So this is where CA is taking the series

[Puzz3D]

Studio marketing manager Ian Roxburgh statement about RTW in an interview with GamesDomain Games Domain interview :

"We're genuinely at a point where the player is effectively commanding and participating in a battle scene from films like Braveheart and Gladiator."

and also:

"The work of Ridley Scott has been my personal inspiration for some of the in-game cinematics and movies in the game."


It would appear that the goal of Creative Assembly is to make the gameplay resemble recent movies.

[Admin]

Hello,

This sounds like old days gamers/fans are sold out so to say. I feel this conclusion is drawn too fast.

I don't think I'ld fancy a Braveheart and Gladiator game type either, but it may just mean that it equals the graphical immersion. I do not, never did and never will, see an effort to please the masses as a bad thing if .
Please the masses means sales, and sales means more resources to improve the product.

The if seems to be there, very clearly. The game may not be perfect off the box for fanatic wargamers or history experts, but the toggles, configuration and modding tools are there. I'm very happy to get rid of the unitflags, green arrows and to have restricted general camera by just changing a few things in Preferences.txt (there will be a full GUI in the full game too, no doubt). I doubt the masses will care a bit about these details, this stuff is there for those few who like it. Software can only be splendid when there is freedom for each user to configure it. Big sales are required to make anything of this possible. For all I care, the next game is Pokemon(R):Totalwar.

[Warmaker]

We'll see how much changes will be implemented when the game goes gold. I of course have the opinion that it will not drastically change but I hope for some tweaks to cater to us older Total War players.

If not, and if the game is as easily modable as they say, then I can see the Total War community "addressing" what needs to be addressed... the same way it has always been, especially with Medieval.

[Papewaio]

For all I care, the next game is Pokemon(R):Totalwar.

Hi everyone my name is Papewaio.

I have Pokemon for the Nintendo 64.

Thats the first step right?

Admitting to your peers you have a problem.

Peer support is needed for those who have used such games as this.

[Shahed]

LOL !

Yeap, this is where TW is going.

[nightcrawlerblue]

the next game is Pokemon(R):Totalwar.

Actually that might be pretty cool if done right...

[Puzz3D]

Well, I agree Tosa. It's not the programmers who are going in that direction. It's the marketing managers, and they are getting their way, so they must be in a very powerful position within Creative Assembly. However, all is not lost because I expect the programmers will make the game modable. As I recall, there have been posts made by CA which said the game would be highly modable. Apparently, making the game modable is not seen by the market managers as hurting sales or you can be sure the programmers would be prohibited from doing it. Sending suggestions to CA on how to improve the game is pointless because the manager is going to throw the suggestions in the wastebasket.

We now have to anticipate that to retain a high level of tactical gameplay in multiplayer we are going to have to play a modded game. That means playing a small fraction of the number of opponents you might otherwise play. Most players will stick with the regular game while the rest will fracture over several mods.

[Admin]

Hello Yuuki,

Hmm, sending in suggestions to the right people can't hurt. And actually, we can't blame marketing either. If they do their job well (huge sales) then all gamers gain too. And to be even more fair, coders can smu.. cough.. in some bits, but making modding a serious part of the game is something different. I'm not sure whether Market managers decide about that, but programmers need permission from the boss(es) to do that.

Modding is a proved 'concept', both here and in other games. The left hand needs the right one to wash both.

Not necessarily Yuuki. The demo shows another level, there's the option to set realism in the demo by changing some configuration, there can be more in the full game and also MP. Possibilities enough.

More people or less people, that's an interesting topic. It's true that different settings could create several camps. That's always been the case anyway: people insisting on playing 60k battles, flat maps and so on.
But I agree, different mods will probably split it up more. The counter effect is that the different styles will attract more people. As long as old/regular players have a pool of say 100 players there won't be a negative effect compared to the old situation. Look at it from another way, would RTW bring in 1,000's of new MP gamers if it was just an improved old style MTW? I fear not, STW/MTW are undoubtely great fun, but not everyones meal.

Absolutely nightcrawlerblue. I've played some 'alternatives', Kraellins mortars spring to mind. Great fun, it had little to do with realism, but great fun.

[Puzz3D]

Tosa,

The nature of the suggestions will have to change since there is no point in making suggestions that would bring the gameplay in a direction that is incompatible with Creative Assembly's goals. A suggestion such as, "Have the ai control all my units except the one I have selected.", would probably fall on receptive ears. That way you could play the entire battle at ground level zoomed in on the unit you are controlling and really enjoy the 3D graphics. After all, I doubt there are many players in the massive market that CA is trying to reach who can actually coordinate 20 units, and, if you only have to control one unit, you could possibly expand your customer base by making inroads into the first person shooter market.

I'm not being sarcastic. I actually have more fun with the RTW demo by zooming in on one unit and controlling that unit at ground level. Of course, I'm not controling the overall battle by doing that, but trying to control the battle gives me a headache because it's all happening too fast to actually control all the units. I find myself reacting to the RTW demo the same way I react to something like Call of Duty. It's fun to play for a while, but I have to get away from it after a short time and do something less hectic. With MTW, I only take a short break between battles and often play as many as 10 battles in one continuous session over a period of hours. I never get the feeling that I want to play some other game. I already have that feeling with the RTW demo, and I've only had it 3 days. Some of the other games on my shelf are starting to appear very attractive.

