JRock
10-26-2002, 06:32
This is long but I hope you take the time to consider the points contained within.
====================================
Creative Assembly,
I haven't much played with Medieval Total War in about two weeks now. I bought it the week it was first available in the stores here in the United States. (Yes, I'm just another one of those brash, opinionated Yanks but please read on.)
It was fun playing through one single-player campaign, at least up until the point where I'd conquered most of the map and then it got annoying and frustrating with stupid AI moves and silly rebellions and faction uprisings. I still beat it but that last portion I only beat to be able to say I beat it. It wasn't much fun, mostly auto-resolves of silly battles that never should have needed to have been fought in the first place.
The multiplayer, the few random times it actually worked were a blast. Successfully logging into Gamespy, finding a game, joining that game, loading that game, and playing that game to its completion really makes you feel like a medieval general leading his troops into battle and either achieving victory or being soundly beaten.
However that is sadly the exception to the rule in multiplayer MTW, where 75% of the time or more it didn't work due to one bug or another in that process listed above (or simply due to using Gamespy for your entire multiplayer interface). Easily the worst multiplayer gaming experience I’ve had in the past five years.
I was initially satisfied with the purchase of the game, but after owning it for a couple months with no patching of the MASSIVE and NUMEROUS problems, bugs, crashes, and forced-decisions this game comes with, it really turned out to be just like every other game out there: Incomplete.
For the future, CA would do well to allow more options for the player to choose from (instead of forcing us to use certain things and certain ways).
Perhaps when you come to items in your play-testing/beta-testing of the next work-in-progress that you can't decide which way you like better, allow the player the option to choose between the different ways of doing something. You don't seem to understand that what you couldn't even agree on amongst yourselves is certainly an issue that the players will be divided on. Instead of choosing, "okay, this is how we're going to make it since 6 of the 11 of us want it this way" you should offer both ways to satisfy the 6 who wanted it one way AND the 5 who wanted it the other. (My numbers are arbitrary and simply made to use the point - I have no idea how many employees CA has and it is completely beside the point.)
There are so MANY, MANY issues with this game that would never have occurred had the players been given more OPTIONS. It would take too long to even type a list here of the many items I am alluding to, but most of us players notice them when we (try to) play the game.
I know for fact I'm not alone in my sentiments about Medieval Total War, and in fact this post is sort of a conglomerate of opinions that myself and a number of other players have voiced since the beginning and throughout the months this game has been available to us. And I don’t mean on just this forum. Amazingly enough out of the thousands of forums out there, there are many gaming forums. Of the forums I visit that contain gaming forums, several of them have had at least one long thread discussing MTW.
CA, I do appreciate Gil, Target, and LongJohn (and anyone else from CA) 's presence here and their attempts to help work things into the game that players brought up here. I don't fault them for the things they did do right.
However, this doesn’t change what we ended up with and what hasn’t been changed or won’t be changed.
I do still believe many of the unit balance/price issues that are bandied about on this forum and the .com forum would be solved simply by having two different sets of stats/costs for each unit - one for sp and one for mp. This removes all the conflicts b/w the two halves of the game and allows more freedom to better balance the units for multiplayer enjoyment while still keeping the single-player more true to Medieval statistics and history.
In single player the focus on reality is a higher priority and easier thing to accomplish than in multiplayer because it is just one player against AI. The AI can be tweaked and changed to help create a more historically accurate feel to the game, but in multiplayer it is balance and fun factor that rule the day and this is achieved at the expense of some of the realism/history. You would do well to learn that.
I also know that so many, many things would be better for multiplayer if we, the players, were given more OPTIONS. A few of the glaringly obvious ones that come to mind because they are common sense are simple things like:
*Fatigue levels - the ability to adjust the percentage of fatigue in our games - None, 25%, 50%, 75%, Full, and Double Fatigue.
*Florin count - if the game is truly balanced properly there is no reason to ever have to limit this. Allow the PLAYERS to decide if they want to limit this. Allow the option for unlimited florin games - the player is still limited to 16 units max so it's not like unlimited florin is some horrible thing - and again it's just an OPTION so that players who want to play that way CAN. It's called Game Longevity... Replay Value… variety… Holding the player's interest.
*Ammo - Limited, Unlimited - should be selectable directly in the Multiplayer Game Setup Screen instead of based on a user's single player settings that aren't accessible once logged into Multiplayer. Again – separation of sp from mp via twin options settings – one set in sp one in mp.
