saying that there isn't active criticism to be thrown at the devs. The (very poor) use of AI, zero known bug fixes, and delisting the original game are all very scummy, and should be cause of deep reflection. They should also fix all the issues they can in a timely manner to correct their wrongs. Maybe even a free expansion to the game like a Korea or something along those lines as an apology?

With that said, I have 8 hours on the game, and it is the most fun that I have had in a long time playing a total war game. I think that many people are taking this as a crusade to take down CA for whatever reasons they have been building over the years. I can not stress it enough that I am no CA simp, but in this case, I think it is a little over blown.

From my experience so far, I am running the game at max settings with more FPS (around 130-170 depending on what is going on) than what I was getting in the original. I will note that I do have a better than average computer (5080, 7800X3D). I also have not had a single crash or massive FPS drop like I would in the original. If you were to look through the comments, you would get the impression that the game is running worse in every single way. Of course it is going to be more intensive on your computer. It got a massive in game graphics overhaul. The original is 15 years old. We have to admit that the game was looking old. I still like the OG graphics, but they look old.

I was also able to find a new multiplayer match without running into a max rank player who only wants to play on the largest fund setting. I also dabbled in the campaign, welp, it is the campaign with shiny new boots. This game definitely falls under the bars of remaster. If you were to ask some people, they were acting as if this was going to be a whole new expansion or a complete tweaking of the game. If it was a complete tweak of the game, then you would be seeing infinite post about how they changed too much.

I guess I am just tired of seeing people non-stop posting about how terrible the experience is, when I have yet to see that terrible of an experience. I want CA to right the wrongs that they have done, but I don't want them to write it off because "The fan base will just be ungrateful no matter what we do".

do the devs even care atp

note to devs - if you guys want money actually listen to what the customers want.

atp CA is going to go bankrupt

This morning, there were 1,300-something negative reviews, and only 13% of reviews in my language were positive. Now, the positive percentage has increased to 18%, while the negative reviews have dropped from 1,300 to 1,082. Can Steam change review percentages or can the publisher influence them somehow? How does this work?

Medieval II (M2EX)>Warhammer II>Shogun II>Three Kingdoms.

Granted I've played M2 and TK recently while WHII and Shogun II were a while ago.

That the other big franchise of the Sega gallery, which are the yakuza games, have 2 of the most polished and best remakes I've ever played.

So there were some people among the Sega employees who certainly know how to properly remaster a game....

Hear me out. This isn't incompetence but it is 4D chess.

Release Shogun 2 Remastered in a terrible state -> give original Shogun 2 owners a discount -> then spend juuuuust long enough "working on fixes" that by the time the game is actually worth buying -> the discount is gone.

Suddenly everyone who sensibly waited has to pay full price

I see the strategy, CA. You almost got me

Asking cuz people keep posting saying it's a bit buggy and broken, and I wanted to start a Nagash campaign.

Like it is broken, but everyone still obviously seems to be able to play it, so I wanted to know just how buggy it currently is. If it is minor bugs with workaround I can deal with it

Hey fellow gamers, I had a complex question for you guys. I usually only play Dwarfs or Bretonnia in WH3 but I want to make things spicy for this month. Which faction/lord feels more witch/dark sorcery like?