Disgusting...

[TopHatJones]

I have been a Total War fan for a while now. I have played every game/expansion, missing only the original Shogun.

But this latest installment has killed a HUGE amount of my faith in CA and the TW series.

I know all games have some bugs, but they are usually minor and/or are fixed very shortly after release. This game, however, is FULL of serious, game-breaking bugs such as 2h axe units not attacking, shields taking away defense rather than adding to it, the long list of broken or missing triggers, etc. It is obvious that this game was not playtested at all. I am hesitant to make such a claim since there are so many things to test for and some things will surely slip through the cracks, but 2h axe units not attacking? Shields removing defense? Passive AI and AI seige bugs? These are things that anyone can easily see within a few minutes of playing the game even if they weren't looking for it. Its the type of thing you can notice while testing for something else! That's what leads me to wonder if the game was tested...not just enough, but at all.

This game came out very quickly after RTW + Xpac. I wasn't even finished with those yet TBH. There was absolutely no reason that I can imagine to rush this game out like they did. An extra few months would have probably been enough to turn this game from a shack to a palace since it has so much potential....they just threw in the towel at the 1 yard line. This is also the first TW to not have some major advancements. Some new features were added, but nothing extraordinary. This is basically a self-contained expansion to RTW. Maybe Sega has something to do with it...every system and game they ever made themselves was awful.

To be fair, I am still having some limited enjoyment with the game, but that is due 100% to LTC 2.0 (Waiting for 2.1) for fixing a lot of the problems. Modding is a great feature for any game since people will inevitably disagree with a lot of design/balance features and will want to make their own changes, but modding should NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be expected to require the players to fix game bugs and make the game, or large sections of it, playable.

That seems to be the trend lately though, games have been doing this more and more. Oblivion had similar problems...I found that game unplayable without an extensive list of mods. The difference is, Oblvion required mods to rebalance the game and add in missing features, while M2TW requires mods to fix actual game-breaking bugs. Even Oblivion didn't require players to do that. What's worse is that a LOT of this game is hardcoded and we CAN'T add missing features like heir selection and the ability to start in different eras (high, late) for example. So we get all the negatives of modding abilities (bugfixing) but few of the positives (new content and features).

If CA doesn't get their act together, Sega or no Sega, the chances of my buying their games in the future will be slim to none.

$0.02

[manbaps]

Totally agree with this statement.

[Bijo]

If CA doesn't get their act together, Sega or no Sega, the chances of my buying their games in the future will be slim to none.

$0.02

But your money is already taken, isn't it? Just like all of us who had their money taken
Anyway, you speak good words in there, but I wouldn't blame too much on CA. Sega, the publisher, is the financier, meaning they call the shots. Blame Sega. Boycott Sega! Down with the infidels!

Eh-- I mean-- uh.... U

[Goofball]

I partly agree. Please see this thread:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=77300

But as in that thread, be prepared for some guy who has played for 10 minutes to call you a whiner and say the bugs are historically accurate...

[TopHatJones]

But your money is already taken, isn't it? Just like all of us who had their money taken

Yes they got it this time...but unless this is the last TW they are making, they will be missing out on a lot more in the future.

[ShadesPanther]

I agree mostly with what you have said.

True, alot of the bugs are major and obvious some aren't quite.
For example the Shield bug.
The shield bug means that the higher the shield value the worse it fights in melee regardless of its total armour.

But It isn't very obvious that this is going on and so I sort of forgive them for missing it, but expect it fixed ASAP in a patch. Some other things are so bad you do wonder how they missed them and even missed them again in the first patch.

[Carl]

Some of them wern't missed in the first patch, they knew of them but just didn't have time to fix them in time for the patch release date. I've also heard rumouirs from people claiming to be in the "know", (they may have been lying BTW), that the publisher was so determined to get a christmas release date that no beta testing was done, which explains the bugs unfortunatly.

Of course these people might have been lying.

p.s. The sheild bug isn't obvious to us, but to the devs who should know what they expect to happen it should be glaringly obvious.

[TopHatJones]

True, alot of the bugs are major and obvious some aren't quite.
For example the Shield bug.
The shield bug means that the higher the shield value the worse it fights in melee regardless of its total armour.

Fair enough...it did take some extensive testing to really nail the shield bug, BUT on the other hand, it IS instantly noticable that there is definately SOME problem when some of these units fight each other.

[Lusted]

Fair enough...it did take some extensive testing to really nail the shield bug, BUT on the other hand, it IS instantly noticable that there is definately SOME problem when some of these units fight each other.

Not really, i've extensively rebalanced units for my LTC mod yet it never occured to me there was a shield bug. Didn't even know something might be wrong until someone started a thread about it.

To be fair, I am still having some limited enjoyment with the game, but that is due 100% to LTC 2.0 (Waiting for 2.1) for fixing a lot of the problems.

Glad your enjoying my mod.

Personally, i love this game, and i think its the best TW to date. Yes, it has some bad bugs, but i cannot help but feel they are down to rushed development, or in one case the result of people complaining(2 handedbug - animations used in demo removed by CA due to number of complaints). Im sure CA will try to fix as many as possible in the patches, and they've already said they're working on the 2 handed bug for Patch 2.