*Camera Control Free or Limited - same thing as Ammo issue.
*Camera Control in general - to a request I once made asking for the ability to zoom a little farther out and look more directly down at my troops in multiplayer so I could more easily place and control them, you (CA) said you don't allow this because you feel it would ruin the game's graphics. Again, here is where you are forcing a decision on us instead of allowing an option - simply have a checkbox for "Allow greater camera range of motion" with a note to players that the game won't look as pretty.
CLEARLY those of us interested in more ease of control (very important in multiplayer combat where one slightly off click can send your camera spinning to focus on another unit instead of sending your selected unit to a point next to the other unit) don't mind suffering a graphical loss of beauty due to viewing angle.
*How florin is doled out - by player or by team. Again, OPTIONS. Some people prefer Team-based florin counts so they can ensure each team as a whole is balanced. Other people would prefer a player balance of florin to ensure that even if the teams aren't even when the game is ready to start, every player gets the exact amount of florin the host wanted.
And those are just a few of the primary multiplayer options issues. I haven't even touched on singleplayer ones like the ability to choose to play a singleplayer campaign with just armies (no assassins, spies, religious figures, etc) as opposed to the current mandatory full-on game.
--------
And aside from options there are simple coding issues with the game that no modern game should have to suffer with - one that comes to mind right away is how player start spots are created on the battlefield.
First of all they shouldn't each be hard coded in a way that ties them to the player's selected faction. Look at any RTS game out there (RTS games being exactly what the multiplayer component of MTW is all about – real time strategy (or perhaps in our case, tactics). They all have spawn spots for each player determined in more logical manners and they are located via the map making program used to create the map instead of hard-coded coordinates shoved over every map regardless of terrain or strategy.
This is the second issue - In the map maker, the person creating the map, be it a CA programmer or a player who has the map editor included in the game, should be able to position each start spot - the axis or focal point of the circular area in which each player's setup area lies. They should be able to set each player's position on the map and hopefully also the radius of the set-up area for each player (again adding another element of strategy to the map’s design phase). Not only would this create near-limitless options for maps (because we wouldn't be tied to the current hard-coded positions and layout), it would also correct the simple frustration of start spots cut off by cliffs or water.
Third, rivers and lakes should have their boundaries coded properly and rivers should be able to curve and bend without screwing up Passable/Impassable areas like they do now.
As it is now, the map editor and the way start/spawn/set-up points/areas are handled is a total kludge I would expect to see in a first-generation RTS game from, say, 1994.
Really, I could go on forever with the simple “issues” this game has that it really shouldn't have had at all off the shelf, let alone two months later unpatched. I realize there are deadlines and Activision looking over your shoulder, but if you want to do a game right, get the game coded properly from the beginning and also play-test/beta-test the darn thing on a variety of systems and environments. There's nothing quite like a game (MTW) that so many, many people have crashing right out of the box that says, "poor beta-testing". Yes, it’s nice that it works fine on all ten of your employees’ machines. Shame it crashes in some manner or another on, say, 75% of your customers’ machines.
Create a small beta-test group bound by NDA to help you test the stability of the game. If you're worried about leaked betas, hell, just hold a 50-person LAN party in your town with invitations sent out to gamers around the area asking them if they'd like to help play-test your new game. I'm positive a lot of gamers would be VERY, VERY willing to help ensure a game is going to work right from the beginning and at the same time get a peek at your work in progress. Heck, you might even get some valuable fan/player feedback from it too! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/eek.gif
To step back from my rant and bring this to a close…
I wish you the best with the patch. I'll grab it if/when it ever comes out and see how much stuff it fixes/breaks. I hope to keep this game installed and play some Custom Battles once in a while in the meantime, but overall I have to say this game is not the success it could be, should be, and would be had it been done more correctly from the ground up.
All in all, MTW was certainly a memorable game and enjoyable for me at least in Custom Battle (which is pretty sad considering how little of the game Custom Battle is [Singleplayer Campaign and Multiplayer being the heart of MTW]). I had extremely high hopes for this game, being a military history fanatic and formerly-avid RTS player and war gamer.
You have an excellent idea in these Total War games, I think you just need to let go a little more – allow more options and get away from this archaic game engine.
