The little narrative event pop-ups, meanwhile, feel influenced by Warhammer. It’s like inheriting a saved game from somebody who expanded far too quickly and having to bring everything under some semblance of control.Īurelian (red) is feeling the squeeze here. If you opt to play as one of the Roman factions (particularly Aurelian), there’s a similar urgency to perform triage on your ailing empire as there was in Attila. It’s pretty clear that Creative Assembly are taking aspects that found success in Total War: Attila and Warhammer and retroactively applying them to Rome 2. Another five factions (including the Britannic Celts and Armenia) have the more familiar Rome 2 sandbox feel without the more explicit narrative touches.

The five of them get their own invincible leaders (like Total War: Warhammer, these people only get ‘injured’ for a bit in battle), plus special event pop-ups, and more elaborate victory conditions. Those three factions, plus the Sassanids and Gothi, are dubbed ‘Heroic’ factions. In the south-east, around Syria, the Palmyran empire is ruled by Queen Zenobia. To his north-west, Gallic Rome (much of modern Western Europe) is controlled by Tetricus. There’s Aurelian, with his unusual choice of sun god headgear and a hefty chunk of land that encompasses Ancient Greece, Macedonia, and bits of north Africa (but not, notably, Rome itself). In Empire Divided, the focus is on one period of the Crisis of the Third Century, during which the Roman empire was fractured, vulnerable, and had multiple claimants to power.Įmpire Divided offers you three of those claimants as playable factions. Getting people to revisit the game through a shiny new expansion could result in more reappraisals.įinally, the Rome 2 setting still has plenty of unexplored historical ground. The studio already repackaged and reissued the game as the (by then, quite improved) ‘Emperor Edition,’ but I bet, deep down, their pride is still hurt by what that awful 2013 launch did to their reputation. Second, it must still sting to have Total War: Rome 2 recalled as that game with the terrible launch. It retains 5-6k concurrent players on Steam, so there are plenty of potential buyers there (their more recent historical spin-off, Attila, has 2-3k in comparison). Primarily, Total War: Rome 2 is still played by a lot of people. Creative Assembly’s decision to do this, I think, comes down to three things. But the current champion must be Titan Quest, which just got a new Ragnarok expansion after eleven years. Paradox have been adding DLC to Crusader Kings 2 for so long now that we’re actually on year five (and closing in on six). Putting out an expansion that long after its original launch is an unusual move, but not unprecedented.

Empire Divided adds a new campaign to Total War: Rome 2, fours years after the game’s initial release.

Rome 2 won t start