Now if you don't mind, im going to resume my Danish campaign, i have some Russians to beat up.

[zulukiller]

Hmmm you know what TBH with you its not just this game thats buggie. Im not sure whats going on but for at least the last couple of years most PC games have been released with major bugs and bad game imbalances. Some of which never get fixed and i know this for a fact because ive taken part in several closed betas were bugs or massive game imblances have been reported and the games still gets released.

[JCoyote]

I have a deeper question about all of this.

BTW, I'm new around this forum but I've been playing TW since Shogun.

Anyway... knowing they had a strong development-minded community already there...

Did we buy a "beta"?

Is CA/Sega using us?

Did they think they could rush a game out the door, and more pointedly save money on playtesting, beta trials, and even bugfixing (that's the one that really bothers me), and let the community put in uncompensated work to finish it for them?

I'm just sincerely hoping that a modder doesn't get their code ripped off in the midst of this to find it included in a patch. I know it's a bit paranoid, but hey, as far as I can tell I already bought an incomplete product from a store shelf in all of this.

[Monarch]

shields taking away defense rather than adding to it,

rofl, I'm sorry but thats beyond a joke. Until recently, when some guy accidently stumbled accross it whilst doing other tests. Nobody even knew about it, now its the main reason people are hating the game....

You guys are such jokers

(*Monarch turns around and walks back to the mp forums. Where even though everyone still complains, at least people like Puzz3D and Orda Khan who complain actually make sense and know what they're talking about)

[Satyr]

It's hard to imagine the CA would want to release a buggy game. The results of the lack of quality in RTW is probably used to scare future game developers. When have people taken up a campaign against a game before, and those were people that dearly loved that company's previous releases? I would have bet that M2TW would be really good when it was released. Well, I obviously would have lost that bet. I hope they can fix this game. It's pretty close as it stands, and it is gorgeous. Too bad they have lost so much more credibility with their fanbase. You have to wonder how many more times they can do that and survive as a company.

[TopHatJones]

rofl, I'm sorry but thats beyond a joke. Until recently, when some guy accidently stumbled accross it whilst doing other tests. Nobody even knew about it, now its the main reason people are hating the game....

You guys are such jokers

(*Monarch turns around and walks back to the mp forums. Where even though everyone still complains, at least people like Puzz3D and Orda Khan who complain actually make sense and know what they're talking about)

Like I said above, I didn't know what the problem was, but I did know there was A problem when peasants roll spearmen and a whole slew of other rediculous inconsistencies.

Like another person said above, it may not have been obvious to us, but to a developer who knows exactly what's going on behind the scenes, its glaringly obvious that there is SOME sort of problem.

Also, nothing is more pathetic than when someone finds any reason to argue against ONE of the original points (ignoring all others), and pretends to have won the entire arguement.

Even IF it was entirely impossible for the developers to not notice a problem with the shield bug (unlikely)...remove that one half of a line from my original post and try again.

[General Zhukov]

Too bad they have lost so much more credibility with their fanbase. You have to wonder how many more times they can do that and survive as a company.

Hey I just did some tests and uh... ok the results are coming in now:

For every 1 person negatively motivated enough to post on a forum how much M2TW sucks, there are 100 others who think alike but do not post. The other 900 in the sample are too busy enjoying the game to come and post, and couldn't give a whit.

Developing...

[TopHatJones]

Too bad they have lost so much more credibility with their fanbase. You have to wonder how many more times they can do that and survive as a company.

To blunder twice in war is not allowed.

[TopHatJones]

Hey I just did some tests and uh... ok the results are coming in now:

For every 1 person negatively motivated enough to post on a forum how much M2TW sucks, there are 100 others who think alike but do not post. The other 900 in the sample are too busy enjoying the game to come and post, and couldn't give a whit.

Developing...

I don't believe the sample of people who go to online forums are that significantly different than those who do not.

And I also seriously doubt anyone would spend so much time playing the game that they wouldn't have time to log in if they wanted to.

[Satyr]

Hey I just did some tests and uh... ok the results are coming in now:

For every 1 person negatively motivated enough to post on a forum how much M2TW sucks, there are 100 others who think alike but do not post. The other 900 in the sample are too busy enjoying the game to come and post, and couldn't give a whit.

Developing...

Yeah, the other 90% are 12 years old and too blinded by the pretty soldiers to notice the bugs (I pre-apologize to all you really bright 12 year olds who kick my butt online - and post here).

[Goofball]

rofl, I'm sorry but thats beyond a joke. Until recently, when some guy accidently stumbled accross it whilst doing other tests. Nobody even knew about it, now its the main reason people are hating the game....

You guys are such jokers

(*Monarch turns around and walks back to the mp forums. Where even though everyone still complains, at least people like Puzz3D and Orda Khan who complain actually make sense and know what they're talking about)

Wow. You really play mp?

Really?

You're cool.

