Creative Assembly, the developers behind the celebrated Total War franchise, is ceasing updates on their most recent game, Total War: Three Kingdoms, and some fans are feeling let down.
The news comes via a developer update video posted on the official Total War YouTube account, which states that the development of Three Kingdoms has ended and that the team is moving on to a new project set in the Three Kingdoms time period of Han dynasty China (202 BC – 220 AD).
In response, outraged fans have begun to review-bomb the Three Kingdoms Steam page, voicing their displeasure at the news, claiming that Creative Assembly is reneging on promised updates.
Final Three Kingdoms Update
Released 23 May 2019, Creative Assembly has supported Three Kingdoms with numerous paid expansions and DLC since its launch. These include The Yellow Turban Rebellion, Eight Princes, Mandate of Heaven, A World Betrayed, The Furious Wild, and Fates Divided.
At launch, Three Kingdoms garnered an impressive score of 85 on Metacritic. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, and most of the DLC releases receiving favourable reviews as well.
Since Creative Assembly (who is also working on the upcoming Warhammer 3) released the developer update video (which has itself garnered more than 7000 dislikes), more than 4000 negative reviews have been left on Steam.
Reading through the negative reviews, a common theme is that fans feel like the game still has plenty of potential for growth (and plenty of bugs still to quash), and that they were led to believe there would be further expansions.
In particular, fans were hoping for an expansion that would flesh out the north of China, the site of many historic battles during the period, and home to interesting barbarian tribes that could have been introduced.
Patch 1.7.1 was released alongside the developer update, and at least at the time of writing, is the last update Total War: Three Kingdoms is set to receive.
It squashes numerous bugs and updates the campaign map in some substantial ways but is a fairly lacklustre note for the game to go out on otherwise.