Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On

https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f

by mrtbld • 2 years ago

157 84 2 years ago

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

I can't believe it's been 10 years since this game came out.

Rome I still has a special place in my heart. Probably spent more hours playing that game than any other. Even inspired me to read some Plutarch to learn about the lives of famous generals.

Rome II was somehow a worse game. Especially weird because it came right after Shogun 2 and its amazing expansion pack which are the best games in the series bar none.

Quite honestly none of those games have particularly good AI

oraphalous• 2 years ago

Our men are running from the battlefield! Shameful display!

---

Good times...

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

Ah that hit me straight in the nostalgia

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

Isn't that when the enemy general/army is running from the battlefield? At least I wouldn't call my own performance shameful.

kombookcha• 2 years ago

If you ever feel like going back, the Divide Et Impera overhaul mod really, really elevates Rome II into a great game in my opinion. Very, very strongly recommended.

simplicio• 2 years ago

The AI was never good, but before Rome II it seemed like it either got a little better with each iteration, or at least, the parts that got worse had to do with incorporating new mechanics (Empire's AI was terrible, but it was pretty obviously because trying to jump from armies with swords and arrows to those with muskets and cannon was a big change).

Outside of the navel stuff, Rome II's combat wasn't wildly different from Rome I, Shogun, Medieval, etc. This made it kinda jarring what a step backwards it ended up being.

harryf• 2 years ago

I used to be a fan of the Total War games, back from the first Shogun Total War in 2000. The AI was never that great but was good enough to make the game fun to play. The main thing was the battlefield mechanics worked well, rewarding smarter tactics, like flanking manoeuvres, which could allow a smaller force to defeat a much larger one.

The original Rome Total War was probably the most fun and Medieval Total War was enjoyable.

After that it just went downhill, adding pointless features while worsening the battlefield gameplay. The first Warhammer Total War was where I tapped out - the limited size of battlefields meant it basically became a tower defence game, fought in three columns.

Reading this, seems like they became a victim of their own success.

Der_Einzige• 2 years ago

Besides divide et impera, there’s also the excellent atilla total war

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh.

The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar.

It sounds like they needed people to manually create and optimize these for various maps rather than using an algorithm to generate it automatically.

Additionally there's this big issue with sea battles where each little boat has a little moving navmesh which little soldiers can move around on, including when the ships actually land and have to make the boat navmesh connect with the land navmesh at runtime.

Altering navmeshes at runtime (which are generally static stack allocated) is sure to lead to a bunch of stale references if the code wasn't architected to be flexible to begin with

This sort of detail is probably lost on non-technical folks and needs to be clearly communicated early on.

At the end of the day, I have much fonder memories of capturing the Black Ship in Shogun 2 (which used the old two navmesh system separating boats and land), and virtually no memories of landing troops in sea land battles in Rome 2. The feature was not important to gameplay, but requires refactoring the whole damn navmesh system!

fakedang2• 2 years ago

So how did you capture the Black Ship? I would basically use a bunch of fire arrows from bow kobayas to set it on fire. Others would use a pair of Nanban trade ships on either side to do a double barrage at the same time. And then others go ham with a heavy bune fleet.

Which route did you go for?

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

Just spam my entire fleet at the damn thing and save scum if I accidentally sink the damn thing. Lol.

Endgame campaign.

Really shows that in gamedev, game design trumps everything.

Shogun 2 under the hood was janky as fuck, but boy did they plaster over that shit with some solid game design and playtesting.

chongli5• 2 years ago

That may be the proximate cause of the issues but the ultimate cause was the development methodology. There was absolutely zero reason for the game to not be in a playable state throughout the development lifecycle given that they had Shogun 2 — an incredibly polished and well-built game — to work from. This was a management own-goal as far as I’m concerned.

Go back in time to the beginning of the Rome 2 lifecycle and simply proceed by iteration. Maintain playability throughout. This would’ve given them a much longer lead time on major issues with the gameplay.

