To Buy or NOT to Buy?

[Amun Nefer]

I have heard some rather awful things about this game re: activation and security. Should I get this title or stick with Rome and Medieval II (which I can't find right now :/)?

[Ethelred Unread]

Which things have you got an issue with?

Steam?

[Rick]

Although I haven't bought it I do have some observations regarding it. I have also read the negative reviews on ETW, but I've also heard from people I trust who have the game, who really like it. There are very few computer wargames out there covering this era and many officionados of this era have bought it for that reason, applying whatever patches and mods that somehow correct its problems.

Now, the upcoming NTW is suppose to solve many of the negative problems of ETW. We'll see.

That being said, I intend to buy ETW eventually, but my financial situation at the moment precludes this. So I'll be waiting for ETW to go on sale once NTW is released. At least I hope it will go on sale.

[Fisherking]

I don't know what those problems could be...

I never had an issue with activation or security. Most of the serious in game issues are solved. Most recent problems have come from patches going over mods, so far as I know...

[Amun Nefer]

You can see all of them listed here: http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Total-War-Pc/product-reviews/B0018YXM3Y/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

Well it appears that you need an open internet connection while playing and a few other things. I like to cut off my net when I play games. (some h4x0r5 are vewy mad at me atm :p)

Btw, Special Edition of NTW only 40 bucks. :D

I use Steam and it doesn't really bother me at all, but I'm not sure I want something that apparently won't let me reinstall the game on another comp if I decide to get rid of my three-year old M2010. :/

[Peasant Phill]

You don't need open internet connection to play the game. I always shut diwn my internet before playing ETW and the game plays just fine.

And I'm quite sure you can install ETW on other computers. I thought that was one of the advantages of steam, that you could access your games on any computer you like (as long as you have the time to download and install them).

What are the other complaints?

[Amun Nefer]

A lot of these other dudes (and dudettes, women do play video games now :p) are saying otherwise. I bought it but returned it because I decided that 20 bucks extra for Special Forces wasn't worth it and never got the regular one. I can't verify these claims myself.

Well some people are complaining about install times, but I mean big game = long install time, duh.

Here's some of the more descriptive negative reviews: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2UJYQ5DV429F5/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0018YXM3Y&nodeID=#wasThisHelpful

Here's one with a lengthy bunch of comments: http://www.amazon.com/review/RDDUDB9YIRA4U/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0018YXM3Y&nodeID=#wasThisHelpful

The thing is that if well over 50% of reviews on something are one star on Amazon, it makes me wonder about purchasing the product. :/

[rob_au]

Having purchased E:TW on Steam, I can honestly say if you believe half the 'Amazon' Reviews then you reallllllly need to get your head read... Was the game buggy when it came out? Yes.

Did the game crash a lot : YEs

Does it now? No.

Was this any diffrent to most Total War Releases: No.

People seem to expect 'bug free' games these days and it doesn't happen.. they also seem to think that amazon = a good place to get reviews.. which it's not, most people who are on amazon are just there to abuse things and half of them you wonder if they even HAVE the game.

You want a fair review of the game and it's plus's and minus's go and look at Metacritic where you will note that from Professional Critics it has a score of 90 and from users it has a score of 6.7.

Least there you tend to get 'real' reviews.

And if your really worried about the price? Just wait for it to be on 'sale' like it was over christmas and new years.

[pevergreen]

Would you rather play the story based campaigns in Napoleon, or the Grand Campaign in Empire.


Thats the main difference. Pick which one and buy that.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Having purchased E:TW on Steam, I can honestly say if you believe half the 'Amazon' Reviews then you reallllllly need to get your head read... Was the game buggy when it came out? Yes.

Did the game crash a lot : YEs

Does it now? No.

Was this any diffrent to most Total War Releases: No.

People seem to expect 'bug free' games these days and it doesn't happen.. they also seem to think that amazon = a good place to get reviews.. which it's not, most people who are on amazon are just there to abuse things and half of them you wonder if they even HAVE the game.

You want a fair review of the game and it's plus's and minus's go and look at Metacritic where you will note that from Professional Critics it has a score of 90 and from users it has a score of 6.7.