Hopefully the revenues from STW and MTW will go towards making better the next Total War game in the series. Personally I hope to see one based on Roman/Greek times with all those wonderful factions like the Macedonians, Gaul, Barbarians, etc., but that’s a topic for another thread. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif
Best wishes,
-J
====================================
Creative Assembly,
I haven't much played with Medieval Total War in about two weeks now. I bought it the week it was first available in the stores here in the United States. (Yes, I'm just another one of those brash, opinionated Yanks but please read on.)
It was fun playing through one single-player campaign, at least up until the point where I'd conquered most of the map and then it got annoying and frustrating with stupid AI moves and silly rebellions and faction uprisings. I still beat it but that last portion I only beat to be able to say I beat it. It wasn't much fun, mostly auto-resolves of silly battles that never should have needed to have been fought in the first place.
The multiplayer, the few random times it actually worked were a blast. Successfully logging into Gamespy, finding a game, joining that game, loading that game, and playing that game to its completion really makes you feel like a medieval general leading his troops into battle and either achieving victory or being soundly beaten.
However that is sadly the exception to the rule in multiplayer MTW, where 75% of the time or more it didn't work due to one bug or another in that process listed above (or simply due to using Gamespy for your entire multiplayer interface). Easily the worst multiplayer gaming experience I’ve had in the past five years.
I was initially satisfied with the purchase of the game, but after owning it for a couple months with no patching of the MASSIVE and NUMEROUS problems, bugs, crashes, and forced-decisions this game comes with, it really turned out to be just like every other game out there: Incomplete.
For the future, CA would do well to allow more options for the player to choose from (instead of forcing us to use certain things and certain ways).
Perhaps when you come to items in your play-testing/beta-testing of the next work-in-progress that you can't decide which way you like better, allow the player the option to choose between the different ways of doing something. You don't seem to understand that what you couldn't even agree on amongst yourselves is certainly an issue that the players will be divided on. Instead of choosing, "okay, this is how we're going to make it since 6 of the 11 of us want it this way" you should offer both ways to satisfy the 6 who wanted it one way AND the 5 who wanted it the other. (My numbers are arbitrary and simply made to use the point - I have no idea how many employees CA has and it is completely beside the point.)
There are so MANY, MANY issues with this game that would never have occurred had the players been given more OPTIONS. It would take too long to even type a list here of the many items I am alluding to, but most of us players notice them when we (try to) play the game.
I know for fact I'm not alone in my sentiments about Medieval Total War, and in fact this post is sort of a conglomerate of opinions that myself and a number of other players have voiced since the beginning and throughout the months this game has been available to us. And I don’t mean on just this forum. Amazingly enough out of the thousands of forums out there, there are many gaming forums. Of the forums I visit that contain gaming forums, several of them have had at least one long thread discussing MTW.
CA, I do appreciate Gil, Target, and LongJohn (and anyone else from CA) 's presence here and their attempts to help work things into the game that players brought up here. I don't fault them for the things they did do right.
However, this doesn’t change what we ended up with and what hasn’t been changed or won’t be changed.
I do still believe many of the unit balance/price issues that are bandied about on this forum and the .com forum would be solved simply by having two different sets of stats/costs for each unit - one for sp and one for mp. This removes all the conflicts b/w the two halves of the game and allows more freedom to better balance the units for multiplayer enjoyment while still keeping the single-player more true to Medieval statistics and history.
In single player the focus on reality is a higher priority and easier thing to accomplish than in multiplayer because it is just one player against AI. The AI can be tweaked and changed to help create a more historically accurate feel to the game, but in multiplayer it is balance and fun factor that rule the day and this is achieved at the expense of some of the realism/history. You would do well to learn that.
I also know that so many, many things would be better for multiplayer if we, the players, were given more OPTIONS. A few of the glaringly obvious ones that come to mind because they are common sense are simple things like:
*Fatigue levels - the ability to adjust the percentage of fatigue in our games - None, 25%, 50%, 75%, Full, and Double Fatigue.
*Florin count - if the game is truly balanced properly there is no reason to ever have to limit this. Allow the PLAYERS to decide if they want to limit this. Allow the option for unlimited florin games - the player is still limited to 16 units max so it's not like unlimited florin is some horrible thing - and again it's just an OPTION so that players who want to play that way CAN. It's called Game Longevity... Replay Value… variety… Holding the player's interest.
*Ammo - Limited, Unlimited - should be selectable directly in the Multiplayer Game Setup Screen instead of based on a user's single player settings that aren't accessible once logged into Multiplayer. Again – separation of sp from mp via twin options settings – one set in sp one in mp.
*Camera Control Free or Limited - same thing as Ammo issue.
