TOTAL WAR:ARENA developers promise no more account wipes

Total War: Arena developer Creative Assembly has said that, following the release of the latest update to the free-to-play multiplayer RTS earlier today, there will be no further account resets, even when it launches. The studio said that it is now confident enough in the infrastructure and tools supporting the game to commit to making all player progress permanent from now on.

Creative Assembly acknowledged that players getting a later start may feel like they’re at a disadvantage, but it’s got that base covered too. “We feel that even though this is a valid concern, it’s not a good reason to reset everyone’s progress. It’s one way to say thank you to all those players who’s tested the game during the Alpha stages (some of whom have already gone through an account reset), as the progress they’ve made during the Alpha gave us invaluable insights into the game’s progression and balancing,” it wrote. “Additionally, new players will never meet high-tier players in battle, as the matchmaking system puts similarly strong players together.”

Perhaps even more importantly, it also said it’s made a “big breakthrough” in its efforts to reduce CPU lag, which should dramatically improve performance, particularly on dual core machines and laptops. A few bugs have been fixed as well, including one that made spear infantry much weaker against cavalry than it should have been, and another that caused the game launcher to freeze for several minutes at a time.

Total War: Arena is a new free-to-play game currently in development, and it will be the first title in the series that has a free-to-play model. Total War: Arena will focus entirely on online multiplayer, mixing elements of real-time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena gameplay. The game will feature 10 versus 10 battles, with each player controlling 3 units, each containing up to 100 men.

Authors described it as Team-based strategy with epic-scale realtime battles.