And, 1000's of new muliplayers is meaningless to me if they are playing a game that I don't play. It will mean the next Total War game will be even less about coordinating units and even more about flashy graphics and clicking fast. As has been mentioned in the past, clicking fast is a skill. , but tactical thinking suffers when reacting fast becomes more important.

[Blodrast]

although a pessimist by nature, i think we can still hope for good stuff from the programmers, even though the main line of CA's policy doesn't perfectly fit the hardcore TW players' interests.
IIRC, there was at some point this rumour/fact around, that one of the MTW patches was actually written by the programmers in their own time ? just because they wanted to have something of high quality; mind you, I can't recall all the details, but I'm pretty sure that "the masses" didn't notice the need for a patch until it hit them in the head ;)
so it wasn't the mainstream player they did it for, but the hardcore people.

so let's give'em some credit; besides, like Tosa/Admin pointed out, a big part of the game seems to be moddable, judging from what we got with the demo. So that's good !

[Admin]

Tosa,

The nature of the suggestions will have to change since there is no point in making suggestions that would bring the gameplay in a direction that is incompatible with Creative Assembly's goals.

Not necessarily. In order to make a toggle, you need to know what to toggle.
A suggestion may not make it into the game, but the coders could make the option to allow us to change it.

Unit/game speed serves as example.

Some people here feel it's too fast. CA's goal may or may not be to keep it that fast (fast paced games are considered a pro by gamers, judging on UT2k4). CA could add the option to run it at a slower pace, but only if they know we want/use such a thing.

1,000's of new players is not meaningless.
-More customers -> more profit -> more resources for future development. Wargames like you and I play them are a (relatively) small genre. It needs to be linked to something bigger to continue. Neither do I mind if a BMW slips into the pocket of CA and motivates them to continue.
-Among those new customers will be a few who become 'addicted' and are eager to try the 'hardcore' style.

These are two profits.

There would be a loss if the 'hardcore' player was scrapped completely. This doesn't seem to be the case at all.

[Nelson]

I honestly do not see Rome becoming any sort of "click fest". While playing the demo I have not clicked any more often or any more quickly than I ever have in Shogun or Medieval.

CA's efforts to reach out with Rome are obvious but do not represent some sort of betrayal of their original vision. They want to expand the market without alienating the old fan base. Thus far, the speed of certain running units is the only indisputable deviation from what I expected.

The regrettable term "Real-time strategy camera" has struck some people like a pilum. The game is not a traditional RTS any more than Shogun was.

[Puzz3D]

I didn't click any more often either in the Trebia battle because I was already clicking continuously just as I do in STW or MTW, but I got less done and I don't even have the full 20 units yet.

CA's vision is to make the game play like the movies "Gladiator" and "Braveheart".

I don't think single player is going to be a problem because, if something is off with regard to the tactical battles, you will apparently be able change it. In multiplayer, you don't have that option. You just have to adapt or not play. So, if infantry in MTW walked at speed 6, ran at speed 15 and charged at speed 17 while cav walked at speed 9, ran at speed 20 and charged at speed 22, that's how you would have to play it. You might get some mileage out of a mod if you could convince a few others to use it. Of course, mods don't spring from nothing. They take months of work, and my experience is that you can't convince enough people to use a mod to make it a viable option for online play.

[MadKow]

There is something silly going on between computer games and movies...

I agree it can be interesting and fun to make you, in a game, relive a famous scene from a popular film as the protagonist.(Check medal of honour allied assault, to experience D-Day "Spielberg style" or Call of Duty for Stalingrad like in "Enemy at the gates". It is fun.)

Yesterday i was watching a very bad movie made about a very (or should i say two) dear subjects. King Arthur. Its got King Arthur and Rome, and strangely enough they could or might have been related, in some farfetched way...

Anyway, none of the subjects got the dignity they deserved but one of the things that caught my attention was hints on the dialogues that whoever wrote the script was thinking (or trying to) of games.
There are some description of forces in the movie that sound like people on these forums describing their battles: Using terms like "Light Infantry here, heavy cavalry there" There is also this one particular scene where one of the "Knights" shows a crossbow he got from a dead enemy and says. "Armour Piercing!"

It will prove very stupid if games start to imitate movies that try to imitate games. Everything will go on in cyrcles, away from what make good films and what makes good games.

End of Rant.

[Captain Fishpants]

...

CA's vision is to make the game play like the movies "Gladiator" and "Braveheart".

...

Thanks. I had been wondering about the whole 'vision thing' but now I know!

Or could it be that Gladiator and Braveheart are really good marketing metaphors and 'image shorthand' for what we're doing with the scale of things and the level of excitement in the game?