*Camera Control in general - to a request I once made asking for the ability to zoom a little farther out and look more directly down at my troops in multiplayer so I could more easily place and control them, you (CA) said you don't allow this because you feel it would ruin the game's graphics. Again, here is where you are forcing a decision on us instead of allowing an option - simply have a checkbox for "Allow greater camera range of motion" with a note to players that the game won't look as pretty.
CLEARLY those of us interested in more ease of control (very important in multiplayer combat where one slightly off click can send your camera spinning to focus on another unit instead of sending your selected unit to a point next to the other unit) don't mind suffering a graphical loss of beauty due to viewing angle.
*How florin is doled out - by player or by team. Again, OPTIONS. Some people prefer Team-based florin counts so they can ensure each team as a whole is balanced. Other people would prefer a player balance of florin to ensure that even if the teams aren't even when the game is ready to start, every player gets the exact amount of florin the host wanted.
And those are just a few of the primary multiplayer options issues. I haven't even touched on singleplayer ones like the ability to choose to play a singleplayer campaign with just armies (no assassins, spies, religious figures, etc) as opposed to the current mandatory full-on game.
--------
And aside from options there are simple coding issues with the game that no modern game should have to suffer with - one that comes to mind right away is how player start spots are created on the battlefield.
First of all they shouldn't each be hard coded in a way that ties them to the player's selected faction. Look at any RTS game out there (RTS games being exactly what the multiplayer component of MTW is all about – real time strategy (or perhaps in our case, tactics). They all have spawn spots for each player determined in more logical manners and they are located via the map making program used to create the map instead of hard-coded coordinates shoved over every map regardless of terrain or strategy.
This is the second issue - In the map maker, the person creating the map, be it a CA programmer or a player who has the map editor included in the game, should be able to position each start spot - the axis or focal point of the circular area in which each player's setup area lies. They should be able to set each player's position on the map and hopefully also the radius of the set-up area for each player (again adding another element of strategy to the map’s design phase). Not only would this create near-limitless options for maps (because we wouldn't be tied to the current hard-coded positions and layout), it would also correct the simple frustration of start spots cut off by cliffs or water.
Third, rivers and lakes should have their boundaries coded properly and rivers should be able to curve and bend without screwing up Passable/Impassable areas like they do now.
As it is now, the map editor and the way start/spawn/set-up points/areas are handled is a total kludge I would expect to see in a first-generation RTS game from, say, 1994.
Really, I could go on forever with the simple “issues” this game has that it really shouldn't have had at all off the shelf, let alone two months later unpatched. I realize there are deadlines and Activision looking over your shoulder, but if you want to do a game right, get the game coded properly from the beginning and also play-test/beta-test the darn thing on a variety of systems and environments. There's nothing quite like a game (MTW) that so many, many people have crashing right out of the box that says, "poor beta-testing". Yes, it’s nice that it works fine on all ten of your employees’ machines. Shame it crashes in some manner or another on, say, 75% of your customers’ machines.
Create a small beta-test group bound by NDA to help you test the stability of the game. If you're worried about leaked betas, hell, just hold a 50-person LAN party in your town with invitations sent out to gamers around the area asking them if they'd like to help play-test your new game. I'm positive a lot of gamers would be VERY, VERY willing to help ensure a game is going to work right from the beginning and at the same time get a peek at your work in progress. Heck, you might even get some valuable fan/player feedback from it too! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/eek.gif
To step back from my rant and bring this to a close…
I wish you the best with the patch. I'll grab it if/when it ever comes out and see how much stuff it fixes/breaks. I hope to keep this game installed and play some Custom Battles once in a while in the meantime, but overall I have to say this game is not the success it could be, should be, and would be had it been done more correctly from the ground up.
All in all, MTW was certainly a memorable game and enjoyable for me at least in Custom Battle (which is pretty sad considering how little of the game Custom Battle is [Singleplayer Campaign and Multiplayer being the heart of MTW]). I had extremely high hopes for this game, being a military history fanatic and formerly-avid RTS player and war gamer.
You have an excellent idea in these Total War games, I think you just need to let go a little more – allow more options and get away from this archaic game engine.
Hopefully the revenues from STW and MTW will go towards making better the next Total War game in the series. Personally I hope to see one based on Roman/Greek times with all those wonderful factions like the Macedonians, Gaul, Barbarians, etc., but that’s a topic for another thread. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif
Best wishes,
-J