Least there you tend to get 'real' reviews.

And if your really worried about the price? Just wait for it to be on 'sale' like it was over christmas and new years.

Metacritic isn't a good way to find out if a game is good or not, not by a long shot.

[Hooahguy]

id say if your system isnt running the minimum for it, then by all means go ahead.
i loved ETW but due to time constraints i no longer have the time to sit down and play for 5-6 hours, which is pretty easy to do with this game.
i also had to uninstall ETW to make room for Crysis. but i promise once school is out im going back to ETW.
its even better with mods.

[Amun Nefer]

I just take the view that if enough people are saying the same thing (and I doubt most of the negative ones there are BS) there must at least be something behind it and it's worth investigating. I don't mean this to sound like an insult, but saying that just because your experience was good means that all of that is false is completely unscientific and illogical. That is why you need to test something multiple times before you can each a real conclusion. For one thing a lot of these guys actually updated their reviews when new patches came out and found there were still glaring errors.

It's like saying everything on Wikipedia is fake. Sure there are a few guys that might screw things up and just be there to be troll and be morons, but the vast majority are trying to be helpful. I speak from experience that much of what I find is correct. Sure some people will take the fruitcake approach (bad mouthing without even trying it), but you can usually tell when that is the case.

It's not about price, but I figured if SF is 70 and Reg is 50 then why pay 20 bucks extra for some silly units? Even if one of them is Old Ironsides, it ain't worth it.

Professional Reviewers are people who A, might have some connections to the company and B, usually have monster machines and all the other crap needed for these games set up. I don't usually notice most bugs for the simple reason that I don't care enough to look for them (except glaring ones like messed up flags). It's like trusting a movie critic to call a film properly it's based on their opinion which people expect to be "professional" just because they're in a fancy magazine, newspaper or show that gives them some semblence of authenticity. Some of those things are basically just well-written ads. :/

Also hey there Hooah fellow Son of Abraham o/ :beam:

[Fisherking]

Look guy, we are talking about WARGAMERS here!

They Love to complain.

Here is someone who recently bought the game and gave his opinion of it. https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=124736

It was a very buggy release but most things are fixed and it is an enjoyable game. It always was except for the technical issues.

If you download direct from Steam it can have a long install time but that depends on your connection.

Many of those reviews, the people have no idea of what they are doing...some are just crap and I wonder if they even bought the game.

If you are truly interested in knowing if it is worthwhile buying then just look around.


Oh! The SF edition is $40...and the regular is $39.99.


It still has a good player base almost a year after release.

If you just want to talk about negative reviews and bait people, that is a different story.

For what ever reason the US site seems to have been hit with a negative storm.... Was it deliberate?

I don’t know but it sure looks phony to me.

Try the UK reviews. Some love it and some hate it but at least more seem real and less made up.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B001ASREGO/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending



Oh! The SF edition is $40...and the regular is $39.99.
:laugh4:

[Amun Nefer]

Generalisations seem to be big around here, no offence, but I've seen a lot of that. :/ I read most of those while I was getting a haircut. :p

Meh I was looking at D2D mate :) http://www.direct2drive.com/Search.aspx?SearchTerm=Empire%20Total%20War I don't usually shop around for video game prices because I rarely buy new ones these days and I see no reason to pay extra taxes and shipping costs for having something shipped to New York. Using Amazon to get the Reg version shipped here would be about 50 USD with taxes and shipping (unless it qualifies for free shipping in which case 5 off! :D) and the SF edition is 54 USD or so at the lowest (the list price is basically wrong if you look closer) and the shipping is at least 6 USD by standard and the tax is maybe 7% or so if I remember correctly so it's about 63 USD. Not 70 of course, but still not enough for me to buy it over Regular.

So what you're saying is that's it something akin to a chan-raid but on Amazon? That's strange. Alrighty, so I guess I could buy it and find out for myself. :/ I usually have a bit more luck with these things and I am pretty good at dealing with this comp.

I'm not baiting people mate. -.- If I wanted to troll I would, but I am actually interested in getting the opinions of Total war vets. I also want their replies to the negative reviews.

