Empire Total War was the most ambitious of the franchise, also one of the most flawed. It’s AI struggled with the complexity of the games, sea combat was a waste of time, and it fell to the community to fix its faults. The platinum release of DarthMod Empire makes substantial improvements to the game’s systems, most importantly its AI, which the creator, Darth Vader – no, not the one you’re thinking of – claims is capable of beating humans.
Though, within days of releasing the mod, Darth Vader has announced his retirement from creating any new mods for Total War. Though, he will still tweak those he’s currently released.
I considered including the change log for the mod but it’s simply too substantial a thing. You’ll have to go check it out over here. The mod itself is a whopping 13GB and can be downloaded on ModDB.
On to the retirement.
Darth Vader, maker of this Empire Total War mod, and similar all-encompassing alteration-fests for other Total War games, said on his facebook page that “The DarthMod project will no longer continue for Total War games.” His reasons are twofold, he was not invited to Creative Assembly’s upcoming modders’ summit and also his claims that”CA continued to devalue my efforts to improve their games.”
Both emerged in an extensive thread on the Total War forums. Creative Assembly’s Craig Laycock announced plans for a modders’ summit where influential members of the community would be invited to their offices to talk about what the studio can be doing to help and also to make a couple of secret announcements. Darth Vader was not amongst those invited.
Darth has also taken a comment Craig makes later in the thread as a slight. He says, Craig’s comment,”There are some mods out there that claim to do things that are impossible to do within the limitations that exist at the moment.”, is directed at his work and is an attempt to “devalue” it.
However, from the very small list of attendees – only four – and a stated focus on Shogun 2 modders, it is not a complete surprise Darth is not on the roster. Although he has released a mod for Shogun 2, it is not as extensive as the work done on Empire. Also, the list includes people who have worked on creating the tools for modding, rather than those who have created the tweaks.
Will this perceived snubbing and retirement stick, the temptation to work on Rome 2 must be strong in this one.