Lewie skews Chaotic Good where possible, and loves pressing buttons, viewing pixels and listening to sounds. He's written for publications like Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, VG247 and Kotaku UK, and spent 13 years running Savy Gamer. If you ever get the chance you should ask him to tell you the story about that time he had a fight with a snake on an island off the coast of Cambodia.
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Launching today on the Epic Game Store is the latest entry in the Total War Saga series. For the first time in many years, the decision has been made not to release on Steam, but to instead release exclusively on the Epic Game Store. This comes with some upsides and some downsides. The downsides are that they’ll be splintering the multiplayer community since the version that will come to Steam in 12 months’ time will be entirely segregated from the Epic Game Store community. They’ve also had to entirely remove any mod support since the Epic Game Store doesn’t have fully-fledged mod support yet, just a limited beta. The upside, however, is pretty substantial, where Epic have taken all that V-bucks money and are footing the bill, so if you add it to your account within the first 24 hours, you can get A Total War Saga: Troy for completely free, and it’s yours to keep.
Removing the option of a Steam version at launch is perhaps a somewhat tough pill to swallow for some, especially since the game had actually been previously announced for Steam, but it’s hard to argue with free. I’d be interested to see a breakdown of how many people are going to be grabbing this freebie will be people who are maybe trying a Total War game for the first time, how many are returning to the series having played some earlier entries, and how many are dedicated fans that buy and play every entry.
As opposed to the mainline Total War games, the Saga games are built around a specific moment in history, with a greater focus on storytelling, and focusing on the life of a particular historical figure. They’ve reigned in the scope and the scale and instead focused on historical detail.
A Total War Saga: Troy follows the story of the Trojan War, and I for one am quite interested to see the infamous Trojan Horse recreated in the large scale strategy battlefields of Total War.
We don’t know too much else about the game, where I get the sense that because it’s being given away for free, Sega and The Creative Assembly have been less concerned about marketing and promoting the game, since anyone with a casual interest will presumably jump on this free offer.
If you miss out on this 24-hour giveaway, the game will still be available to buy on Epic Games Store, and it’s going to be coming to Steam in 12 months’ time.
This promotion has resulted in one million downloads in just the first hour
We've had one million downloads for TROY in the first hour! Thanks to everyone who claimed it – and if you didn't, there's still just under 21.5 hours to get it for free, courtesy of @EpicGames… pic.twitter.com/eVNjiketzg
— Total War (@totalwar) August 13, 2020
If you’re interested in other opportunities for getting games for free, be sure to pay attention to our Friday Freebie weekly column, where we highlight interesting giveaways every weekend.