October 13 saw the release of Total War: Shogun 2 – Complete Edition, described as being “the updated, enhanced, and complete version of the grand strategy classic.” Players are describing it as “literally the greed they talk about in the bible,” with 82 percent negative reviews over the last 24 hours.
Originally released in 2011, Total War: Shogun 2 was received with widespread jubilation. Routinely scoring 9s and 10s across the board, it was heralded as the best game in the already very healthy Total War series, and has remained one of the most highly rated games in the franchise since. In 2019, Kotaku rated it the very best of the lot, and The Gamer more recently put it at #2, behind only the then-just-released Three Kingdoms. The point is, people love this game. A re-release, designed to run on modern machines, should have been an absolute gimme.
Instead, the new version is currently firmly in the Overwhelmingly Negative position on Steam, being slammed for crummy performance, bugs old and new, broken mod support, a litany of graphical issues, and the alleged (and undisclosed) use of AI upscaling for the game’s unit cards. That Sega has chosen to delist all the previous versions of the game from Steam at the same time, and increase the price for this new version, is only making people more furious. (It’s worth noting that when I added the Complete Edition to my library on Steam I also got the original version, although I cannot get it to launch.)
Quite how Creative Assembly has gotten the install size of the game to grow from 3.85GB to 45GB is impressive if nothing else, but few are finding it adds anything beneficial. Which is in stark contrast the extremely few press reviews the game has received, with just four critics giving it a Metascore of 86.
A new generation
Running the game certainly feels crummy, the camera movement jagged and the art this peculiar mishmash of old and slightly less old, looking blurry and dated and certainly not attractive. It certainly doesn’t look modern.
We’ve reached out to Creative Assembly to ask about AI use, but have yet to hear anything back. But given there’s no declaration on the Steam page, it does make some of the game’s art pretty tricky to explain. I’ve gone through the new game’s encyclopedia and compared some of the images to those in 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 top deck of the boat for part of the background, and so smooshed one of the figures to death, along with the loss of coherent detail in many areas, including the bow strings. If it’s not genAI then it’s inexplicable, and even if it is, it remains incredibly sloppy work.
Here’s another that emphasizes some really crappy consequences of this.
Obviously it look significantly worse, not least where the AI hasn’t understood the plumes of smoke from gunshots and rendered them as, I dunno, lampshades. But more egregious are the flags, where the specific emblem of the unit type is lost, now displayed as a sort of art-deco jellyfish. Also, check out the guy at the front up top, who has gone from standing on the far side to now inserted between two slats of wood.
But by far my favorite so far is General’s Hatamoto, where the upscaling has not coped with the scant details in the original’s depiction of the face below the helmet, and instead decided to merge the two into some sort of 16th-century automaton.
The lack of an AI declaration on the Steam page violates Valve’s rules, so expect to see that added in a hurry. And hopefully we’ll soon hear from the developers, 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 get.