Dear All,
So it has come to this. This latest battle is over, and Shogun 2 has reached you all.
My sword arm is heavy and my armour is stifling.
Therefore it has come time to relinquish them both.
It has been a distinct pleasure to have worked at Creative Assembly for the last few years. Some of you likely won't have a clue who I am, others may lament my departure and others still may be jubilent.
We have all shared both great and difficult times together and I am grateful for your company throughout.
The British Diplomatic Service has a tradition whereby ambassadors write a 'final letter' from their embassy upon leaving a country and I feel it fitting, given the nature of what we do, that such a post can be made here.
Therefore ladies and gentlemen, for those interested, this is the last post.
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Whilst working as CA's Studio Communications Manager I've travelled hundreds of thousands of miles around the planet. From Europe to Australia, California and Asia. At your behest and driven by your hunger for infomation I've been lucky to see sunsets over Singapore and dawn in San Francisco.
My team and I have had the pleasure of carrying word of Total War from shopping centres, to busines venues up to huge stages, theatres and trade shows. Small gatherings and vast platforms for thousands in hundreds of languages across the globe.
This beautiful land of Babel we all inhabit.
Still; Sometimes, in those dark hours between real days, when you're catching a connecting flight at 3am on a weekend you wonder why you do it.
There are lots of answers to begin with: The love for the game, travel, excitement.
The first one is the same reason the programmers work late nights on complex procedures and the designers write thousands of words of documentation and pore over spreadsheets of values.
The reason why CA's historians read hundreds of obscure documents and translate pages of text. Why the sound engineers replay the same effects in different variations again and again, just with the desire to get it right.
It's for that same reason the CA QA team work through the night, joking with one another (In the most brusque terms) and stealing everyone else's pizza.
The same reasons the artists toil over tiny collections of pixels in the knowledge they will one day become Mount Fuji on your desktop.
And that's a great motivator.
But, in those moments when you're looking at your phone to see if your loved ones have called from half the world away, it can feel like you need something more. A human element.
That's you.
Without an audience a game is just a collection of binary data scored by laser onto layered plastic. Without the enthusiasm, support and sometimes passionate ire, of its fans, a game is a book unread.
So thank you.
At the risk of repeating what I've said before, you have all given us a job and we know it. Sometimes it might not feel like it but your voices and opinions are a regular feature in CA design meetings and discussions. One of my personal highlights of Shogun 2 is that many of you feel we listened to you. We're glad that's the case, because we did.
It has it's downsides too.
Sometimes we have to deal with the anger of someone's disappointment or frustration. Sometimes this is misplaced, their desire for perfection coupled with passion and imagination has built the game into something it can never deliver and will always fall short of. When you, naturally, fail to meet that very personal expectation you still suffer for not delivering.
At other times the anger is understandable. People who can't get something running, don't like what you've proactively decided to do or have other criticism of the game based on choices the team have made or action we've taken. We might not agree, but these people have a genuine grievance.
I am personally grateful to the vast majority of you who have been kind enough to share your opinions and ideas whilst conducting yourselves with dignity and politeness toward myself and our communications team.
I'm also happy to have met those of you I had the chance to at various community events and public forums throughout the world, thanks for making the effort to come and see us!
Please know this, no matter how angry you got, no matter whether your point was inconvenient or difficult if it was put forth construtively and politely, it was heard.
We've tested one another quite a bit at times, and we've always come through it. And that brings me, happily you'll hear, to my final points.
I think what gamers have with their favoured series and studio is a relationship. It is an ongoing and enduring partnership of people. We come from everywhere, every culture, language and landmass on the planet. We are brought together in an age unlike any we have represented in games to date, an age that allows us to share and connect our love for these games and their themes. A time when gamers in Poland can campaign against players in San Francisco.
With you I've fought alongside Samurais, Red Coats, Knights of the Realm and Ancient Greeks.
We've conquered, and strategised our way across the old world, the new world and beyond to the far east.
We've beached trade ships from China to the Horn of Africa and shared tales of glory from these far horizons.
Sometimes our campaigns were hard, we stumbled and fell, only to rise and retake that which we sought. My thanks to all of CA, the producers who constanlty had to tell me to be less noisy, the IT crew who took my phonecalls at 3am when a PC wouldn't boot in Russia, to everyone; But particularly to my former team, Craig, Marko, Laurence and Peter.
I'll be moving on to pastures new inside SEGA and working closely with CA all the while so you'll still hear from me from time to time, an armchair general of sorts. My replacement will make himself known shortly.
I would like to leave you with this:
"Is it not a matter for tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, I have not conquered one?"
Together we have governed nations and negotiated, planned, invaded, traded and battled our way through history.
We have further to go.
To that far horizon gentlemen.
Kind Regards,
Kieran
Goodbye Kieran Brigden
Originally Posted by LestaT
that Sega themselves have shown at various promotional venues. With that said though, I hope they keep him away from the trailers 
.
