Total War devs admit to being ‘disheartened’ at Chaos Warriors DLC backlash

A designer for upcoming Sega title Total War: Warhammer has said that the studio has been left a little down in the dumps by the fury that greeted its recent pre-order DLC announcement.

The announcement in October that the popular Chaos race will be locked behind a pre-order paywall was greeted with fury by the franchise’s fans. Indeed, the trailer for the content on YouTube has 41,225 dislikes compared to just 3,099 likes.

It’s disheartening, you know. You never like to see there being a negative aspect of the game, but it seems to be something which is becoming, sadly, a more common trend with a number of games,” designer Rich Aldridge told Eurogamer.

Again, I’d just like to stress that we feel that by adding the additional content that actually the users get a far better game in the long term. And, obviously, it is their decision whether they wish to purchase now or in the future. We leave that open to them.”

Was he surprised by the criticism?

Yes and no. I think some people are always going to want to voice their opinion and be heard, and sadly that tends to be more negative than positive,” he added. They’re a very important race and they do feature in the game.

What we’ve decided to do is that we’ve added additional content and then made them playable. We didn’t want to disappoint people. We actually thought by adding more content, that would make it an exciting pre-order proposition for them. But certainly all of the criticism that we’ve taken and the comments that have been made, we have been absorbing and taking on board for future products.”