One of the biggest updates in the history of the franchise has left us with a rich Bronze Age sandbox.
Total War: Pharaoh got off to a bit of a rocky start, mostly by no fault of its own. It released at a time when community sentiment around Creative Assembly was at perhaps an all-time low, with discontent about the quality and pricing of Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC, the debacle surrounding the cancellation of Hyenas, CA's most expensive game ever, and at least for me, the lingering, soul-deep resentment over the abandonment of Total War: Three Kingdoms.
But Pharaoh itself was actually pretty great, to be honest. And with the crowning Dynasties update, it has really become the full-featured and comprehensive Total War: The Bronze Age game I've been daydreaming about since A Total War Saga: Troy.The scope of this update is hard to undersell.
It seems clear to me that Creative Assembly Sophia has taken the bulk of what was probably supposed to be multiple paid DLCs and added it to the base game. Perhaps at some point, the plan was to release Troy, Pharaoh, and a third game focusing on Mesopotamia individually, before combining them into a megacampaign similar to Total War: Warhammer's Immortal Empires map. What Dynasties managed to pull off, amazingly, seems to be almost all of that.
Now, one of my initial criticisms of Pharaoh was that I worried we may actually have too many campaign mechanics at this point. And Dynasties doesn't help that, layering even more on top such as a succession and royal marriage system. But I also found that, the more hours I put into it, the more I appreciate having more to think about on any given turn than my next conquest.
It's a bit disappointing that the 25 new minor factions added in this update don't get the same treatment. I mean, for one thing, 25 new minor factions! But knowing that we probably won't see the likes of Ajax or Achilles elevated to Major Faction status leaves me pining for what might have been.
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