I cannot believe these devs...they used to make great, albeit buggy games but that Rome II launch was just outright despicable....it had half of the features claimed, it ran like crap on any PC, the AI was a complete mess, the siege mechanics were totally broken etc I shall not bore you.

Now they are releasing the Emperor Edition and it includes one piece of campaign DLC....and they have coined a new unbelievable term! "Free-LC" did I see that right? yes I did, what is next? are we going to be paying for patches and for developers to fix their broken games? god the nerve!

The very least they could have done was include all the DLC as an apology to the fans, like the DLC is really bad and a complete milking session "blood and gore"...you are paying for the aforementioned in a game about big battles in one of the most brutal time periods in history.....

So I must ask what happened to these guys? SEGA? lack of sales on PC?

All I can say is damn they really have some nerve releasing a broken game then telling the fans the patches to fix their game are part of this new edition.

/semi-rant

Really not sure what your problem is. They patched the performance of the game within a few months - it went from where I couldn't get 30 on medium to easily getting 60 on high, amazing improvement. And now you are angry at them for giving everyone free DLC? Uh...

I'm angry at how they called patching and fixing their game "Free-LC" insinuating they could have charged for it.

It is not OK to wait months after a games release for it to be optimised and that was only one problem in a multitude.

One campaign.....while you have to pay for blood and gore...

The blood and gore DLC is an interesting one. By charging for it as an extra piece of content it's not counted in the game that is rated by the ESRB. As such it can get a lower rating than if the blood was included and those that want it can have it for $1 or something.

@soap: hmm that is an interesting perspective to take on that one, still though previous total war games have had blood/gore etc so I really do not think it was warranted and the games audience is more likely to be mature anyway so I hindsight that does not really make sense.

1 things for sure Rome total war II was releaseD way to early but at this point its a pretty good game.still i think paying for factions that are already in The game is pretty lame.But in The current market i cant blame them so i bought all there Dlc. Well Atleast its beter then hats right ?

Their Alien: Isolation game looks alright...

I can blame them, it does not justify charging that much when the game was already £50 digital download on release.

I would be very wary since SEGA seems to publish any old crap especially on PC, you can also bet isolation will be very unoptimised as it is creative assembly and there is every possibility it could just be another Colonial Marines.

@einhert: Sega also has 2 of the biggest and most successful pc franchises...

The last Sega port I played was Sega all star racing transformed which was the best version of that game. It ran great and the environments looked really nice.

Yeah, that Rome game wasn't great when it came out, but I heard it got a lot better, still doesn't excuse them for releasing a game that isn't ready to release, but at least they made it work better.

As for the Emperor Edition, this doesn't seem great, seems more like a way to sell a game for full price (is it full price?) again. Also Free-LC? Ugh... That is some of the worst shit I've ever heard :(

They'll announce the next Total War game on the 26th of this month if I'm not mistaken. Yes, Rome 2 was a massive disappointment and the state it was in on release day was ridicilous. A year later and the game still looks and plays terrible, and that's my own honest opinion about it.

Two of my friends have been playing the Total War games since the original Rome: Total War, they've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of SP in those games, and I have heard nothing but bad things about Rome II. From the gross DLC that locks nations and unit types behind paywalls, buggy AI and poor performance, that game sounds like an abject failure. I heard somewhat more glowing things about Shogun II, though it is EXTREMELY dissapointing that the perhaps best game in the franchise got such a lackluster sequel.

@einhert: Free-lc is a name, same with how game demos are somehow called alphas. It's marketing for good publicity, especially needed after the disastrous launch of Rome 2.

It's not simply a patch.They fixed the game's stability months after launch already. Have you read the patch notes? Even after the bug fixing patches the base game was still over simplified, but this big patch is balancing almost all units, and revamping how the campaign civil war works entirely, so no more cheesing your way through. These are big game changers for the players if you ask me.

Plus, they should give you all the dlc for free to apologize? What kind of argument is that? They've been doing piecemeal dlc since shogun 2 (or is it empire?), heck a lot of games do that nowadays, only thing I can say is that I too miss the times when expansions were a thing.

I don't speak for CA, and Rome 2 is certainty the most disappointing game for me in a while, but a lot of people here just seemed misinformed about the whole thing.

CA has always been releasing flashy but shallow, buggy and unbalanced games with Rome 2 they released a downright broken game. The whole dlc thing is very much how Pc games works now.

