Total War: Warhammer 3 has spent this month being review-bombed over AI bugs specifically and bad vibes in general

How are things going in the Total War community? Not great, yeah. It began when an existing bug that prevented some factions from being aggressive spread to encompass even more of them—namely the Lizardmen and Tomb Kings—getting to the point where it was difficult not to notice how many Legendary Lords were sitting at home twiddling their thumbs while minor factions went on the warpath.

The bug causing this was actually due to how computer-controlled factions deal with recruitment. Each of those lazy stay-at-homes was trying to recruit specific units they had limited access to, finding they couldn't, and then defaulting to inactivity. Apparently the bug had previously affected the Beastmen, but went largely unnoticed because nobody really cares about Beastmen. Which is harsh but true.

After a recent update spread the issue to the Tomb Kings and Lizardmen, it was spotted by YouTubers and Redditors who made it a talking point, deciding that the only way to convince Creative Assembly to do something about it was by review-bombing Total War: Warhammer 3 on Steam.

Which has worked before. Complaints about the Shadows of Change DLC led to a public apology and changes to future DLC, from which the online community learned that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. While 81% of Warhammer 3's user reviews in September were positive, only 13% of October's have been positive, dropping it to an overall rating of Mixed and a recent rating of Mostly Negative. That's a lot of squeaking.

Creative Assembly has posted an update on unit recruitment issues, and released a hotfix this week that seems to have dealt with the bug. Unfortunately it introduced a new one, which prevented some players who don't own the first two games from being able to access units added as "freeLC" in Warhammer 3. Combined with a lack of news about the delayed Tides of Torment DLC, the community still has plenty to complain about.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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