You shouldn't just assume because I'm new and being a bit negative about a product I'm here to troll. I understand why you're being somewhat hostile as you probably have a great feeling of pride in them and a need to defend their honour. I know the feeling, I feel the same way towards many of the games made by Impressions and Tilted Mill. I like these games a lot, but I want to make sure I don't get a bad product as this is real money we are talking about. :/

Sorry if I'm seeming rude or mean, but I'm just finding this place to be somewhat hostile. :/

[pevergreen]

Sorry if I'm seeming rude or mean, but I'm just finding this place to be somewhat hostile. :/

Mainly because your in this section.

:smug:

I try to wade above it.

:tongue:

The people here are very nice, but since the launch of Med 2: Total War (I was not here before that) people have always been angry in the main game areas complaining and so forth. No one really defends the games and says they like them (apart from me, most of the time anyway. Always pre launch. :beam:)

If you think someone goes over the line, PM the lovely Martok or Fisherking, they'll help you out.

(I respect Fisherking for his RL stuff and Martok is the Camel Master and my Lord. Plus it helps that they moderate this subforum.)


It is a good game. It all depends on your view of the time period and the tactics. I dislike the time period, yet I still like the game as it advances the Genre and the gameplay from M2 and RTW. Yet for a total war game, I'd rather sit and play rome (Which I do!) because that time period appeals to me.

For my playthrough on the game on the afternoon of release, check here: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=113673

(went in picked it up around 11am, came home installed it and then this. started at 1:25 pm)

It has a few thoughts mixed in.

[Fisherking]

There are those who love this game and there are those who hate this game. There are those who hate anything CA does and make a lot of noise.:dizzy2:

There are even people who just hate everything.

Everyone has had some complaints at one point or another. Complaining is no sin.

You may find that a lot of people here hold strong opinions but they will not attack you for yours...at least they shouldn’t.

This is a good game. It is not as good as it could have been, but that is different than being a poor game.

There is a great deal of replayablity and it can be a lot of fun.

I had a lot of complaints with some of the patches but I was never sorry that I bought the game.

Playing it on easy or medium is completely different from playing on hard or very hard.

There is a lot of depth to the game and if you like the TW games it is worth the money.

The dlc is also worth getting for the most part and not too expensive. But these are my subjective opinions and like anything else in life there are many who would disagree.:yes:


:laugh4:

[Marten]

My advice: Buy it! It's worth it. Really! :2thumbsup:

I played it through the complete christmas time, 'cause Max started a new campaign as austria. And he was never really persistent in games ... he got a new wife, three kids ... so i have to finish this until N:TW (all better AI, believe me!) comes out.

And pevergreen: I like the game ... :yes:


Buy it! End of transmission ...

[Amun Nefer]

Haha! You know what this is exactly like? Sim City Societies. When that came out there was a great deal of anger about it in TM's forums, which were the semi-official ones. Most threads were something to the effect of "ZOMG YOU RUINED SIM CITY FOREVAR!!!!!!111" even though that was EA's fault, but that's a story for another time. Alrighty I see this is a similar situation and shall act accordingly.

Ha, I want to play as Austria given my heritage. (Austrian Jew so the old WWII jokes don't work on me :p) I was disappointed I couldn't play as them in MTWII. I know why, but it was still kinda lame. :(

I'd love to be able to link the games like you can with Paradox games. I'm trying to envision a combination of Paradox Games and Total War games. Basically combining two clear examples of Win into the ultimate form of EPIC WIN.

[Braden]

Personally I like the game. Honestly my first actual campaign "challenge" from a Total War game since Shogun...honestly.

Was I concerned about activation via STEAM? Yes. Have I actually found it a problem? Nope.

Advantage...play the game without having a disc in from any PC that has the STEAM client on it. Automatic downloads of updates and the ease of buying extra content has now won me over to this system.

Seriously, I was a major skeptic but now I have seen the light.

