As if gaming didn’t have enough controversies to go around, fans of Creative Assembly’s turn-based war-mongering simulator Total War: Rome 2 have turned against the developer for, wait for it, letting women become generals in the game’s latest update.
A quick peak at the most recent reviews on Steam, the majority of which are negative, is a rather startling experience. Reviewers aren’t shying away from getting straight to the point and decrying, god forbid, the presence of women in the game.
Our favorites evolve around Total War: Rome II being infected by SJW virus (and the dozens of variants on the theme), others convinced it’s a bug, and one reviewer’s claim CA were taking ‘a Marxist political stance’ with the changes. The backlash has been severe enough to jolt Total War: Rome II from a Mostly Positive to a Mostly Negative review average.
The reviews have caused such a stir that Creative Assembly has been compelled to release a statement. The crux is summarized in rather verbose style as:
‘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. If a player has their male family members seek a wife and get married, more females enter the family. This means more female characters may appear as recruitable generals, but again, only in those factions where female characters may be recruited as generals.’
CA round off the statement by saying they have no plans to change or patch the feature as it is working as intended.
Recent months have been marked with other controversies surrounding the portrayal of women in games, with the one common factor being a pronounced case of sexist bigotry. EA’s incorporation of women fighters in Battlefield V – albeit with questionable prosthetic hook appendages – sent fans of the FPS series into frenzies of dismay. Conveniently, those offended by the inclusion managed to completely ignore historical fact and the other more blatant inaccuracies inherent to a World War 2 shooter.