Mr Roxburgh has a very hard job trying to get over the whole Rome: Total War concept in one or two sentences that are going to stick in people's heads and get them fired up. Anyone on these forums is already clued up on the idea of Rome, but the same is not true necessarily for the hundreds of thousands of potential players that we'd like to reach. Hence his use of those particular metaphors.

[Degtyarev14.5]

As I recall, there have been posts made by CA which said the game would be highly modable. Apparently, making the game modable is not seen by the market managers as hurting sales or you can be sure the programmers would be prohibited from doing it. Sending suggestions to CA on how to improve the game is pointless because the manager is going to throw the suggestions in the wastebasket.

Which publisher or developer in the post-Counterstrike era has been adverse to modding? Now, more than ever before, modding fulfills a crucial role within the gaming community.

I have been thinking about this extensively over the past couple of weeks, and I have arrived at the conclusion that the product is no longer the game, but the engine itself. Why else are today's games - almost without exception - released in an unfinished state? Because they are little more than a skin within which to sell the engine to the 10-15 year old "fan boyz" demographic. W00t!!

Today's game is now little more than a means to an end. The engine, and the distribution thereof, is that end.

To support this thesis, I would point to the sheer number of games suffering from intolerable imbalance issues in their "from the box" state, a notable case in point being the hideously biased Command and Conquer: Generals. I can not think of a better example of an atrociously imbalanced game built upon a breathtaking graphics engine.

I would also draw attention to the widespread release of modding tools to the general public by the developers. Bethesda Softworks provides perhaps the best example of this practice in packaging their Elder Scrolls Construction Set with Morrowind.

Developers and publishers survive, of course, upon the revenue from their games as they come "from the box," but I am now utterly convinced that they regard their games as secondary to their engines. These engines are their gifts and tributes to their core fan bases, and I believe that the Rome: Total War engine is Creative Assembly's magnificent gesture of gratitude to us for our continued support and patronage.

I look forward to modding it into oblivion and back!

A.

[Admin]

Of course, mods don't spring from nothing. They take months of work, and my experience is that you can't convince enough people to use a mod to make it a viable option for online play.

I can't but agree here, making a stat (that's what mod means here) can take months and even then it's possible that things turn up that don't work that great, you know that very well. Time consuming, wasting even. Not that a good set of stats isn't a nice thing to have, but a gamecompany could drain up all its resources to get it 100% right. Better invest in flexibility, stability and selling it :)

Part of the problem with playing mods online is that it's still too hard and cumbersome to do. Anyone who regularly changes Era knows one problem: it takes a while to change. Add a few mods and it will take even longer to scroll through the list. I guess the CRC is responsible for that. CRC is a very important thing, but it should be done after the era/mod is selected and not real time during scrolling the list.

The other problem is that the only way to play a mod/map/stat is to get the file from a fansite. Many other game titles offer autodownload of missing files (very effective and mod games florish there). TW files, speaking about STW/MTW and I expect most RTW ones not to be much bigger either, are well below 100kb, even a 56k can get that within 15 seconds.

Allowing mods is one thing, a quick distribution and selection is another (not just, but especially for MP).

I also think stat makers can improve the proces. Instead of saying it's all bad and investing months to get it right (risking to give it up) in one go you can address the most obvious issues first and continue releasing improvements. That does require a flexibile versionmanagement of course, both a job for the modder but also the game.

Full mods are one thing and consume time to create and distribute, extensive configuration/profiles is another. The fast gamespeed is, at least mostly, a configuration matter. Anyone who builds a server/hosts a game should be able to do that within seconds, just push the slider to left/right and anyone who joins, plays those settings. Why should CA look into getting that right for everyone? Decide yourself!

This is not a new thing, STW already had morale on/off, (un)limited ammo and restricted camera. RTW deserves to have much much more. Peeking at the demo: RTW does already have something.

[octavian]

Today's game is now little more than a means to an end. The engine, and the distribution thereof, is that end.

To support this thesis, I would point to the sheer number of games suffering from intolerable imbalance issues in their "from the box" state, a notable case in point being the hideously biased Command and Conquer: Generals. I can not think of a better example of an atrociously imbalanced game built upon a breathtaking graphics engine.

very well put, i would add to it... but you have covered everything i could say

and as far as speed in MP is concerned, i have a feeling that many of us hardcore TW fans wills be playing a historically accurate version online as well as in SP. things such as unit speed will be modded at the same time as everything else.

[Kaiser of Arabia]

As long as there are piles of bodies I am happy.

[Lonewarrior]

This has turned out to be a pretty good thread.

[Lehesu]

I, for one, have been using the pause button much more than I would like in Rome. I think that Rome will turn out okay though. The battle packaged was a "set piece" to demonstrate the drama and "cool" factor (elephants) that the game could generate. Although the drama may not have rubbed off too well, the basic core seems to hold true to the Total War system. Some of those changes though....

[Alrowan]

i just want the old move army commant back... i love alt...

[Colovion]

i just want the old move army commant back... i love alt...

amongst other things

Yes

[TosaInu]

I love alt too. I managed to get it done (I think) when using one of the profiles, I don't recall which (I believe you need to set control to classic in pref.txt).