CA blog from Mike Simpson

[Yun Dog]

I agree

lets hope that its not just words to placate us

and that hope carries us to purchase the expansion pack/not an expansion pack scripted campaign

but I personally had those same hopes when I read other words about what a revolutionary improvement ETW would be.

they say hope dies last.. mine died some months ago

now only bitterness remains

[Dradem]

I for one am happy with the blog,

Ok they released it to early no doubt about it, probably due to pressure from SEGA.
But also from a lot of the Fan base I remeber reading posts here and on the /shoguntotalwar.yuku.com (not to mention on other sites) that a lot couldn't wait for the release and where angry that it even got postponed for a few weeks.

I'm not blaming us just pointing this out.

[Boohugh]

But also from a lot of the Fan base I remember reading posts here and on the /shoguntotalwar.yuku.com (not to mention on other sites) that a lot couldn't wait for the release and where angry that it even got postponed for a few weeks.

I agree with this sentiment. Have you all forgotten all the DEMO spamming that occurred on these forums as release date approached? That was just a symptom of a general community feeling that the game should be released sooner rather than later and there were relatively few voices saying CA should take their time even if it were to add another 6 months or more to development time.

With a publisher trying to push the product out of the door and the community pushing for a release, what would you have done in CA's position?

Now, I'm not trying to absolve all blame from CA because they perhaps should have stood firmer against Sega as they clearly didn't have a stable and polished product (I don't want to use the word "finished" as I don't think a game can ever be finished as such, there are always improvements you could make) and Sega's own Q&A department should have realised the product wasn't up to scratch either. They could then have made a joint statement to the effect of explaining the game wasn't polished enough, or stable enough, to release at that point to appease the community to some extent (although as I said earlier, I think that would only have appeased a minority with the majority wanting an immediate release just because they don't care about the 'polish' as much).

Additionally, a number of you have admonished Mr Simpson for saying that the community has potentially compromised future quality by criticising the game so heavily. Whether you feel his criticism of us is justified or not, you seem to be ignoring the fact he is correct. If, due to the criticism of the community as a whole, sales of ETW fell significantly, then we will have impacted on future game development as they will have less money to spend. I'm not trying to debate whether they "deserved" it or not due to releasing a sub-par product, but I can certainly sympathise with Mr Simpson's position as a game developer. He presumably wants to create the best game he can, both for himself and the community, but is constricted by the amount of time and money given to him. Now if that amount of time and money is constricted even further due to the same community criticising all his work, I imagine that would be a very frustrating position to be in.

I think part of the problem was so much of the criticism was negative rather than constructive. Constructive criticism would help the developers fix aspects of the game, whereas lots of it was basically "oh, the game is broken" or "the way that aspect was designed is rubbish". That doesn't really help them track down problems or figure out why something doesn't seem fun (and remember they have to take into account a whole range of opinions about what is fun and well designed, as well as their own vision of the game which may well be different to your own).

All the negative criticism the game received from the community didn't really help anyone. The developers had to sift through all the dross to get to the useful nuggets of information on what the actual problems with the game were. The community atmosphere turned hostile and unfriendly to both CA and each other (you just need to read the posts in this thread to see how it has affected people, they've generally become cynical and hostile to any effort by CA to communicate with us now). In the end the victim of all this criticism is the game itself, in that problems don't get solved as quickly or at all and there is less money to spend on game development in the future.

So, I can wholeheartedly sympathise with Mr Simpson's position and his views on the damage the community has done to the game. He acknowledges in his first blog that the game went out when it shouldn't have and that CA deserved some criticism for this, saying:

I’m not saying that we didn’t deserve to have a fair number of verbal bricks thrown our way.

I think we now need to acknowledge that the community does deserve to carry some blame too. We had the chance to show the Total War community can be mature and criticise a game whilst remaining constructive and we comprehensively failed at that task, and it has damaged the game and its future as a result.

[Khorak]

I no longer have much truck with excuses, because they're meaningless to me as a consumer in the first place, let alone after they're all I've been getting. You don't get to tell the community what is and isn't fair in how they judge your product, it's a process where they take what you've given them, and you only get to watch as the result comes out. If they think you've given them something bad, that's the end of it. With the sheer numbers involved, it starts to become entirely amoral and faceless; you'll be able to put a face to a .org member and make judgments on them, but that Metacritic rating? Nah, that's what you get. There's no 'too harsh' anymore, the votes get tallied and that's how you did. If the game was ultimately good in spite of a few problems here and there, the averages would show that, but no, there are such vast numbers of people casting their vote on the basis of being buried under an army of bugs and inadequate gameplay that you end up with just what you deserve.

I, and no-one else, has any responsibility to spend money or recommend the spending of money, on anything they don't think they should. If that impacts future game development, that's not our fault. We are not the ones who put out a product which cannot be recommended in such a fashion. Any thought otherwise is an act of absolutely incredible hubris, and if you've slipped into a mindset that we should buy and recommend things regardless just in the hope that the future developments won't be a continuation of an apparently failing/failed process, then you get everything you deserve when it comes crashing down around your ears.