First impressions thread

[edyzmedieval]

For the lucky ones who are preloading (just started on mine, at a friends house), it's time to post your first impressions once you get your hands on the game. No need for reviews, just short impressions on how you found the game.

Preloading...preloading...




EDIT: For those who are still waiting, if you want to read a S2TW-inspired short story to spend your time while Steam downloads, click on my sig.
*shameless advertising over*

[Lemur]

Yup, got my preload conflicting with my kids watching streaming Netflix. Children! Sit in the dark and stare at the walls! Daddy's game needs to download!

-edit-

Preload completed. Children may resume watching Yo Gabba Gabba or whatever mindrot they like.

-edit of the edit-

Things to do while waiting for unlock: Drivers! Make sure all of your drivers are minty fresh before you try to run the game!

[CanCritter]

first impressions....."no"...you cant have it till 15th :O(

[edyzmedieval]

And so the fight begins! Preload almost finished, the waiting time is now over, time to become Shogun!

[Lemur]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

[UglyJun]

nice shiney box instaling right now :)
ps: steam is one f... up thingy soo u might have to delete all local shogun content and then try install game from cd otherwise it will try and download even while your cd rom sitting in the comp lol

[edyzmedieval]

Lots of people are experiencing problems, being stuck at 74% on the Steam encryption unlock.

[froogle]

What? No updates yet - are all you lucky European residents too busy gaming to post up a simple "It Rocks!" summary! ;)

I jest of course, but here in the US Steam is insisting we have another 10 hours to go before the unlock lands. Arrrggghhh.

[Monk]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

Steam doesn't unlock games until like 10 am EST. There's still 9 hours before Shogun 2 unlocks on steam, looking at the Store page.

For all those who love to stay up and play the new releases it must be torture! For me? I have a final tomorrow! No shogun for me until much later.

[antisocialmunky]

Amazon for whatever reason is overnighting it to me... They could have sent it out earlier. :\

[Cecil XIX]

UPS says my game arrived in Baltimore about half an hour ago. That's only an hour from where I live... Hopefully class tomorrow will keep me occupied until it arrives.

[CanCritter]

11 hrs 10 mins to go....someone is gona die between now and then......

[AggonyKing]

i'll be going out tomorrow after a nice night of sleep and buy the game ^_^ no rush

[Kocmoc]

nice shiney box instaling right now :)
ps: steam is one f... up thingy soo u might have to delete all local shogun content and then try install game from cd otherwise it will try and download even while your cd rom sitting in the comp lol

Installing the game with outplay on is FAIL! :D
if you have the demo on your account, you go on the DVD and start it manually. This way it wont download from steam and install from the DVD instead.

[Hosakawa Tito]

Not in the USA, apparently, or at least not just yet.

Mine is being delivered today, but first I must give my employer 8 hours of my precious time. Hopefully you boys will have it all figured out by then.

[Kocmoc]

Last night 40 people was online, today in the morning 10.

The game seems to be stable while playing 1v1 at least. A number i got is, 24 games played and 1 crash. Thats not perfect, but its good so far.

This evening we will see how big the impact really is, just 40 in the first night isnt much. I did expect more.
If the numbers dont go really high, than we will see some heavy pacing since you will play player with higher lvls and more unlocks for sure.
It might get very disappointing even in the start, if we dont get a big amount of player online.

[AggonyDuck]

We will most likely see a lot more as last night most players didn't have it installed yet and I have a feeling most will play a SP campaign to get acquainted with the game before trying MP.

[Kocmoc]

We will most likely see a lot more as last night most players didn't have it installed yet and I have a feeling most will play a SP campaign to get acquainted with the game before trying MP.

Sure, we will see more, but its already an indicator. We could see it with many other games, where the people did camp the shop, went home, installed the game and went online the same night. So, 40 is a pretty low number, especially after the declaration of "MP-focus".

What peaks we will see?

[Lemur]

Managed to play a few turns this morning. Runs smooth on my Core2Duo machine, so apparently two cores are enough to make it happy. Only real gripe so far: hard to see the range of your armies. It's all shaded and strange, and I have a hard time telling when my units will run out of movement in a turn. Maybe I just need to get used to the new graphics or something like that ...

[Furunculus]

gah! my disk hasn't arrived in the work post today.

[Daveybaby]

Disk? Post? How... quaint.

A few turns in.

So far: quite impressed.
* The game as a 'mood piece' is absolutely fantastic, great art and audio - it really feels like a coherent whole. Much more so than any other of the TW series since the original shogun.
* AI seems competent so far (on hard), both in campaign and battle. Quickly exploits opportunities such as unprotected archers or empty castles. Hasnt done anything noticably stupid yet.
* Pretty responsive. Seems less of a machine killer than ETW was (although this may be partly due to it not letting me use AA).
* Really liking the province upgrade paths, and the general/daimyo skill trees etc.

A few annoyances:
* Enormous load times! Just been playing medieval 2, and in comparison i keep thinking S2 has crashed. In reality it's probably similar to ETW, but even so, it's a pretty long wait.
* Mouse scrolling on the campaign map feels very... clunky and unresponsive. There's a significant delay between your mouse hitting the edge of the screen and it starting to scroll, that wasnt there in any previous TW games. Can't initiate mouse scrolling where there's a UI element at the edge of the screen, i.e. most of the way along the bottom - *very* annoying.
* Cant zoom out nearly far enough (IMO) on the campaign map. Can barely see more than 1 province at a time, not ideal for grand strategic planning.
* Dont like the mist effect that occurs when you zoom out.
* Anti-aliasing disabled? Uh?

