One day after its release, Total War: Shogun 2 – Complete Edition is sitting at “Overwhelmingly Negative” on Steam — with 83% of user reviews skewing negative and fans accusing Sega and Creative Assembly of shipping a broken, AI-upscaled re-release while quietly delisting the original.
The 2011 original is one of the most beloved strategy games ever made — routinely scoring 9s and 10s on release and still ranked by Kotaku in 2019 as the best Total War of them all. A modern re-release should have been, in Kotaku’s words, “an absolute gimme.” Instead, it has become the week’s biggest PC gaming controversy.
What Went Wrong
According to the wave of negative reviews, the Complete Edition runs worse than the 15-year-old original, carries old bugs that were never addressed alongside brand-new ones, and has gutted the game’s Steam Workshop mod support — the very thing that kept the community alive for a decade and a half. “Awful, [Creative Assembly], just awful,” reads one top-rated review from a player with 3,507 hours in the original. “So many bugs have not even been addressed, and on top of that you introduce new ones.”
Another scathing review laid out the core frustration: “The whole point of the community wanting these ‘old’ games ported to 64-bit is better stability and performance, which this game fails miserably at. Instead, they gutted the game of Steam Workshop support and it runs noticeably worse than other modern titles… They delisted the original game and repackaged it as a new ‘Complete Edition’ at a higher price. Absolutely shameful.”
Sega did indeed delist all previous versions of Shogun 2 from Steam while pricing the new Complete Edition higher — a move that has only fueled the fury, especially since stability was exactly what the community asked for.
The AI Upscaling Accusations
The most incendiary element is the artwork. Sega, Creative Assembly and co-developer Mataboo promised “improved visuals” and “1440p and 4K UI scaling,” but side-by-side comparisons show unit cards with the telltale artifacts of generative AI upscaling. Kotaku’s comparisons found the process confusing a boat’s wooden deck for background and “smooshing” one figure to death, losing coherent detail in areas like bow strings, rendering gun smoke as what look like lampshades, and turning unit flags — whose specific emblems identify the unit type — into “a sort of art-deco jellyfish.” One general’s face was merged with his helmet into what resembles “some sort of 16th-century automaton.”
“If it’s not genAI then it’s inexplicable, and even if it is, it remains incredibly sloppy work,” Kotaku concluded. There’s no generative AI disclosure on the game’s Steam page — which, as Kotaku notes, violates Valve’s rules, so expect one to be added in a hurry. The original artist behind Shogun 2’s unit portraits, Roland MacDonald, has also reportedly weighed in on the game’s subreddit, calling the updated visuals “very lazy.”
What Happens Now
Strikingly, the few press reviews that exist tell a different story — just four critics reviewed the Complete Edition, giving it a Metascore of 86. Neither Sega nor Creative Assembly has officially responded to the blowback; both Kotaku and Polygon have reached out for comment.
In the meantime, players who want the original experience the way it was are discovering they no longer can — the delisting means the Complete Edition, bugs and all, is now the only way to buy one of strategy gaming’s all-time greats on Steam.