Total War Pharaoh Steam reviews put Creative Assembly’s strategy sim at ‘mixed,’ while the TW Pharaoh player count falls below Total War Rome 2 from 2013.
You say this, but companies do love to pretend that employees are numbers and are replaceable but then key devs/designers/product people start leaving and you end up with a real brain drain for all the deeply entrenched institutional knowledge that projects rely upon. They are literally going to need to relearn how to make a good Total War.
Tired of these half baked shithouse total war games like pharaoh, troy and britannia. It must be so hard to develop a sequel to medieval, Rome or any of the other successful franchises that people actually want to play
I'd actually have really liked a Bronze Age Collapse game.
For all I know, it's this one, HOWEVER, my unplayed library is too big as is, but what definitely wouldn't have made the cut is another Roman strategy game.
Apples to oranges comparison. CA builds a lot of games under the Total War banner. Some are very big, very expensive projects (like Rome 2), others are really just a way of testing tech and training devs (like Odysseus). Pharaoh, as I understand it, falls very much into the latter category.
While the sales numbers look bad on the surface, for what it probably cost to make, I suspect CA is prefectly happy. Remember they literally gave Odysseus away for free. That's just how their release cadence works.
First of all, it's called "A Total War Saga: Troy", not Odysseus.
More importantly, the "Saga" part of the title is what CA uses to designate the smaller, more experimental projects that you're mentioning, which they explicitly did not use with Pharaoh.