Geek Control 2 Major Tim: Total War: Attila, Empires of Sand

Empires of Sand: Total War: Attila, and the return of factional DLC

A Review by Timothy Hunter

 

Today saw the release of Total War: Attila’s latest downloadable content pack (DLC), Empires of Sand, and the content is highly-polished, but also a revitalizing set of new experiences for the game, which is reaching the end of its tenure as Total War: Warhammer approaches. Total War: Attila is possibly my favourite entry in the Total War (TW) franchise, and was a vast improvement on the fiasco that was the Total War: Rome 2 launch. Attila released clean, with nowhere near the degree of bugginess as its predecessor, and from a gameplay standpoint it was more balanced, and played more smoothly. It also had its own share of controversy, with rampant DLC spamming in the month following release. As a mouth-foaming TW fanboy, but also a savvy PC gamer, I was both overjoyed to see an expansion to Attila, but also nervous about getting ripped-off by DLC. 

Total War: Attila was excellent on release, with a good spread of factions, focussing mostly on the twin Roman empires, their Sassanid rival, and the migrating hordes that rampaged westward, leading to the collapse of Rome. It is one of my favourite periods of history, and it gave the player the chance to be the bulwark of civilization as the Romans, or experience the full-blooded catharsis of burning it all to the ground and salting the earth as the migrating barbarians. Add to that the experience of revitalizing the Persian Empire in the form of the Sassanids, and you’ve got the core experience of a fantastic game. The DLC for the game has all been exceptionally high quality, with the new factions all being polished, and offering new playstyles and campaign experiences. However, Creative Assembly (CA) had profit margins to meet, and was likely under pressure from its publisher, Sega. The DLC started with the Viking Forefathers, which came free to any that chose to pre-order the game. Pre-order DLC always piqued my suspicion, as it meant that the content was being specifically extracted from the game to help push pre-orders, or as I like to call them, “pre-review orders”. I took to it hesitantly, but couldn’t resist the thought of purging the world with that sweet, sweet Nordic fury. The DLC was also available for post-release purchase, so at least it wasn’t playing the scummy “exclusive content” card that PC gamers revile. All seemed well, but within two weeks of launch CA announced the Longbeards DLC. This is where it started to go downhill. I bought the Longbeards pack, and was again satisfied with the quality and polish that had clearly gone into it, but was already getting pissed at the frequency and speed that it was coming out. Releasing a content pack for purchase only two weeks after launch says to me, “this was totally part of the original game, but Sega saw a way to choke an extra $10 out of you, so we removed it.” This was the final bit of goodwill I had left, and when CA announced the Celtic Culture Pack two weeks later, that is three DLC packs in the space of a month after release, I and virtually the whole TW player-base collectively stared down CA and said, “Up with this we will not put.” The Celtic Culture Pack received a critical drubbing from the community, in spite of the fact that it was clearly a well-designed. 

The problem with Attila’s DLC was that it was clearly all great, but released far too quickly, and too close to the game’s original release. It devalued the original purchase, by making it seem that the consumer had bought an incomplete product, and that they were instead being drip-fed the full game, paying more in total than a full game should cost. What’s worse, releasing DLC so frequently caused a spree of corrupted save files, since the game had to update to accommodate the new factions. Considering TW’s legendarily long campaign times (dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete a campaign), this meant that during the first few weeks of the game’s release that Attila’s bug-free reputation came under severe criticism. The critical backlash also comprised a near-community wide boycott of the Celtic Culture Pack. This seems to have sent CA into damage control, and no factional DLC was released for months. CA did release a campaign DLC pack for Attila, which was accepted by the community, largely on the grounds that it was not just another factional DLC, and it was given a reasonable stretch of time before being added to the game. 

All this brings us to our current situation. Empires of Sand feels like it has been timed perfectly. My biggest concern with the rampant DLC spamming in the month following Attila’s release was not that we would see too much DLC, but that we would end up seeing none at all, and end up with an incomplete game. Attila’s map felt a bit barren (even before you introduce it to Attila and his ravening hordes), and I personally felt it was still so western-centric, with most of the playable factions concentrated in Europe. The East of the map was the grudge match grounds for the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanids. I genuinely believed that some factions in the North African and Arabian regions would spice up the game, and with Total War: Warhammer approaching, it looked like that end of the map would go unfinished. Enter Empires of Sand, which feels like a perfect closing act for TW: Attila. The game was growing staler with its age, and Empire of Sand has added a little new flavour to the map that felt truly missing. The new Desert Kingdom factions comprise the Aksum, the Himyar, and the Tanukhids. All three factions feel well-thought out, and not just reskins or half-assed clones of armies already in the game. 

The Aksum are a north-east African tribe, and are themed around their role as spice merchants, monopolizing the trade route to India. As such, their unique campaign centres around completing missions to improve trade relations, secure resources to trade with India, and mercilessly crush your trade rivals and hear the lamentations of their stock marketers. If all that talk of trade has you fearing Phantom Menace flashbacks, don’t despair, much of the profit comes at the tip of your khanda. The faction is well-modelled, and cool looking, with awesome silk outfits and unique Indian weapons. It is gratifying also to finally play an African faction in Attila, one that is savvy, technologically advanced, and with a unique campaign goal: making the spice flow.

Next are the Himyar, and these guys are the new kids on the block in the Arabian Peninsula. In the vanilla game, the Sassanid Empire goes all but unchallenged in its Persian realm (it is basically the game’s easy mode to play Sassanid). Now, the Himyar rise in the south to challenge that rule. Hymyar get a number of cool desert-themed units, including axmen with terrifying silver masks, reminiscent of the immortals from the film 300, or the sons of the harpy from Game of Thrones. Their campaign not only brings you into conflict with the Sassanids, but also sticks you with the ticking time-bomb of an ancient dam that threatens to burst and wipe you out if you don’t pay careful attention to maintaining it. This is what John Oliver meant when he said that the best way to make routine maintenance of infrastructure seem sexy was add in the threat of it exploding violently in full HD. 

Finally, we meet the Tanukhids. These guys represent the latest horde faction to enter TW: Attila. Horde factions are kind of what sets TW: Attila apart from previous entries in the TW franchise, and they represent migrating people without homes. Much like the Huns, these guys will probably be most fun to play while in their horde mode, rather than settling down, and make them great for action hounds that love to watch the “civilized” world burn. Their gimmick is that they gain food from sacking cities, making it more of an imperative than a leisure sport as it is for the Huns. I like this trait, which makes more sense in the desert, where food and grazing lands would be harder to come by, making your horde’s quest for food more understandable. 

Should you buy this? I feel like CA has finally earned this one. The DLC for TW: Attila was a step and a half above the content packs from previous TW games, where it often felt like you were paying for nothing but cheap reskins that a modder could have made in a weekend. Attila’s DLC has all been uniformly high quality, but just felt like it was being force on the player too hard, and too fast. This lot has been given time to brew, and more particularly, it feels like the timing is just right to refresh the game one last time before Total War: Warhammer goes live. You’ll make up your own mind what you value as a consumer, but as someone that has both loved, and been stung by DLC before, I can say that this is one I will spend a good while enjoying while the storm that is Warhammer builds on the horizon.