Official CA modding announcement

**Nelson** · 07-01-2011, 15:05

I fail to appreciate how this can be seen as anything but good.

**Poulp'** · 07-01-2011, 17:17

Am I the only one who cannot access the link ?
The rest of TWCenter work fine though.

**TinCow** · 07-01-2011, 17:20

Originally Posted by Poulp'

Am I the only one who cannot access the link ?
The rest of TWCenter work fine though.

No, it's not you. There appears to be some kind of error with that thread.

**Voigtkampf** · 07-01-2011, 21:55

Well, I wrote a long post earlier and just erased it. Saw no point in bothering.
Now I went back to TWC forum, which is working now, and red the 10+ pages of comments. Most were brown-nosing of such a shameless variety that I might very well consider the possibility that the members there are being paid for such comments or maybe the staff themselves is "ghost-commenting" with all the member accounts.

First, let it be known that in the past decade I've written more than a dozen reviews and articles published in gaming magazines on the topic of Total War and CA. I have always been on the CA's side of the wall, defending them, praising them as well as the TW series, even when they were sub-par with quality or rigorously ridden with bugs.

Now I feel the urge to dissect this entire story, and I'll make it short and sweet. Pro and Cons, let's count it like that.

PRO: CA released some XML and XSD files concerning Empire Total War.

CONS:

It came two years after the game itself was released.
Nobody can tell with any positive certainty how useful, if at all, those documents are. There is talk about mercenaries and possibility to edit the map. Daisy, maybe therein lies even the fabled treasure of Sierra Madre! It cannot be denied that most of the files for E:TW have been peeked and probed and deconstructed by modders already through the good ol' trial and error procedure. These files will hardly add much to it.
The editing tools were promised; giving out couple of files years later and basically saying, nah, we'll never make promises again, we might just make a better strategy about supporting modders. How political can you get without running for an office, eh?

Nah, I won't even bother anymore... There was one poster at TWC saying:

we basically have a load of xml files which will gain us more types of religions for in game and we can also now identify some further "Unknown" columns in the db files?? and thats it? so we are all wetting ourselves over a bunch of files that really is not going to make that much difference to the ETW & NTW games?

That pretty much sums it up.

this isn’t a conspiracy to make you buy DLC over creating your own content…

I believe that... In regards to Empire and Napoleon. I suppose one needs not to be clairvoyant to figure out that there will be no such or similar files forthcoming for Shogun 2. Not until the title is milked for all the DLC's one can think of. Then the modders will probably get a bone.

Ok, and now in spirit of tl;dr : This is too little, too late. If they had released same or similar files for Shogun 2 along with these, it would have been different. But on some optimistic level, I'd say better this than nothing.