October 13 saw the release of Total War: Shogun 2 – Complete Editiondescribed as “the updated, improved and complete version of the great strategy classic”. Players describe it as “literally the greed they talk about in the Bible”, with 82% negative reviews in the last 24 hours.
Originally published in 2011, Total War: Shogun 2 was greeted with widespread jubilation. Consistently scoring 9s and 10s across the board, he was touted as the best game in an already very healthy region. Total war series, and has remained one of the franchise’s most beloved games ever since. In 2019, Kotaku rated it the best of the lot, and The player most recently placed it at number two, behind only the just-released Three Kingdoms. The fact is that people love this game. A re-release, designed to run on modern machines, should have been an absolute gift.
Instead, the new version is currently firmly in the extremely negative position on Steam, being criticized for poor performance, bugs old and new, broken mod support, a litany of graphical issues, and the alleged (and undisclosed) use of AI scaling for the game’s unit maps. The fact that Sega has chosen to simultaneously remove all previous versions of the game from Steam and raise the price of this new version only makes the people even more furious. (It’s worth noting that when I added the Complete Edition to my library on Steam, I also got the original version, even though I can’t launch it.)
The way Creative Assembly increased the game’s install size from 3.85GB to 45GB is impressive, but few find it adds anything beneficial. This is in stark contrast to the very few press reviews the game has received, with only four reviews giving it a Metascore of 86.
A new generation
Running the game certainly looks crummy, the camera movement is erratic and the art is that particular hodgepodge of old and a little not so old, which looks blurry and dated and definitely not appealing. It certainly doesn’t seem modern.
We’ve reached out to Creative Assembly to ask about the use of AI, but have yet to hear back. But given that there’s no statement on the Steam page, it makes some of the game’s artwork quite difficult to explain. I looked through the new game’s encyclopedia and compared some images to those from the original, and… it’s not good. Below you can see some comparisons, the original version on the left and the new version on the right.
You can see how the process has confused the central wooden bar on the upper deck of the boat with part of the background, and thus crushed one of the figures to death, as well as losing consistent detail in many areas, including the bowstrings. If it’s not genAI, then it’s inexplicable, and even if it is, it’s still an incredibly shoddy job.
Here’s another one that points out some really shitty consequences of this.
Obviously it looks a lot worse, especially when the AI didn’t understand the plumes of smoke from the gunshots and turn them into, I don’t know, lampshades. But more egregious are the flags, where the specific emblem of the unit type is lost, now displayed like a sort of art-deco jellyfish. Also take a look at the guy in the front at the top, who has moved to the other side and is now inserted between two wooden slats.
But my favorite so far is by far the General’s Hatamoto, where the scaling failed to take into account the sparse details of the original depiction of the face under the helmet, and instead decided to merge the two into a sort of 16th century automaton.
The lack of an AI declaration on the Steam page violates Valve’s rules, so expect to see this added quickly. And hopefully we’ll hear from the developers soon, so we can find out which version of the familiar “placeholder art was created using generative AI and was unfortunately included in the final release” excuse we’re getting.
Gn tech