It’s absolutely crazy to me that they would tear Shogun 2 down to its individual components and work on them all separately without maintaining a playable version of the game. A ton of it could be done with continuous integration, where they just have a couple of CI servers sitting in the office running the nightly build in an all-AI automated fashion. Heck you could even plug in a monitor to the server so that people can just walk over and watch the AI vs AI battles as a sanity check.

The other baffling part of the whole thing is how little communication was going on. I mean it’s baffling in terms of good design and development practices but it’s understandable from a dysfunctional management perspective.

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

Quite honestly, I could see why they would want to rework big chunks of Shogun 2.

Rome II with all its faults had working cities with plazas and walls. Shogun 2 had maybe 6-8 actually distinct fortresses, where folks just line up on some walls most the time and do tower defense. The AI was always jank.

The "tower defense" gameplay in Shogun 2 was way more enjoyable than in Rome 2 though. Having a small fortress you can tightly defend against overwhelming odds is more fun than having a sprawling city where you're running foot soldiers around plugging gaps along a 20 km long wall.

The other part is the crazy requirement that soldiers be able to fight each other on boats which are very often moving around. Quite honestly naval hand to hand combat is pretty boring, but tacking that requirement on by featuring it in a trailer is an insane decision. Sounds like the marketing team wanted to do Saving Private Ryan in 200 BC. The number of times I actually used this mechanic in a 30 hour campaign was like 3-4 times, and it sucked every time. Typically the soldiers would slowly disembark (quite often literally teleporting to land) and then immediately get run down by enemy cavalry since the AI would get stuck in the "disembark" state and soldiers would stand still barely defending themselves.

Shogun 2 had many of its core problems plastered over with solid game design.

Also CI in gamedev is not nearly as common as in webdev, mainly because the state space for a videogame is far larger than for a web app. These issues are caught at playtesting and QA time, and every stakeholder involved in that process should be well aware that they are shipping a broken game.

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

The other thing to keep in mind is that CA built their own game engine for this series of games.

Tearing up any part of the game engine (which dates to the late 90s) is sure to have big breaking consequences for other teams and any half decent project manager or mid level manager should be aware that this cannot be done in parallel with other activities without first really carefully communicating and engineering interfaces.

Any sort of navmesh rewrite or fix in the engine would ideally be done BEFORE non artistic assets are laid out. Ideally, they should have set out to automate the mesh generation and built artist tools for mesh editing as a major goal.

novaleaf2• 2 years ago

any navmesh alternatives for dynamic worlds? I am toying with gamedev and this one still has me stumped.

LarsDu887• 2 years ago

Well if you use the Unity game engine, you can always script a setup that does a runtime bake on level load. Not really sure about navmeshes that actively change at runtime though...

intelVISA• 2 years ago

The fall of CA has been sad to watch, many studios wrestle against a similar fate once the money and grifters roll in.

throw_nbvc12342• 2 years ago

I have mixed feelings about their handling of TW Warhammer III. Parts of it are harder to defend (Initial campaign, buggy releases) but the expectations of the fans are arguably a bit crazy. I have 1.8k hours between TWW II + III, which probably isn't an outlier of the typical fan i read feedback from as a lurker on /r/TotalWar.

People expect a DLC provide them 100s of hours of new/fresh gameplay that will allow them to play the same game for 3-6 months until the next DLC release. Comparatively you could look at the same amount of content and play 50ish hours of game play then set it down and play something else until the next DLC. Even though my play style is closer to the former, I think the expectations of the latter are more healthy. This mismatch of expectations and the pricing of any DLC (which adds in macro factors outside of the Dev's control) has lead to such toxicity on the subreddit at times.

It's also interesting how much that toxicity has subsided in recent months with positive releases, better/consistent developer correspondence. Which maybe points to my expectations opinion being a bit wrong.

sensanaty3• 2 years ago

Subreddits are generally cesspools, especially games like these.

Like you said, when people have literally thousands of hours spent on something, they can get passionate about it to a bit of an unhealthy degree.

