About six months ago, Total War: Rome 2 received an update from developer Creative Assembly that included female generals as playable characters in the game. From there, certain players began launching complaints against the game, claiming that they were being forced to use female generals, and that there were too many women in the game. Creative Assembly has now issued a statement on Twitter, reacting to these claims.
“There have been no changes to recruitable female general spawn rates,” Creative Assembly wrote. “But with the addition of the family tree feature and the new gameplay features it brings, playable factions may gain more female family members via marriage.”
Creative Assembly added that female characters have a 10 to 15 per cent chance of appearing a recruitable generals in most factions (although that figure is moddable). Therefore, the company explicitly addressed claims of a lack of historical accuracy. “The exceptions are the Greek States, Rome, Carthage and some Eastern factions, which have a 0 percent chance, and Kush which has a 50 percent chance,” Creative Assembly added. “This is to broadly represent the cultural differences in those factions during the time the game is set. We’ve not seen a verifiable bug where this is shown to be different or not working as intended. We have no plans to patch this out or remove this feature from the game.”
This statement builds on the words of one Creative Assembly community manager, Ella, from month ago. Although her post on the game’s Steam forums caused a new set of complaints from naysayers, the company appears to agree with her. “Firstly, I’ll say it again: Total War games are historically authentic, not historically accurate – if having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play,” Ella wrote. “People saying they won’t buy the game because there are too many women in it is fine with us – if that’s their reason, we’d rather they didn’t anyway.”
So, there we have it: Creative Assembly seems unlikely to give in to disgruntled player demands over female generals, having no planned changes to this feature. And in the meantime, the Total War: Rome 2‘s overall reviews on Steam remain mostly positive. You can find the game’s Steam page here.