The game does take some PC clout to run well but nothing too special for a modern PC, other than that I have a reasonably bug-free game that I enjoy and find challenging. I can't play this game on "Very Hard" settings...Medieval II...on "Very Hard"? Phish easy...this, not a chance! :laugh4:

[AussieGiant]

Activation and Security through Steam has proved to be excellent. And I maintain a constant vigil against ever increasing levels of background software running on my gaming machine.

Steam has proved to be low maintenance, easily deactivated and is happy to be used in an "on demand" way.

I disable it from the auto start up list in the msconfig command. If I want to play CoD Modern Warfare, ETW or Blood Bowl, then I simply start up Steam, then run the games.

If not, then it does not require itself to be part of the bloat ware solution other providers aim their software to require.

There is no SecurRom, or other tentacle like aspects to the solution.

BUT, you do need a reliable internet connection and a relatively fast one.

[antisocialmunky]

Steam is only really bad on release day...

[Durallan]

Activation and security issues = None. Absolutely no issues whatsoever, as long as you log into your steam account and you haven't given that account to anyone else to use, you can play your game on any PC in the world. Most of the total war nuts are on here, so I would take their opinion of TOtal war over any anonymous ranting on amazon or metacritic or anything because we know these people have played the game (like I have) I don't remember any installation issues with ETW, alll I remember is the crashes. I still have to play it on XP though because on my vista 64bit install it still randomly crashes, so I don't play it alot. Waiting for NTW anyway,

I would say ETW is very stable these days, and the gameplay is good if you've never played the game before, but most of us on the ORG have a very bitter experience of it being so buggy and taking so long to fix that some of us just aren't going to get that out of our minds and be able to sit down and enjoy playing it.

So, if you have alot of money buy it! if you don't have all the money in the world wait till its on sale and buy it! its just as good as MTW2 now at any rate, plus you don't have to worry about sending diplomats all over the world map just to talk with other countries.

By the way, take any hostility on these forums with a pinch of salt, most people on these forums are friendly folk and whilst some like to rub you the wrong way (antisocialmunky for one :P) (just cause I pre-ordered again like a sucker)once you get over your newbness and become a regular poster most people will appreciate that, so hang around because alot of people are going to be discussing NTW when its released, and this is where the best discussions are.

[invalidopcode]

If you can find it at a good price buy the game. "Good price" means different things to different people but at around $20US, I would do it.

It's passable now as a game and you will enjoy your first campaign or two. There is enough to keep you occupied for a little while. However, don't expect any great AI or tactical/strategic brainstorms. It stills has some issues. So once you get passed the first play throughs you will notice the deficinicies and want to move onto something else.

And Steam is fine. No issues for me. Release day is sometimes an issue but the rest is fine.

I'd recommend one game as a European power, exploring the Americas if you can. Then another in India and work your way north.

Then turn off the computer and read a book or go outside and talk to somebody....

[AussieGiant]

I'd like to support a few guy's here in relation to Steam and its performance, on and around release days.

It's a centralised solution, so Steam comes under massive strain as literally hundreds of thousands of people begin to down load, create accounts and use the functionality on offer.

Keep in mind, other games are also being released which you may, or may not be interested in or aware of.

This can cause some frustration. Generally Steam does an excellent job of dealing with this loading...but...I do not buy my games off Steam anymore.

I have a 5mbit connection, but downloading from Steam and their enourmous bandwidth requirements means I can usually only get 500kbits of bandwidth from them. Even with small games this can take hours.

What I do is buy a physical copy of the game so I can install it straight through by DVD drive. I then let Steam handle the patching and credential handling, which means I can play the game without the DVD in the player.

[Durallan]

500kb/s? thats a pretty decent speed, I can get up to 420kb/s, and I'm not woorried about the hours downloading on steam witht hat speed, because before my new net I had 52kb/s and that took DAYS to download...

[Veresov]

Definately not buying. CA doesn't support their products and doesn't listen to their customer base. The Batman grappling hooks in the battle fort sieges and the idiotic melee massing was too much for me. The BAI was horrible and extremely easy to defeat.

Why bother playing the game without a respectable challenge?

[NimitsTexan]

Perfection it is not, but ETW is at least a decent (if not a good) game. If you are all at interested in the TW genre or the time period, I would definately recommend it.