I just bought WH3 the other day, and at least as a fresh player it's a crazy good game. I'm sure there's lots to be desired in terms of balance and all that, but that's the kind of thing you start worrying once you're 1000 hours into the game. For now my sole focus is "Holy shit a giant boat skeleton colossus that shoots a giant cannonball?!", repeated for every single new enemy type I see.

The game has so much content it's almost overwhelming, to be honest, so I can see myself spending the next 800 hours being amazed by everything until I start seeing cracks.

mgh95• 2 years ago

I'm going to be honest: I was playing Rome II as this article came up. I didn't play Rome II right at launch, but bought it a couple years on. I play it with mods (DEI). I previously played Shogun 2 (and associated expansions) and Rome: Total War

Overall, I quite like Rome II. And for all of the (valid) criticisms which can be levied at the incomplete state, I am glad many features such as first person command of naval and emplaced artillery ultimately made it in. Due to a modding community, such features become more complete, adding dimensions to amphibious battles which were initially missing. While I do acknowledge these are in many ways labors of love by game devs (or hobbyists) I do hope that ambitiousness in features isn't ultimately abandoned in game development.

I wish there was a "refund point" way of purchasing games: purchase a partially complete game, upon successful delivery of a feature (amphibious landing, nav succes, etc.) it becomes non-refundable. I feel like this may smooth over these issues, but I ultimately know very little about the domain. At least looking 10 years back, I can say I'm happy with Rome II with mods.

boneitis• 2 years ago

For those who like to read these sorts of posts through a case study lens, it's likely of interest to take a look at Mick Gordon's statement[0] on Doom Eternal.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33532078

joegibbs• 2 years ago

Honestly I remember playing Rome 2 and not thinking that it was that bad. I played it for a while and thought it was really entertaining. I don't remember it being particularly buggy at launch, but being 14 I probably wasn't all that discerning.

But in any case it and Attila didn't quite grab my imagination like Rome 1 and Barbarian Invasion did, and I'm not sure why - the later two were better graphically, more realistic, had more features, but even when I've been working on my own game I still feel indebted to Rome 1. It definitely wasn't childhood nostalgia because I only played Rome 1 the year before Rome 2 came out.

Maybe it's that the lower-fidelity graphics give you more room to imagine, or every settlement being able to be upgraded to the maximum, or the lack of a region system making the world feel bigger.

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

This is a fun one:

As far as I know, the only significant example of a “human face” gameplay feature that made it into battles was the cinematic mode that allowed players to control an individual unit from a close third person perspective. This was similar to the unit camera that existed in previous Total War games, but arguably worse because it forced the camera very close to the unit, reducing players’ tactical awareness.
During testing it became clear that no-one was using this feature, and design leads were unhappy that a feature they had spent a lot of time on was being ignored by players. They then announced that a combat bonus would be given to units while in this camera mode in order to encourage its use, which prompted controversy with programmers arguing that the camera mode should not influence the outcome of the battle.
Eventually design leadership settled on the following compromise: The user interface would tell players that it gave a combat bonus, but the combat bonus wouldn’t actually be applied. They wanted to explicitly lie to players in order to trick them into using an unpopular feature so that they could save face. I honestly don’t know whether a combat bonus was applied in the end, it’s possible that the button is still lying to this day.

EZ-E3• 2 years ago

Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any expectation that they might one day be unified. What that meant was that you had one part of the codebase that handled land units and land-based combat, and another part of the codebase that handled ships and naval combat, and neither half had been designed with the other in mind. The battle programming team was asked to deliver combined land and naval battles as a core feature in Rome II, and our lead warned that combining those parts of the codebase would require a lot of the code to be changed, and that it would create a lot of bugs that we would spend most of the project dealing with, and we couldn’t guarantee that it would be stable by the end of the project.
Leadership said to do it anyway.

I don't really see the leadership problem here to be honest, because of feature is difficult to do (because ambitious) does not mean it does not deserve to be done. I guess the problem was more that the time to execute was too short. An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

The developper sounds like he may have been a bit difficult to work with at times.

