Weekend Reading: Launch Day Issues for Empire: Total War

The biggest release of the week that has passed has been Empire: Total War. The game, created by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA, is continuing the Total War formula of offering a mix of turn based strategy on a global level, while allowing the player to get down and dirty in real time battles putting two armies against each other. The title was eagerly awaited by a lot of fans and March 3 and 4 were marked down in the calendars of a lot of gamers.

So, here are the facts: we have on our hands what is shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of 2009, as far as strategy gaming and PC exclusives go; we have a widely lauded and very popular digital distribution service in Steam, which is powered by Valve; we have the more popular by the minute idea that gamers don't need to go out and get a title from retail brick and mortar stores because games will come to them. But taking a look at the various Internet boards on which Empire: Total War is discussed, you will find a lot of angry gamers, still waiting to play the game some time after the official release date.

It all began when the announcement came that Empire: Total War would not have a pre-loading option. Basically, pre-loading means that the game is downloaded from Steam, in an encrypted state, before the game is officially out, in order to spread the load on the network and avoid bringing it down on release date. Because the game came out with a one day difference in Europe and North America, pre-loading was not allowed. The predictable result: there are still users stuck at about 50% of the more than 11 GB download of the game files. There were frequent crashes of the servers that offered the title and activating a game bought at retail, a required step in order to get to play, was a nightmare.

What would have made the launch of Empire: Total War better? SEGA should have set the release date for the game at the same hour on the same day for the entire world, should have allowed pre-loading and should have only made the Steam authentication a requirement for multiplayer play. I'm sure than more people would have gotten the game in the first days after release and there would have been less anger towards SEGA (for good reason) and Creative Assembly (for, in my opinion, no good reason).