@themangalist: "a lot of people here just seemed misinformed about the whole thing." What exactly is there to be misinformed about?

The contents of this patch. OP made it sound like it's a bug fix when it's more than that. Fact is the bugs were mostly fixed long time ago. This is a huge content patch meant to "fix" the gameplay of Rome 2. Many people here sound like "oh I heard from a friend it sucks" and "I've never played this new one, but I heard from the internet it sucks", the launch did suck, which is true, and so does the game; but to say it's still as buggy and the fuck "offering to fix the bugs for free!" angle OP is holding is misinformed. The game is much more stable now, and what is left is that the gameplay is oversimplified and boring. That's why CA cooked this up to balance all units, prolong battles, and overhaul the civil war event in the campaign, in attempt to fix the gameplay side of things.

Look, when the game was released it took MINUTES to end a turn. That was fixed in the first two patches I believe. This is the type of thing that if CA used the term free-lc to refer to the patches to fix their broken ass game, I would rant about. But this isn't it.

They destroyed Company of Heroes 2 and Total War: Rome II, it will be very interesting to see how they market this next one.

There is nothing to misunderstand, they very clearly state what is included in the video.......

Umm I can log on right now mate and see AI running around in circles not knowing where to go when they are being assaulted from multiple angles, and the pathfinding in sieges is still broken so they are really frustrating, the unit balance is all over the place with spear infantry charging down and killing sword infantry and there are many more I cannot think of off the top of my head.

That was my point....they call fixing their broken game "free-LC", there is no angle to take from that..when there has been no new content put into the game for free, it is all locked behind nickel and diming DLC. The whole point of the rant was they released the game in such a broken state that this is to little and far to late for most people.

If you paid for the Collectors Edition on Launch you would feel very differently but evidently you scooped it up on a steam sale so you have little attachment to what you spent your money on.

And that turned you off from the Total War franchise? Rome 1 had buggy sieges, urban cohorts absolutely dominates multiplayer... definitely not to the extent of Rome II at launch, but those were things that were never fixed. Medieval II's cavalry is unresponsive and was never fixed. Game replays since Medieval II never represented the battles that you played correctly either. I would say Creative Assembly fall from grace started long before Rome II, more like after Medieval II, when they started introducing unit packs and piecemeal dlcs.

This argument I could get behind. It was broken and the gameplay is bad at launch, and long enough to turn away most fans of the franchise.

... but this is enough for me to want to disengage from the conversation you started. I'm not here to argue and make assumptions. I'm not even sure you read the two replies I wrote.

I read everything you wrote, my opinion is that they are unjustified in implying patching and fixing their completely broken game is worth the moniker of "Free-LC" like we should be paying for it.

Yes previous total war games were buggy but this is 2014.

As a fan of the series since Rome, it is easy to admit that there is no perfect Total War game, but it is a large irritant to see the series make the same damn mistakes and absolutely lie through their teeth about AI and gameplay improvements.

MTW2 was broken on release and had numerous bugs with unit stats, (shields would remove armor rating and double handed units could not attack cavalry) and still has broken AI that wasn't fixed.

Empire also had unresponsive AI that didn't know how to use ships for naval invasions. Also, one of the patches broke the battle AI which caused units to just charge, and every battle became large melees.

Napoleon and Shogun 2 were improvements, but the series also got more streamlined. Hopefully when they announce the new game this month they'll actually try to make a quality product again.

So they release a new campaign for free and....that's bad somehow. What?

Man you people have no idea what you are talking about. The emperor edition is just a another giant patch the re-hauls a lot of the game and includes a pretty large campaign for free as well. It's free if you already own the game and they aren't reselling it or anything. The name just seems like they are trying to re-brand it so people give it another chance, I bought Rome 2 when it first came out and it was a pile of dogshit, but I can say with confidence that right now it's a great game and about to get better come tomorrow. Yeah it sucks it took them a year to finish the game after launch but at least they stayed committed to improving the game and adding content. People just need to stop being crybabies and try the game and let your old opinions about it go, what I did and I'm currently enjoying slaughtering barbarians and filthy Greeks.

What is bad is the £44 worth of DLC sitting on the steam store, cutting up and segmenting games like that is just wrong...

One campaign is nice but there should be more to make up for that launch.

My opinion is biased due to me having bought the game full price on launch. Maybe if you bought it in a steam sale you would not share this opinion but having such a messed up broken game with pieces of the game segmented into £44 worth of DLC is messed up.