Total War: Pharaoh will be partially refunded, first DLC to be free update

It looks like everything else about Total War: Pharaoh’s future is currently in flux. A statement made by Creative Assembly vice president Roger Collum says:

We have now begun the process of reassessing what comes next for PHARAOH, and while we don’t have all the answers today, we want to make it clear to you that we’re not closing the door on other, more ambitious updates to the game in the future. We’ve still got big plans, but we want to be honest with you in saying that we need to spend more time with them before putting them out on show.

Whilst we have removed the Dynasty Edition of the game from our lineup and have internally changed up our plans for what we go on to do next, we’ll still be releasing incremental updates to the game that help to bring fixes and changes to the core experience along the way. One plan that we’ve always had since the early stages of development on PHARAOH is to expand the size of our campaign map as a free update, and to introduce even more factions and cultures to the game. We’ll have more to say, and to show, what that looks like in the new year after our next update for PHARAOH releases.

The uncertainty around Total War: Pharaoh’s future might be the consequence of the game seemingly not having done very well commercially until now. Pharaoh was not able to achieve a high player count on Steam, remaining well behind Total War: Warhammer 3 as well as older historical entries into the series. This is especially bad timing due to the company being under pressure after the cancelation of Hyenas.

However, Creative Assembly has already announced three DLCs for Pharaoh ahead of release, so it will have to fulfill that obligation in some form if it doesn’t want to create even more bad blood between itself and the community, as has happened plenty of times already this year.

The blog post, which contained this reveal, provided information about the next plans for Total War: Warhammer 3 and its DLCs as well, which include a delay of Thrones of Decay.