14 DAY TRIAL // The new Total War was not an easy game to love when it was initially launched, especially for those players who experienced issues like crashing or lack of compatibility for their video cards. Two weeks later, the situation seems to have improved significantly.
The Creative Assembly has delivered a number of patches for the game and they seem to have really had an effect on the overall experience.
The official forums have less posts about hardware issues and, after the second patch, which was initially delivered in beta form, even the end turn lag all but disappeared, with the parade of factions taking less than 40 seconds after about 20 turns of play time.
The team continues to say that patches are set to be delivered at a constant pace in order to address all new problems that the community is reporting and to further balance the experience.
Of course, all of this cannot justify, for a segment of the gaming community, the fact that Total War: Rome II was launched in a poor state.
This is why I am very happy that one of the leaders of the studio has acknowledged that a long beta period would have greatly benefited the game and would have allowed for many problems to be squashed before the entire fan base experienced them.
A new full Total War title is years away, but I hope that The Creative Assembly uses the new model to test expansions packs and DLC in order to give gamers the solid out of the box experience that they deserve.
I also hope that at least the first paid content pack for Total War: Rome II is offered for free to the community as an apology for the problems that appeared on launch and could have been avoided.