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By Steven Asarch
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Creative Assembly released a statement on Tuesday regarding the recent controversy surrounding the game's access to female generals. In March, a patch for Total War: Rome II added a family tree feature, allowing players greater access to generals in a genial line. This increased the spawn rate of female generals for some races to 10 to 15 percent, with only Kush having a 50 percent chance at getting a female general.
In August, a small number of users shared their unhappiness about the change on the Steam forums. An image showing a full selection of only female generals started to gain some circulation. Creative Assembly Community Content Editor Ella McConnell tried to filter the rage, telling players that there was a small chance that this could happen but it wasn't common for most games.
"Total War games are historically authentic, not historically accurate," she wrote to a user claiming McConnell was being "sexist." "If having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play. 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."
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McConnell's post and the presence of female generals in the game riled up a few of YouTube's most outspoken "anti-SJW" channels. Arch Warhammer, who makes videos about the history behind Games Workshop's dystopian franchises, released a video where he went on the offensive against Creative Assembly. "The vast majority of your player base doesn't give a fuck about this," Arch Warhammer said. It's only when you try and shit on us that we start getting angry without you."
The outrage grew when the blog One Angry Gamer and neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer started to cover the issue, characterizing it as an unfair addition to the Total War franchise. Over the next 24 hours, more than 300 negative reviews piled onto Steam, with some pushing for McConnell to be fired.
In the statement released by Creative Assembly on Tuesday, the company said they have "no plans to patch this out or remove the feature from the game."
This is far from the first instance of a game's community attempting to get a female developer fired for speaking out. In July, ArenaNet fired writer Jessica Price over a single tweet that rebuked a comment from a player which outspoken minority did not approve of. In this instance, it seems, Creative Assembly is standing by McConnell and isn't letting the trolls win.
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