The best game China won't let you play.

total war arena first released in february 2018 it currently sits as one of the highest rated total war games on google of all time with 96 percent of users liking the game that's more than warhammer one two and three and yet you can't play this game this video right here is going to be the last ever footage of this forgotten game and i'm going to be going on a quest to be the final player of total war arena so ladies and gentlemen grab yourself a cup of yorkshire tea gold as i am about to show off one of the most devastating losses of video game media that no one seems to know about total war arena is a 10v10 arena fighter game where players control free squads of troops and lead them into battle using their abilities and advantages to break the enemy's morale or annihilate them on the field of battle the combat was arguably better than most of the more recent total war games with morale positioning and unit type countering actually playing much more of a larger role which is much better than the nightmare mess that is total war troye's 47 variations of spearmen it meant that regardless of the enemy's units a good commander could use strategic tricks to quite simply outward to their opponent and it was bloody fantastic the game technically first came out in late 2014 in a closed alpha and then proceeded to be added and taken off of steam multiple times until eventually it was published by wargaming in 2018. this didn't last long as exactly one year after release wargaming closed it down that's right the game only spent one-fifth of its actual shelf life as a released game before it was axed which is an absolute travesty now of course i played this game religiously in the alphas and betas and i loved it so when it was finally canned i was devastated but then a few weeks ago i got a hankering to see if there were plans to bring it back and to my surprise the game had been back for over two years but this time in china that's right netties had re-released the game and western players could play it too provided they could navigate a chinese-only installation process and deal with glorious chinese server ping however when i attempted to install the game i discovered only one simple blog post from the developers announcing that the game was to be terminated on the 6th of may 2022 i had just under 2 weeks to somehow download a copy of total war arena translate the game into english make a working new account in china and somehow get into a game what followed is this bloody nightmare adventure okay so of course to download a game you just find its website then you find the download oh wait what the heck is this ah i think we may have a problem now congratulations if you can read chinese but for me this basically meant from here on out the process of downloading required a mix of luck and google translate after translating the page it suddenly became clear in the dev's final blog post that when they said you can no longer download the game or make a new account they weren't lying all of that had been taken off the website how was i meant to download the game and make the necessary account to play it anymore luckily after translating it i did discover two important things here though the forum was still active and at the bottom of the page the publisher left some helpful mantras which i will now recite resist bad games refused pirate games pay attention to self-protection beware of being deceived moderate games benefit brain addicted to games hurt the body thank you chinese website that was really useful to know so with the discovery of the forum still working i decided to hop onto it to see if they still had their account creation system set up and running and lo and behold it was still active the developers had forgotten to take it down so i could finally make myself an account amazingly it accepts my email and details as valid and actually lets me make an account for a game that is no longer going to exist so now it's just a simple process of actually getting the game itself without a launcher i decided to get a little bit ingenious and i realized the developers would probably still have the installer on the website somewhere it just couldn't be accessed by the normal means so i scoured youtube for videos of people installing the game and lo and behold in this video right here for just two frames there is a very blurry url for an outdated version of the launcher now i managed to guess most of the letters and bam it actually works it loads up and the launcher downloads there's just one issue the launcher itself is out of date and it realizes that so it tries to update but it can't and just gets stuck right okay that's a problem we need to find ourselves a more up-to-date launcher luckily after just a few hours of googling i found a lovely german man who just left an entire google document of the entire launcher and the game itself so fantastic we have the game's files we have the launcher i'm sure from this point on it's just going to be a walk in the park or the launcher even loads up and i can even log into my account and it doesn't work the launcher doesn't recognize that the game is actually installed and when you then try and fresh install the game it gets stuck at the final 98 mark and breaks at this point i was devastated it looked like there was nothing i could do to get this game to run so i decided to call in some favors and reach out to the developers at creative assembly directly to see if they had an internal developer build i could use and after a few days of them looking around for one they concluded it was all gone and they couldn't do anything well if not even the original developers have a working copy and the chinese developers now actually fired and also an entire language barrier way then i think i might be just a little bit buggered and this lost game will well and truly be lost for good wait what's that angelic fanfare i hear building in the background oh my is that the messiah himself why yes it is it's evolos gaming a