However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late, how could this allow any meaningful testing and feedback before going live?

Aeolun3• 2 years ago

However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late

That seems rather common for many projects? If you have so many pieces developed in isolation, putting them together only really starts to happen when you get higher time pressure.

EZ-E3• 2 years ago

Even if it's common, I still don't think it's good.

Some games seem to be made playable way earlier then in the case of Rome 2. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 and soon for Path of Exile 2 - all the content is not there yet but the main "game loop" and features are there, this seems like a great way to get feedback, and have time to adjust if necessary. In the case of Rome 2 I guess the management imposed deadlines that did not allow this to begin with. The author does speak of a demo for E3 but it seems like a small piece that was artificially setup to look good.

chongli5• 2 years ago

The part that's missing here is that Rome II is not a new project. The company has been working on this series of games for 25+ years now. They release them regularly and the bulk of the engine work was done years ago. The fact that they break the whole thing down and do it in isolation for every release is a mistake. They should just be iterating on top of the previous game.

Arch485• 2 years ago

As somebody who's worked in game dev, I can relate to the author.

You could totally argue that the incompatibility and non-modularity of the land + naval AI systems is bad design, but that does not put the blame on the author: they may not have had anything to do with it!

In my opinion, it is very much leadership who is at fault in this example. When the programming team says "this can't be done in time for release", and then leadership says "that's rough buddy, do it anyways", that's 100% leadership's fault.

scott_w2• 2 years ago

I wouldn’t even blame the authors of the system that existed. Even in a perfect culture, compromises need to be made. If the time needed to adapt land warfare AI to the new sea warfare AI in Empire(?) is high, better to just focus on making the thing you’re building work well than to be “pure.”

Now consider a culture that wasn’t, as reported, particularly healthy and…

robotpepi• 2 years ago

we couldn’t guarantee that it would be stable by the end of the project.

He said that the time was not enough. Also, we don't know the exact way he communicated the problem.

oreally• 2 years ago

An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

And what if the leadership/culture just responds 'screw you do it anyway, you're really elite right? You can do anything right?'. So the employees in the trench just goes on a death march because hey, passion and whatever.

And then at the postmortem leadership just plays the blame game for the broken product. Which is fine if you don't care about politicking, but now someone upside is convinced you suck and the layoffs come for you. In the author's case there seems to be even some sort of reputational harm. THIS is how the worker gets incredibly jaded.

zo1• 2 years ago

"An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z""

In practice this never goes as smoothly as you think.

It's a constant antagonistic battle between management and the people on the ground doing the work. Let's face it, the devs also want to have a chill time and develop at their own pace (because it allows them to not stress, slack off, but also because they can focus on quality and the art of it, etc). Management knows about this, they just suffer from a lack of ability to tell the difference between which one the dev is doing when when he asks for "more time".

Either way, you need engineering leadership that has clear goals and priorities. Having management with non-technical people that don't trust the technical people, along with conflicting and opposing constraints, will give you Boeing and this game disaster.

We need to bring back meritocracy.

jimnotgym• 2 years ago

But some management jobs are technical themselves. Take CFO for example. It would be very difficult for an engineer to become a CFO in any reasonable timescale.

Marketing, HR, Sales and the aforementioned finance are all things that a frequently trivialised on hn, but none of them would be an easy transition for your average engineer.

I am not in gaming but I run finance at an organisation that has a lot of engineers.

1) I spend a lot of time explaining what our organisation does to our finance team. This is rare in my experience. 2) giving up on engineering focus to want to become commercially focused is a big step, and not one everyone is going to want to take. Imagine suddenly being dragged into a meeting with your holding company to explain why your project is losing money?

Overall I can't believe that they develop games like this. If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine

sitharus• 2 years ago

An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

Yes, and from the article it seems that the author also agrees. However from my reading the leadership was so top-down and closed minded that if you said this the best case is that you’d be told you’re wrong and it was completely achievable because they felt that it should be.

littlestymaar• 2 years ago

That reflects my experience with software team's management for my whole career (12 years).

