And Creative Assembly is watching closely.
Mod support has launched for Total War: Three Kingdoms – and Creative Assembly has made it clear what is and isn’t appropriate.
In a blog post, the developer said it will curate the Steam Workshop and remove any mods that breach the modding terms found in the game’s EULA.
“Please refrain from creating mods that are designed to provoke, intimidate, or antagonise other groups, reference other IP, or create content of a sexual nature,” Creative Assembly said.
Most video games have content restrictions when it comes to modding, but Creative Assembly will be particularly keen to avoid a situation where Total War: Three Kingdoms, which is hugely popular in China, hits the headlines for the wrong reasons.
At the time of publication there are a handful of mods on the Three Kingdoms Workshop that add sexualised female portraits, but I suspect Creative Assembly is keeping a close eye on proceedings.
Creative Assembly also stressed modders shouldn’t take artwork, sounds and models from the properties of other companies, with one rep pointing to Koei’s Dynasty Warriors franchise in a reddit post. These mods will need to be moderated, they said:
“For characters within those IP’s that have a distinct likeness – if fan made content is close enough to that likeness – we may have to moderate them too.”
Elsewhere, there is some disappointment at what’s currently not moddable. You can’t tinker with the campaign battle maps, the campaign map hexes, audio files, game code or the creation of battle assets. But you can mod starting positions, database tables, battle maps, custom models and animations and, as you’d expect from the above, character portraits.
Mod support only went live yesterday, but already there are some cool mods in the works. Currently, the most popular Total War: Three Kingdoms mod is the in-progress Hooveric Reskin. This is designed to give units more variations. Also up there is the UAD (Unify After Long Divide) mod, which adjusts the game balance “to trace the game back to a relatively real Three Kingdoms era”. There’s an Enhanced Battle Camera mod, and I quite like the sound of the No Death By Old Age mod.