uk-based content creator whose channel began from total war arena and is now focused on conquerors blade a modern spin on the arena idea now i reached out to him originally to see if he had a working copy of the game as maybe i could buy his pc off of him and then actually play the game but luckily he had one thing better after a few days of back and forth and experimentation he managed to not only update his old launcher but also work out how to get the launcher to detect the existing game files by randomly pressing these chinese characters we found a way to add the game to the launcher and after a quick patch and the selling of my user data to the chinese government the game is ready to launch and here we have it ladies and gentlemen we're in total war arena all it took was about six days of work near non-stop trying to get this thing to run and here it is in english and i could actually play the game this is absolutely fantastic it is everything i i've missed from the game it is glorious we can play as any of the wonderful commanders we've got all of the factions here we've got the greeks we've got the barbarians we've got carthage and of course the new chinese faction which is horrifically overpowered if i remember correctly because they have access to these repeating crossbows which fire way way too quickly and will basically wipe out infinite units but my goodness look at this tech tree i can't believe all of this is going away all of this glorious glorious game never to be seen again now total war war arena in my opinion had some of the best battles of any total war game for many specific reasons number one unlike modern total war games morale is much more important positioning is much more important and also the rock paper scissors of combat it's all there you're not mashing 1000 variations of melee unit against another 1000 variations nope it is just this dude is on a horse he is weak to a spear this person has a spear they are good at killing horse and then you just basically mix and match it was really really good combat especially when you add in these commander abilities like say this barbarian dude here whose special ability when you get to tier 5 is the ability to disguise himself as the enemy or at tier 1 he has really good momentum meaning charges are better but of course you could just play as different commanders and get different abilities as well it was a really really fun game because it didn't just stop there you also had abilities trees where you could actually upgrade your commander's abilities even further you can make all of your troops that are led by you even better and run faster and do more damage it is just absolutely fantastic i love this game but i can't believe they're gonna get rid of it but hey i think we do one quick game against ai just one really quick game come on oh we've made it into a game here we go here we go we're loading in we're loading in the server is got our message and we're in oh yes here we are oh it's fantastic we've got all of the ai on the left there's also going to be 10 other ai armies on the right we basically get to pick where we deploy now of course we're cavalry so sure we could deploy in the city but that's actually not as much maneuverability so we're going to go on this right flank here and use our shock cavalry to just hopefully charge down the hills into the ai maybe run across these lovely fields here oh it's fantastic all right there we go i've got my deployment position in let's go and we're in ladies and gentlemen here's all of our lovely forces we're gonna move them up forwards and we're gonna take our initiative of additional speed and hopefully get an early drop on the enemy we can also hide in these forests which is important and charging downhill is also important because momentum is huge in this game so it is actually potentially a good idea to hide in these trees where i'm nice and disguised and then just charge my way in what are my abilities i've got cavalry charge to boost away movement speed i've got momentum that just allows me to build up speed vision was also another huge aspect of this game like you really needed vision on the enemy as ai forces behind us oh my goodness there's loads of horses behind us and they're routing our peltists no oh dear i didn't assist my ai friends that's fine i can save these ones these are swordsmen swords one we can help with so we're gonna activate momentum and then when we get close enough we're gonna drop in a cavalry charge the issue is we're in a light forest which is really going to hamper speed build up that's okay we're pulling in close activate cavalry charge in we go look at the damage look at the damage done yes yes oh yeah so yes now we're going to be able to do good continuous damage here to the ai we've broken their morale of course because no one likes getting charged in the rear it really upsets you so we've got total war arena up and running thanks to a lot of hacks and a lot of google translate but total war arena isn't really designed to be played solo sure i can get a crazy uk-based content creator to play with me but could i get a normal person to do it a real run-of-the-mill average joe a default human with no special skills or qualities someone who will dedicate their entire life working for free as an intern for me yes if i could get connor brow to run it then surely i could get anyone to run it now he has to go through the exact same process as me translating the website getting the launcher from a suspicious link sending his data to the chinese government and sure enough even my unpaid intern was able to get the game up and running and with all that done we were away uh ready up connor let's go in the game because the game's getting cancelled they load all of the xp requirements to one xp so you've got two thousand free experience you can technically max level everything right now i'll play as the uh the barbarians i think i've got some cavalry we can we can support each other i just love peasant rabble there i know yeah you have peasant rebel