He wanted to fix Total War: Warhammer 3 for free, but the dev said: „No, thank you.” Reason for saying no is kinda strange

Total War: Warhammer 3 looks pretty good overall, but there's a noticeable issue with some of the textures being of lower quality. Modder Dark Baron knows how to fix this and offered his help to Creative Assembly, but it was rejected.

This mod creator knows his stuff, having made a bunch of successful texture upgrades, like the Warhammer 1 Texture Update Project. The problem lies particularly with textures imported from the previous two installments of the series.

1. The textures were transferred pretty carelessly to Total War: Warhammer III, which messed up their saturation and added some weird artifacts in places, like random red dots.
2. Dark Baron began manually fixing them and dedicated a year of work to this task.
3. He offered Creative Assembly to provide these textures for free for an official patch, but the studio declined, explaining that it would increase the game's disk size.
4. However, Dark Baron checked it out and found that these updated textures are pretty much the same size as the originals. He believes the devs assumed he used artificial intelligence to fix these textures, which isn't true, as he did it entirely by hand.

Fans suspect that contracts are to blame

Sure, keep in mind that developers usually hesitate to use mods and prefer to create their own fixes instead. Adding modifications to official patches might just take too long, and the devs can't fit it into their tight schedules.

However, it cannot be denied that Creative Assembly doesn't have a good reputation when it comes to fixing their titles. The Total War series often has a lot of issues, and many of them never get resolved. In that case, maybe it's a good idea to get the mods to help out if the team doesn't have the resources to make the necessary changes on their own.

On Reddit, one player has an interesting theory as to why this doesn't happen. According to them, Creative Assembly outsources the development of many visual elements of the game, and contracts with these subcontractors may prevent the studio from using fan-made fixes. This would explain why some elements remain unfixed despite community requests, as well as why developers give very evasive answers to fan questions on this matter.

Would a different strategy positively impact the reception of TW: W3 on Steam, which has just dropped to "mixed"? Who knows.

1. Total War: Warhammer III on Steam
2. Total War: Warhammer 3 Review - Quality of War

Total War: Warhammer III

February 17, 2022

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