Creative Assembly says it did not make Total War: Shogun 2 – Complete Edition, the remaster that came off sale two days after its October 13, 2026 launch. “This was not a Creative Assembly developed game,” Roger Collum, the studio’s VP of Total War, said in a statement Time Extension reported on Monday. A team is now working to fix it, and there is no date for its return. The 2011 original is back on Steam for $29.99 on PC, Mac and Linux.
Shogun 2 came out in March 2011, Creative Assembly’s return to the feudal Japan of the first Total War in 2000. In 2012 it got mod tools and Steam Workshop support, which this site reported at the time. It is still the one I hand to people who ask where to start (it also taught me to fear a castle siege). A Complete Edition of it is a fair thing to want. This one did not get far.
Players found bugs, some of them carried over from 2011. Time Extension reports criticism of generative AI artwork, including a viral post mocking the upscaled unit cards. Roland McDonald, the original game’s UI artist, was reportedly disappointed by the upscaling. On October 15, Creative Assembly said it was removing the edition from sale and bringing back the original while it investigated.
What Collum’s statement admits
In the statement Collum posted on Steam on Friday, he says the studio took its eyes off the project. The edition “wasn’t subject to our same internal reviews and quality assurance,” he wrote, because Creative Assembly’s teams were focused on their next big projects. A small team of senior developers is now working with SEGA and the outside developer to bring it up to standard.
On AI, he drew a line. “At Creative Assembly we do not use generative AI to create game assets, including AI-generated art,” he wrote, and he said the studio demands the same of outside developers. He said the Shogun 2 situation is being investigated. He also said the studio uses AI tools where they help its developers, and he raised debugging and prototyping as the kind of work they help with. The partner is not named in the statement. The Complete Edition’s store page lists MATABOO beside Creative Assembly as a developer.
The version to play is the one you can buy. The 2011 release is on sale again, with the Mac and Linux versions Feral Interactive made for it. Creative Assembly said on October 15 that anyone who bought the Complete Edition can still access and play it. Collum’s own statement says that edition did not meet the studio’s bar.
Buy the original on Steam if you want Shogun 2 tonight. I will wait for the Complete Edition to come back, and this time I will read the credits first.