but the peasant because you're playing the chinese faction in this game developed by chinese developers all of the chinese units horrifically overpowered absolutely absurdly powerful oh thermopylae oh look at this map okay so this is it connor where where do you want to deploy do you want to go on the top row or the bottom go for the other leg go for the other lane look at the penis i've drawing of the map i'm having to cavalry charge cavalry which is not effective but had to be done oh dear what cavalry do they have oh no they've got overpowered chinese cavalry run run by van run fleet make sure to use all of your abilities your commander abilities are horrifically overpowered i'm not going to try and flank around the rear what do these do the abilities generally just really good damage but as you can see your units are standing strong against them because you know their infantry and this is shock cavalry oh there's some exposed spears here oh there's some skirmishes so i'm gonna i'm gonna be coming actually there's a low threat something or are they coming i've exclusively charged spearman and it has not gone well i thought one of the spearmen was ranged units and they were not cavalry charge cavalry charge connor look at that back attack oh my god oh slammed in the rear use your dragon strike yes you've routed them you've routed them and i'm gonna get charged in the back as well um which is not good that's gonna break my morale we've created a man sandwich this is just a mess of bodies it is some of my men have routed i get to at least try out the respawn mechanic now um i've done a splendid job with ever so slightly pulling ahead of them yeah how can you see oh at the top okay i'm blind so the game didn't used to have a respawn mechanic but it does now which can make the battles a lot longer battles used to take about seven minutes previously i've had battles last 30 minutes charge charging power tests yes yes oh my goodness look at the kill feet look at the kill feet oh my goodness they were not ready for that horsey storm oh my goodness yes i murdered them i absolutely murdered them i'll even send down some cav to assist you i'm gonna see if i can pull off another flank with these uh horses again although actually it doesn't look necessary because i think we've pretty much broken through these horse lines so i'm gonna see if i can charge there's lots of units i can see in the distance oh that's you that's you fighting them it's me fighting them yeah they've got a whole bunch of slingers back here but i haven't quite been able to kill them but i have slowed down their reinforcements and you pulled some of them back okay no they're coming back towards me now oh rip my commander has been murdered but that's okay he couldn't live forever and he also wasn't very useful we're ever so slowly moving forward on this i was able to actually execute a charge there technically on paper oh i found even more lovely pelters to murder oh my goodness connor we are we're doing the damage you are up to a hundred thousand damage done there is a natural like movement speed mechanic here so the faster i'm able to build up speed the better right turn around my men get that momentum going build up some speed then charge begins let's go let's go let's go yes oh glorious glorious recharge [Applause] yeah i think this is just in the back i'll go charge some of that stuff in the back it's too late they can't do anything [Music] there we go gg there we go that was very good we did fantastic we did amazing corner right now you should be able to level up your units so that they're tear free and then in order to do a human vs human game we're actually gonna need to get more humans in on this so multiplayer worked and it proved to me that this soon to be dead game is way better with friends and it was sad it was so good with just two players but it was designed to be played with 20. with such a ridiculous effort just to get this game up and running we could never achieve a critical mass of 20 players sure i could run total war arena and even do a multiplayer game but with so many hoops to jump through for a proper no limitations multiplayer match it seems like i'll never really play toto arena again unless what if we tried could it really work could we get two full teams of 10 into a game and give it one final farewell party where would we even find this many people how could we find people with an equally enthusiastic love of real-time strategies multiplayer chaos and exploiting systems if only there was a way to find all of these people in just one place oh wait my own discord ladies and gentlemen and thus with a few calls to actions from my trusty unpaid intern dozens of exploiters were busy getting a brief lesson in the chinese language keep going keep going along um and i'll tell you which one which one we want to do if you keep going there's one with like a river straight through the middle which is really cool rubicon there you go of rubicon you can go on the water the issue is you get debuffs for being in the water of course is there a reason why the chat has a die 100 roll function or if you're playing d in a total war arena private lobby you need that dice roll yeah evo loz is playing alexander the great hammer and anvil cavalry so all right everyone ready up and let's go into a game let's do this once again see you guys see you guys at the end of the game team two have fun which side is the city side here which side is a suicide i don't think it's all low feel so yeah it's all fields there's a river through the middle uh sea is like slap bang in the river and is the main contested point he is kind of like on a raised hill so is d nice a penis thank you why is [ __ ] and balls you know why he's [ __ ] and balls you can do formations around the edge of it yeah of course you can it's actually incredibly necessary so cool the dogs are so fast what the [ __ ] they are so fast is ridiculous yeah the bulldogs i think we should actually be able to take c we've really weakened them okay take c and then