EZ-E3• 2 years ago

I feel grateful I don't experience this at my job (so far).

meheleventyone• 2 years ago

However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late, how could this allow any meaningful testing and feedback before going live?

This is a leadership and management problem, it doesn't actually have to be this way and is also why it can be hard to push back on requests that don't make sense because it's hard to tangibly demonstrate the issues when the game just doesn't function. And worse because games are a creative project watching something you've worked on for ages suddenly come together is a really compelling feeling and can be successful so the issue perpetuates until the grenade goes off in your hand.

I also think you're reading too much into the phrasing ten years on. In particular when he's speaking on behalf of his lead at the time rather than anything he directly said.

sensanaty3• 2 years ago

An healthier way to respond would have been...

True in theory, but a lot of the time leadership doesn't care and wants it made NOW, with no care or consideration being given to bugs, because the execs don't play games and don't know (or rather, care) how much buginess can ruin the experience.

For them it's a battle between pushing the broken version ASAP, versus taking an unbounded amount of time to properly do it. To be an exec you have to be short sighted since the only thing that matters is the current and potentially the next quarter, so you get shit like this all the time, since they're incentivized to do it the idiotic way to earn money ASAP and leave for greener pastures right after the money settles.

szundi• 2 years ago

These companies somehow always at the brink of bankruptcy and have to ship shit

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

What you're missing is the notes from the prior meeting where someone told the lead of the programming team "the delivery date is ABC, there will be no delays". The time to finish development was already bounded by that, so saying "please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z" is like showing a cow a card trick.

scott_w2• 2 years ago

Speaking as a manager, I’d much rather my team(s) tell me the plan is pure fantasy and a total joke than blow smoke up my arse. At least I have information to take to the other teams.

Generally, I’ve learned to accept that non-managers won’t communicate as well as managers because that’s the manager’s job: I’ll put the effort in to figure out what’s being said.

The only time I’d see someone as being difficult is, after bringing concerns, making a decision they don’t agree with, they continue to spout off instead of making an honest effort to get things done.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I think they did the right thing: raised concerns, tried to make it work anyway, and were let down by the leadership team. I’m willing to believe this is what happened because I’ve played TW games and noticed how they just seem to get worse. I’ve also watched experienced TW streamers rip into the faults at a mechanical level and how they’ve persisted for years while CA progressively seems to put out games nobody wants.

jonathanlydall• 2 years ago

Reading accounts like this has lead me to the conclusion that for any non-trivial sized project, the overall project management and effective cooperation between people (or often teams) is probably the hardest thing to get right.

And I’m not saying that it’s the “project manager(s)” who are the most important role, because most roles are actually equally important, if one role gets it wrong, the whole project has the potential to fail.

Let’s look at Hollywood movies quickly, your average person looks at headline names in movies like actors, directors and sometimes composers, but these roles while being essential contributors to a successful movie are by no means the most important roles within a movie project.

Movie projects are the work of hundreds of people and any successful movie is a somewhat monumental achievement of everyone doing their part at the right time so as to not delay parts for others and cause cost overruns. Think of shooting a scene, you have at least dozens or hundreds of people on a set and if someone comes unprepared on the day, they’re burning the salary and equipment rental costs for everyone and everything there.

Software development can be the same, rockstar or even smart developers aren’t the “most important” due to their coding skills on large projects. Of course competent technical skills are essential, but success is largely a factor of how effective communication is between all members of a project, this is from developers/QA/artists etc at the lowest level all the way up to the executives.

Everyone needs to be on the same page as to what’s most important right now, what the road ahead looks like, and spotting potential issues so they can be addressed.

According to this blog post, a large amount of the problems with Rome II were that everyone was working in silos and the risks and challenges of trying to integrate everyone’s work at the final hour was largely ignored by management.

Certainly project management here was largely responsible for the problems at launch.

fallous• 2 years ago

Choosing and managing people well is maximizing your chance for success. Good teams with good communication internally and externally ensure a good culture. Good management does everything it can to create and actively maintain that culture.

