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Total War: Rome II

Negative reviews for Total War: Rome II due to female generals

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While Battlefield V has recently been the subject of controversy after it was revealed that the game would include female soldiers (with prosthetic limbs, no less), this time it is Total War: Rome II's turn to be attacked by players arguing historical inaccuracy.

Although the game was released five years ago, it was recently hit by a series of negative reviews on Steam following the release of a patch which introduced female generals. This addition introduced by The Creative Assembly (several months ago, we should add) seems to have gone down badly with players who claim that historical veracity is behind their criticism.

In particular, what has bothered a few players is how female generals suddenly appeared in the game in place of male generals. After that came an unverified image that seems to show a character selection pop-up dominated by female characters (it's likely that the image was taken from a modded version of the game).

It appears certain pro-Gamergate media outlets reporting on the matter has sparked a wave of negative reviews on Steam, where it's recent rating is "overwhelmingly negative."

A spokesperson for CA intervened on Steam in August, at the time writing:

"Total War games are historically authentic, not historically accurate - if having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play. People saying they won't buy the game because there are too many women in it is fine with us - if that's their reason, we'd rather they didn't anyway."

As you can probably expect, that response was not welcomed positively by some people. Fed up with the constant discussion surrounding the change, CA's developers have since revealed the odds of a female character appearing in the game, adding that it's working as intended:

"Female characters appear throughout the game, but have between a 10 to 15 per cent chance of appearing as recruitable generals for some of the playable factions. The exceptions are the Greek States, Rome, Carthage and some Eastern factions, which have a 0 per cent chance, and Kush which has a 50 per cent chance. This is to broadly represent the cultural differences in those factions during the time the game is set.

"These percentage chances are moddable by players. We've not seen a verifiable bug where this is shown to be different or not working as intended."

Total War: Rome II

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Total War: Rome II

REVIEW. Written by Mike Holmes

Fans of the series have been waiting for this sequel for many, many years. Happily, it doesn't disappoint.



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