we're gonna push on their base okay like we're just going to play this hyper aggressive take c okay once once we take c move up straight on to their base so soul and flame mage uh your ballistas are doing more damage to friendlies than they are to the enemies just beware well that was stupid i just realized it was on the wrong team hello it's nice to know i have all of the smartest players on this team today yes he's looking they're they're putting all of their focus on to see at the moment so kind of take heed whilst they're doing it i'm gonna i'm gonna commit my infantry to it okay i'm just gonna sit a testudo formation in front of all of their range units to absorb the hits okay it doesn't look like anybody's on e o e should be free yeah yeah that's what i mean i think i've got a free cap they don't know what to do with the testudo okay they're trying to cross the bridge on d again yeah pin pin the uh pin the one c or try try and apply uh pressure to their base is actually worth it but putting putting pressure on their base takes the pressure off elsewhere oh my the brave holding of my men did so well they held for so long oh lick snicks just got charged in the back now yeah we're doing really good in terms of map control oh yeah put them on the base yeah also try try and body block their entry into the zone so lick snakes uh test tudor and just like literally block people on the entrance so this is going great we've got control of the enemy base and we're stopping them from entering with the sheer mass of our troops we managed to outplay the enemy with superior positioning and teamwork protecting the flanks of our ranged siege units and sniping their ranged support all in all it was a great battle with some high stakes back and forth i almost got outflanked a few times but the teamwork was phenomenal we got to play a bunch of games before this and after this battle and honestly it was some of the most fun i've had gaming with my fans in a very long while and this right here ladies and gents is the final game of total war arena ever played the game closed down at four in the morning on friday the 6th of may uk time so in order to be the last ever player of total war arena i decided that instead of having a healthy sleep schedule i should instead play a bunch of battles of total war arena and i hopped into the game against just ais and played right up until the servers stopped responding the world came to a standstill and finally for good total war arena died there is something surreal about watching something that you could interact with permanently go away and the emptiness that is left in its wake but the real upset is knowing that no matter how much you might want it to this game is never going to return and it can never be played again so there you have it the very last game of total war arena ever to be played it goes to show that if you try hard enough truly believe and install some very dubious patches you too can resurrect a game that should have died months ago and it was worth it there's been nothing quite like total war arena some games get close but this this is truly unique it was the best of its kind but alas it seems the market just couldn't support it now to me that's really sad archiving games of course it sounds boring but it's very important to make sure that we're able to point to the history of art and media and say hey you can give that a go yourself for offline games that's pretty simple even if digital distribution means that some publishers like say ubisoft try to make games like driver san francisco unavailable forever you can usually track down a disk image to replicate the original experience but for multiplayer that's much harder take halo 3 on the xbox 360. the servers are shutting down this year and sure you can play the maps in the overall game in the master chief collection but the experience is fundamentally changed no matter how many classic mode sliders you have and just this month alone ubisoft took down the servers of over 90 games from the xbox 360 and ps3 era it's a huge list filled with some absolute classics wave goodbye to multiplayer just dance 2014 through to 2018. you can say goodbye to rainbow six vegas one and two now these should be available for people to play in some way just as it used to be what do you think ladies and gentlemen are you running down the clock on a multiplayer game that's on its final legs which game would you do anything to get back online and if you've got a game that's nearing its death with developers threatening to pull this over let us know go into the comment section and just maybe together we can do something to stop it happening because if we can temporarily resurrect total war arena we can bring anything back you never know just what we're capable of anyway thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for watching this very very special video of mine i truly want the membrave total war arena to be shared with the world and if you want to assist me on that goal then please do like the video it does massively help us out as always a huge thank you to the patrons and vips who joined us for the recording in this video and also pledge very generously to us thank you very much if you sat there wondering what video to watch next look no further than this one on screen now hand chosen by myself all right i'll see each and every one of you in the next one have a lovely day and good bye for now

Channel: The Spiffing Brit

Views: 1,968,462

Keywords: The, Spiffing, Brit, the best game, best game, china, The best game China won't let you play., china game, video game, unplayable game, unplayable, funny, game, gameplay, total war arena, hidden gem, lost game, game preservation, the spiffing brit, perfectly balanced game, strategy game, indie game, total war, johnny depp, ubisoft, china game ban, banned games, removed, spiffing brit, total war: arena, rts game, amber heard, world box, pc, heroes hour, elden ring, challenge, skyrim

Id: mcCOwdn_-Bw

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2022