Players React to Total War: Shogun 2's AI-Upscaled Edition 'Enhanced'

Steam users say it runs worse, looks worse, adds more bugs, and clearly uses genAI to upscale artwork.

Steam users say it runs worse, looks worse, adds more bugs, and clearly uses genAI to make the artwork bigger.

AI Creative Assembly GenAI Sega Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition

October 13 saw the release of Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition, described as "an updated, enhanced and complete version of the grand strategy classic". Players describe it as "the greed they talk about in the Bible", with 82% negative reviews in the last 24 hours.

Originally released in 2011, Total War: Shogun 2 was met with widespread acclaim. With typically 9's and 10's across the board, it was heralded as the best game in the Total War series and has remained one of the highest rated games in the franchise ever since. In 2019, Kotaku ranked it the best, and The Gamer recently ranked it #2, behind only the then-newly released Three Kingdoms. The point is that people love this game. A reissue, designed to run on modern machines, should be an absolute fix.

Instead, the new version is currently in a very negative position on Steam, criticized for poor performance, old and new bugs, broken mode support, numerous graphical problems, and the alleged (and undisclosed) use of artificial intelligence upgrades for game cards. That Sega has chosen to remove all previous versions of the game from the Steam listing, meanwhile, and raising the price for this new version will only make people angrier. (It's worth noting that when I added the full version to my library on Steam, I also got the original version, although I can't get it to run.)

How Creative Assembly has increased the game's installation size from 3.85GB to 45GB is impressive if nothing else, but few will realize that the game adds anything useful. This is in stark contrast to the very few press reviews the game has received, with only four critics giving it a Metascore of 86.

The gameplay certainly feels awkward, the camera movement is choppy and the art of this odd mix of old and slightly less old looks blurry and dated and certainly not attractive. It certainly doesn't look modern.

We reached out to Creative Assembly to ask about using AI, but have yet to hear back. But with no announcement on the Steam page, some of the game's art is pretty hard to explain. I went through the encyclopedia of the new game and compared some images to the original ones and... not good. Below you can see some comparisons, the original version on the left and the new version on the right.

You can see how this process mistook the central wooden bar on the top deck of the boat for part of the background, killing one of the figures to death, along with a loss of coherent detail in many areas, including the bowstrings. If it's not genAI then it's inexplicable, and even if it is, it's incredibly sloppy work.

Here's another one that underscores some of the truly absurd implications of this.

It obviously looks significantly worse, especially where the AI didn't understand the smoke from the gunshots and rendered them as, I don't know, lampshades. But more prominent are the flags, where the specific unit type insignia has been lost and is now shown as a sort of art deco jellyfish. Also, check out the man in the foreground above, who has gone from standing on the far side to now being sandwiched between two planks of wood.

But by far my favorite is the Hatamoto General, where the upgrade hasn't tackled the small details in the original image of the face under the hat, opting instead to merge the two into a sort of 16th-century automaton.

The lack of an AI announcement on the Steam page violates Valve's rules, so expect to see it added in a hurry. And hopefully we'll hear from the developers soon, so we can find out which version got away with the "locator art was created using generative AI and unfortunately included in the final version" excuse.

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