Following their closed alpha relaunch back in November, Creative Assembly are back to releasing regular updates about their free to play Total War spin-off, Total War: Arena. With this relaunch comes a new partnership with Wargaming.net, the minds behind the ‘World of’ series and seasoned veterans of the free to play market. To tell fans more about the nature of this partnership, as well as their plans going forward, the Total War: Arena team have released the first in a new series of developer diaries for the game.

If you are waiting for alpha access, here are some top notch PC strategy games.

First off, the developers explain why the game was taken offline in the first place. According to game director Gabor Beressy, the team could not deliver their desired changes fast enough, so long as the game was still running. In order to build up the team that they wanted and implement the wide-ranging changes that were desired, the only choice was to take Total War: Arena offline to give the developers the breathing room to make those sweeping alterations.