When you encounter an internal failure you can be certain it was because management failed in creating or actively maintaining that culture.

flohofwoe• 2 years ago

FWIW Rome 2 is the only Total War game I return to frequently. It's a good game now - better than its successors anyway and up with Shogun 2 (which hasn't aged that well in the graphics department as Rome 2 though).

satisfice2• 2 years ago

Reading this is bizarre, because I played a lot of Rome II and enjoyed it. I experienced very few problems with it (except the technology tree is tiresome and just feels like paperwork to navigate… I want an auto mode for that).

Some people just play things and enjoy things and have no idea that there is controversy.

Death threats over a game? jeezuss.

chupasaurus• 2 years ago

Death threats over a game?

Now, Doom fans are not like Disney fans. If Doom fans don't like what you've done, they burn your house down. © Mick Gordon @ GDC 2017

titannet• 2 years ago

Maybe you didn't play Rome I? I also don't understand the death threats but I still remember playing Rome II on launch - after playing Rome I for years - and being absolutely baffled at how bad it was. Apart from the graphics nothing was better and a lot was worse. And I actively avoided playing siege battles, for fans of those it was even worse as explained in the article.

satisfice2• 2 years ago

I'm sure you're right. I think I started playing it a couple of years after it came out.

Also, I found the battle simulations tiresome, so I stayed on the strategic side and auto-resolved the battles.

The one big bug which puzzled me is that there is a probability indicator before you auto-resolve, yet, no battle that it predicts you will win EVER is lost. So the probabilities are meaningless. I liked that bug, though. I don't want randomness.

dobin• 2 years ago

This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish.

I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why they generally suck.

While a normal board meeting style development, i feel completely bamboozled by this approach. Indie games in contrast usually start with an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, to test the basic concept. Then make the basic game loop fun. Then do the rest of the game like maps, sound, graphics, to support the central idea.

AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.

And people still preorder.

indigochill• 2 years ago

As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.

At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.

Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).

throw_nbvc12342• 2 years ago

Interesting in the context of BGIII and its extended early access. I had to stop playing after a play through or two of EA because i wanted the game to still feel fresh when the entire game came out.

diggan• 2 years ago

AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.

Is that actually true? Have you worked on AAA games or got this information from credible sources?

As far as I've seen the process, MVPs and play testing is a concrete phase even in AAA development, usually for each major gameplay feature, where they're tested with minimal graphics (sometimes just blocks/boxes) but still in isolation from everything else.

But, this is just gathered from the few times I've seen the process from the outside, I haven't personally worked on any AAA games.

langsoul-com2• 2 years ago

The problem that everything is good because it's profitable is quite insidious.

Usually, these early warning signs don't come into effect until much much later. And by then it's almost too late. See total war nkw with the latest Pharaoh release. The debt collector has come to get their due, with interest.

langsoul-com2• 2 years ago

It's also important to gauge how the company will pan out in the future. Leadership comes and goes, but the fundamental culture, incentives, self selection out and which type of person gets hired.

avereveard• 2 years ago

I remember those times, I loved the total war series dearly, and was burned by empire total war, which was a total mess at launch and never got quite to the point where it was an engaging game, due to the constant ai mishaps, bugs, wonky unit balance and a naval layer that was just tacked on hastily.

I agree that the backslash was unfair to te single dev, as the entirety of RTWII was a mess, for example with the new building system which was adding complexity without gameplay, or the larger map being too porous for the way a total war game played with unit stacks, and there was frankly too little time for a single dev to make a dent into years of layered systems

the thing I remember tho is that Sony was largely blamed for the downfall, not CA, and not single developer, at least in the more "sane" part of internet. Without taking away from this person personal experience, which sucks, I don't think the reputation damage really extends further than the few nut cases that obsessed over him

that said, I enjoyed reading the retrospective, and I look forward to KSP2 NDA expirations as well.

ryandv• 2 years ago

Rome: Total War was probably one of my top three favorite games growing up as a kid. The House of Brutii was probably my favorite faction, even after trying a couple mods like Extended Greek Mod which tried to round out the non-Roman factions with greater strategic depth. The sheer sense of scale and the "just one more turn" mechanic with macro-scale strategy zooming into tactical micromanagement in the battle layer was such a compelling formula, and I even listen to the OST every now and then all these years later. Absolute masterwork of a title.