[GeneralHankerchief]

After about an hour of gameplay, I quite like it. Easily the most beautiful game I've ever played. My laptop can run it pretty well, as long as things aren't on the highest settings, and so far the campaign seems fine. My only gripe is that the battles go far too fast, and this is even coming from a guy whose introduction to the series was Rome. My archers are lucky if they can get three volleys off before I have to send them scurrying behind the lines.

All in all though, looking forward to my GPA steadily dropping over the rest of the semester as I keep diving into the game.

[knoddy]

well off to a good start when i went to pickup my game today. the fire alarm was going off at the shopping center so i cudnt get in and pickup my game!!!! the gaming gods were hating me this morning :P got it eventaully tho and really enjoying it :D

Played a little bit in my Date campaign, really liking it so far. on hard difficulty i smashed the rebels and took a province from my nearbye enemies. the battle AI does seem improved. i tried to lure the rebel general into charging my yari spears in spearwall but at teh last minute they veered off and smashed my other unit of yari in the back :S my suprieror swordsmen won the day tho.

i do feel the battle was over quickly but it was quite a mismatch with rebel yari vs katana samurai. the second battle i fought was a seige and again pitted yari vs katana, but the unit of retainer samurai put up quite a fight despite being severly outnumbered.

im enjoying the campaign i like the fact that u have a limited number of buildings per town. this makes u choose wether to have towns be troop builders, or econimic/agent builders. similar to empire but better design.

really pleased so far!

[Doug-Thompson]

My first impression? That it's rather frustrating to go through a quite long installation only to be told that Steam is updating the game I just installed -- and taking it's sweet time doing it.

[ByzantineKnight]

It took me forever to get my copy as well. But here's my initial impressions.

I was very unimpressed with the AI in smaller battles (my first 3 or so were fought with a few units of Yari Ashigaru, an archer, and a cavalry unit on each side. During all three battles I managed to lure their general from behind his lines with my flanking cavalry and as soon as he started charging I beat a hasty retreat behind my lines where I was able to swamp him with spearmen before he could get away. Suicidal generals appear to be back.

A few hours later I was quite impressed with a large battle in a mostly forested area where the AI managed to pull some stealthy attacks to weak points in my line. I managed to drive them off but just barely and my archers were a little worse for the wear.

Multiplayer was fun though. I managed to get a few games in before real life took me away from my bliss. So far everyone seems quite friendly and it looks like this will be quite an enjoyable experience for at least several months to come!

As for the campaign itself, once I installed it on my desktop (my laptop's graphics card is awful) I was quite impressed with the atmosphere, simplicity and beauty of the game. Hands down, the best preorder I've ever made.

[knoddy]

updates! load times are epicly long lol might just be my crappy pc
- for some reason the auto detect for graphics settings (if there is one) put everything on ultra which suprisingly my core duo can handle BUT it was choppy as hell so i put everything back to high and battles run much smoother.
- sieges are fun and can be quite hard to defend. the ai splits its troops and attacks from multiple sides
- im really liking the customisation of generals, towns and agents. quite cool!

question - to put a general in charge of a fleet do u just put him on the ships as if for transport? and he automatically takes charge?

[sassbarman]

Yup it's hard. I'm playing on lengendary difficulty and have just lost my first campaign in eons in 12 turns. A bit of advise if I may BUILD UP BEFORE ATTACKING ANYONE!

[antisocialmunky]

First TW in a long time to actually earn its score. (That wasn't an expo)

[Doug-Thompson]

updates! load times are epicly long lol might just be my crappy pc

Oh no. I have a fine PC and good internet connection. My hardware is well beyond the recommended requirements. I started updating, went to the grocery store, picked up some milk and peanut butter, then went to the pet store to get some pet food. Steam is telling me I'll be able to play in 3 hours and 58 minutes.

EDITED P.S. Oops. Pardon me. New development. Now it's saying 7 hours and 23 minutes. I guess I should be planning a good night's sleep, then getting a few minutes of play time before going to work in the morning. I should also mention that I bought the game on DISC. I'm not downloading from Steam. I'm just trying to activate it. And yes, I got the Limited Edition too.

[Krusader]

Enjoyed it. Pre-ordered Limited Edition so no encryption/pre-loading thingy for me. Quite enjoyed it so far. AI seems better, but need some more battles under my belt before a final verdict can be given.
Tried as Shimazu clan and got my ass handed to me, when the clan I beat up sought allies and got them. Still, played a few battles and it seems to me CA have reintroduced things from older TW titles, like pre-battle speeches. I also enjoyed the hell out of seeing the terrain resemble the campaign map area and the campaign map itself is beautiful and love the artistic style. Much more atmospheric game than previous titles and IMO only RTW and older TW games can compare with atmosphere.

Naval battles were boring though. Think those will get autoresolved.
Scored 3 achievements, 2 in one go even.

Although encountered a CTD doing beginner's naval tutorial, which never is fun.