Total War: Rome 2 Facing Steam Backlash Over Female Generals

Total War: Rome 2 is receiving a backlash on Steam's user reviews, over a rumor regarding the appearance rates of female generals. An update to the game launched in March adding female generals, and players have complained that too many women generals is historically inaccurate.

PCGamesN reports that a negative review on Steam complained that "over 50%" of the generals are now women, though no users have produced evidence that the rates have changed. That's indicative of a flurry of negative reviews. Its all-time score is mostly positive with 22,000 reviews, while the recent category is marked as mostly negative from 1,300 reviews. In response to the controversy Creative Assembly issued a statement denying that it has changed the spawn rates.

"There have been no changes to recruitable female general spawn rates. But with the addition of the Family Tree feature and the new gameplay options it brings, playable factions may gain more female family members via marriage."

It went on to state that female generals have a 10-15% chance for some factions. Greek, Rome, Carthage, and Eastern factions have a 0% chance, while Kush has a 50% chance--all in the interest of representing the cultural differences at the time.

"These percentage chances are moddable by players," the statement continues. "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."

Last month, community editor Ella McConnell replied to the concerns, with a statement that Total War games are historically authentic, but not historically accurate.

"If having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play," McConnell said. "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."