In contrast, to this day I have yet to play Rome II: Total War after the backlash from its "disastrous launch."

vundercind• 2 years ago

I played a ton of the Europa Barbarorum mod, which had a heavy focus on historical factions and accuracy (for a Total War mod, anyway).

I’d been meaning to play the “new” Rome game one of these days. Thought it came out a year or two ago. Jesus, time gets weird as you age. Enjoy the first third of your life, folks, it’s 80% of your life apparently.

fefe23• 2 years ago

For the love of all that is good and wholesome, DO NOT USE MEDIUM.

Here is what Medium looks like to someone who was considering spending their time to read your content:

https://imgur.com/a/do-not-use-medium-WhK3omB

EDIT: Apparently imgur is thoroughly enshittified as well. I didn't notice, I'm using Firefox with adblocker. Try this url instead:

https://i.imgur.com/AIrZmUp.png

Winsaucerer• 2 years ago

On a related note, I also hate Imgur. Can be a pain in the arse on mobile, forcing me to use the app, making it hard to view just the image, sometimes looking terrible when not using the app.

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

https://ibb.co/wgsL0sk

The Medium is the mess.

But so are the rest.

anthk• 2 years ago

Stop using damn Imgur too, it's useless without JavaScript.

For Medium, replace medium.com with scribe.rip at any Medium URL.

lioeters• 2 years ago

Glad you shared that screenshot, it's so representative of the enshittification of the web. The actual article is entirely covered up by a cookie notice ("we log user data") with no Reject button; a massive modal to advertise the paid subscription to Medium; and a popup to connect to Google Account for some reason. I can't even read the article's full title. Absurd.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

There's no free lunch, I just run my own blog so there won't be ads and app banners

simonmysun• 2 years ago

What is the solution of this management problem? I imagine someone may say "agile" but does that make the experience of developers and users better or worse?

neaanopri• 2 years ago

Replacing the incompetent managers with better ones.

chongli5• 2 years ago

Iteration with continuous integration. They've been developing this game series since before 2000. There's absolutely no reason to keep tearing the whole game down, developing all the components separately, and then trying to glue it all back together in crunch time. When they started work on Rome 2 they already had Shogun 2 complete and in perfect condition! Just fork Shogun 2 and iterate!

The_Colonel• 2 years ago

It's all about incentives. The leadership has incentives to generate as much profit as possible in the shortest possible term.

Ignore existing and generate new technical debt? Yeah, this will cause problems years from now...

Drive death marches, promise them things you won't deliver, shit on employees. Sure, they will burn-out after the completion of the project, by that time my bonus check has arrived.

animal5312• 2 years ago

I love the Total War games. I missed out on Shogun 1, but after that I've played almost all of them from Medieval onwards. I still figure Rome 1 and Medieval 2 as the best overall versions of the game.

Rome 1: Playing the Romans was amazing, all the way to the corner where you could try expanding with the Egyptians and running into the Roman might.

They basically perfected the simple gameplay loop in this title. Later on they would make changes to make managing cities less onerous (good), but would introduce the concept of Generals to rally armies with (terrible). In later games you would need to move your General back to a city (and even later just in the province) to recruit, then you could set out again to fight. In Rome you you'd usually want your General on the frontlines in enemy territory to fight and you would create units in your cities back home and then send them out to join up to the army in small groups.

