It's... it's... beautiful :O

[caravel]

Ha! Looks like we got another one hooked on "ambience"; that elusive, addictive, game-loving trait that's kept so many old-timers coming back to totalwar, hoping, praying against all odds, to recapture the rapture we felt then.

We can (and do) argue game mechanics, tech traits, and coding snafu's. But in the end, it really is about how it felt to play. Did I laugh, did I cry, did I live, did I die.

An ambience that has never been recaptured since. I remember firing up MTW for the first time, and thinking "oh dear...". I was decidedly underwhelmed. A few of the things I hated most were:
1) Siege equipment and sieges
2) Poor unit balance
3) The campaign map design

Also the concepts of loyalty and the different stats for generals as well as V&Vs annoyed be, but I got used to those. The biggest problem though: What happened to the ambience, where are the storms and fog?

I think the problem was that MTW was essentially a Shogun mod with a Medieval setting. It lacked the polished feel of it's predecessor and felt half done in some ways. It was as if the beast that was Shogun had been twisted and deformed into being Medieval.

The successful Hollywood & Bollywood guys have caught on to this, and give us product that satisfies, mostly. Gaming industry is still working on it, currently entranced by the (false IMO) siren song of graphics enhancement.

A truer word was never spoken. When will the eye candy lovers understand that it's not how realistic an object looks, but the overall feel that it gives to the game. The low poly birds in STW for example would be looked on with scorn by many. To me they were almost origami like in their elegance. Something about them was quite sad and haunting and added to the ambience of the game. Realistic high poly birds that sang and moved realistically wouldn't have had the same effect.

Gamers, like movie-viewers, are willing (and eager) to immerse themselves, suspend their disbelief, for about 20 minutes. That's about how long the product has to hook the player/viewer, that is: seduce that guy into wanting more, and encouraging him/her to suspend disbelief & play longer. THAT is what makes a good game, movie or book. When you can't wait to turn the page and see what happens next.

A book doesn't have visuals, unless it may have a few pictures, and who judges a book on the quality of the illustrations. I've seen games that are graphically superb yet ugly. Look at the old Quake series for example. The first game had some atmosphere but not the greatest graphics, the rest were tacky and nasty looking. It seems that games developers think that Image Quality is everything these days.

Your wish for a Shogun2 is shared by many.

I'd love to see a Shogun2, though with the current RTW/M2TW RTS style campaign map it just wouldn't be the same, even if the did manage to recapture the ambiance of STW.