What this caused is that often you would have random small numbers of units fighting other enemy groups, so you'd have to finely decide if you could win a 3v4 battle, or if you needed to delay to get a few more units there. This added a randomness to both fights and how the maps played out. Today all of the TW's play exactly the same. They give you an initial fight you're meant to win, then you have to build more units until you can go and capture the next city, rinse and repeat. Eventually you have enough support and you create a second army. While you're expanding, because there are a lot more opponents now, you will get stabbed in the back and have to move your single army back. With Rome 1 you could decide to have a percentage of your units in front busy conquering, while roaming non-General group(s) could be back at home to defend.

Medieval 2: The generic starting European factions were less fun for me, so I switched to the Egyptians (with whom I had also conquered the world with in Rome). Playing them wasn't too hard until the Mongols showed up. Due to unit compositions it would take about 2 of your full armies to beat 1 of theirs without suffering too many losses, and they would show up with at least 3 armies who would roam and burn everything. It took some serious strategy to out-maneuver and beat them. Overall strategy wise this is still the best Total War game.

ossobuco• 2 years ago

I missed out on Shogun 1

I remember when I was a kid and shogun 1 was announced. I spent many hours in excitement, reading over and over gaming magazines reviewing the game announced features.

The game concept was simply mindblowing at the time. I was used to RTS like AoE and the likes, and always felt like I wanted more realism. Shogun 1 felt like a dream come true.

Such good memories.

animal5312• 2 years ago

Ah nice, I didn't have a graphics card that could run it but I visited a friend who had bought a new Riva TNT and saw it a few times.

Yeah, coming off of normal RTS games with only a few units to squads in a realistic setting was great (even though the sprites looked pretty terrible up close).

tsylba• 2 years ago

All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint, i. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety).

While I understand how, from the public perspective, you can be despised by the work and influence of powerful individual that can shape collective narrative and "destroy the things you love", I'm always a bit confused about death threats. I get this come from a vocale minority, not the majority of the mob, and maybe linked to a Flanderization of view on a public yet anonymous space that most often than not have no real will to be executed, but still, how you end up being that kind of a person ?

Asooka• 2 years ago

I’m a developer who takes pride in the quality of his work, and Creative Assembly turned out to be a bad fit for me having had that mindset.

That is probably the best summary of the whole article. From playing the modern TW games myself, it does ring incredibly true. There is no commitment to quality in CA's process.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

Total War games confuse me a good bit. I have played a couple mostly blind. The combat seems interesting but the game loops seem really, really bad for campaigns. Like, the game inevitably snowballs as you grow in power and after a very brief period you have little incentive not to to just auto battle everything because whatever mechanical advantage you might get from being better than auto battle; you’re going to lose less time irl just tanking the loss and spending a bit more game time to regroup (which rarely had a consequence). And it becomes a huge grind because you need to be constantly clicking on cities to boost income that you don’t really care about.

I’m curious what fans have to say. It seems to be that the experience would be vastly improved if the campaigns focused on small scenario sections with little to no kingdom management and just a series of planned battles that you must get through with predefined set of resources.

antisthenes2• 2 years ago

I agree, by the time you play your 2nd or 3rd Total War series game, that gameplay loop becomes really stale.

However, there are single scenarios and more targeted campaigns like you suggest in some of the games, I think.

antisthenes2• 2 years ago

I love the Total War series, but clearly some games in the series are very derivative and were just created to fill a certain historical time slot.

The first games seemed pretty unique (Shogun/Medieval/Rome) as they coincided with significant graphic and gameplay improvements.

Most games after TW:Shogun 2 in 2010 seem pretty derivative, with the possible exception of Three Kingdoms, and the game loop is still essentially the same (get early advantage - build up provinces to advanced units - steamroll everything).

Having spent hundreds of hours in that gameplay loop earlier, I just can't bring myself to play it again, despite better visuals.

lifeisstillgood• 2 years ago

>> many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint

I don’t think that is a believable stance anymore.

Social media does not make people say or do stupid, offensive or unlawful things. People do them and social media makes it easier to find what they say.

I think a major cost to the police in future decades will be finding people who just threatened to kill stranger and caution them. It’s all Part of “this is the society we want to live in” cost

Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On

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