[knoddy]

tbh im sick and tiered of people crying on these forums about wot a bad game Medieval 2 is.

I have also been playing the series since Medieval 1, i never played shogun, but throughly enjoyed Medieval 1, Rome and now Medieval 2. ive been playing it since release and love playing it. The graphics are just damn shiny! and the gameplay while not brilliant can give u a real run for ur money on the higher difficulties.


As to the Bugs, well, wot game these days isnt released without a few bugs. AFAIK there are only 2 obvious and bad bugs with vinilla 1.0, that being Passive AI and the 2h unit bug. yet even with these bugs teh game is still playable and very very enjoyable.

As to the "obvious" shield bug, it clearly wasnt obvious at all and it took some guy doin testing on something else to realise it.

Lets look at other games released, Caesar 4, recently released as the sequel to Caesar 3 and old school ROme based strat game, was widely anticipated by fans of the series, yet was released with some glaringly obvious and horrific bugs that made the game unplayable. Crashes at random intervals, and 90% of the gaming community reported CTD's when trying to open trade routes, which is the major source of income in the game, unable to open trade routes = no income = unplayable game.

WoW is patched every few weeks, and while alot of it is content, alot of it is fixing bugs and errors in the code that was affecting. Unfortunatly this often ends up causing more distressing errors. In the recent 2.03 patch, players found that they could cap Battlegrounds flags from huge distances making defense in the battle grounds damn near impossible seeing as u didnt know who was capping the flag cos u couldnt see them.

i could go on with more examples but i will move on

Im currently in the middle of a computing degree, and i struggle to write programs a few hundred lines of code without bugs. How do u think the people at CA go writing code that is thousands possibly millions of lines long. have u ever stopped to think of it from that side of the coin, or do u just complain cos u didnt get wot u wanted.

The notions that CA got the game out without any Beta testing is ridiculus. while i admit there was 1 or 2 bugs that were glaringly obvious that were not picked up in beta, i dont feel that we can make outrageous claims that tehre was no beta, and that they just through M2 out the door so that it would make chrissy sales.

SO in summary Medieval 2 is a great game, both graphically and in gameplay, while it does have some bugs, the game is still very playable, and CA is working hard to release fixes to try and fix the errors that are prevelant in the game. i think the community needs to give the lads at CA a bit of slack, nobody is perfect, most especially those people who keep coming to these forums and complaining about the game. errors should be expected. unless u were willing to wait another year or 2 for the game to be beta tested 47 times to eradicate every single little minute error that the people at CA found.

Cheers Knoddy

P.s. pls note this is not a personal attack on the OP, im sick of all the people posting these sorts of threads on the .org

pps. pls excuse my lack of spelling and grammar :P

[TopHatJones]

No one is asking for a perfect game. A completely perfect game would take so long to produce that the system it was designed for would be obsolete by release.

What I am saying is that some of those bugs that exist are WAY too significant to not have noticed if any playtesting was done and WAY too numerous and serious to consider the game finished.

This game is a Beta...you can play it and you could even enjoy it, but its NOT finished.

It is possible they DID playtest and DID notice the bugs and didn't have time to fix it before Christmas. But I don't accept that as a valid excuse anymore than I would accept raw meat b/c the chef didn't have time to cook it all the way before the lunch rush.

And if you spell like that all the time its no wonder you have so many bugs in your code...no offense.

P.S. Sometimes complaints are valid. No one is complaining because they just want more or they are greedy or something. We are "complaining" b/c we were sold something that does not work properly.

Its a big difference. Buying a widget and complaining because you want a better widget that has more features is MUCH different than complaining b/c someone sold you a widget that doesn't do everything a widget is supposed to do.

[Sheogorath]

GB2/rtw/, then.

[Carl]

Knoddy: I'm not asking for a perfect game. But TBH the Sheild bug should have been obvious to the developers at the start, (it is a bug, i just remebered the M2TW defence chart, (seen it online, didn't get it with my game), it says their that the sheild provides defence and makes NO MENTION of it not applying in melee, yet it does for defence skill). Lets not mention how glaringly obvious the inability of ikemen to use pikes is or how 2-handed swordsmen can't beat working 2-handers of any other type without nerfing the other 2-handers stats so much it tottaly borks auto-calc.

Too much of this stuff simply shouldn't have been missable TBH.

On the other hand if the AI and 2-hander bugs where the only ones I wouldn't mind much. I too have ben enjoying the game, but it's a lot more fun when you mod the bugs out.

[econ21]

And if you spell like that all the time its no wonder you have so many bugs...no offense.

Petty sniping like that is why these kind of threads tend to get locked. Your original post was fine, IMO. But don't let the thread descend into bickering between Org members.

Polite request to everyone: no calling each other 12 year old girls, saying each others' arguments are pathetic, saying people are "crying" etc. If you want to debate these kind of matters, please do so courteously.

[Goofball]

tbh im sick and tiered of people crying on these forums....(blah, blah, blah)......pps. pls excuse my lack of spelling and grammar :P

I understand what you are saying. But there is a difference between crying and trying to point out flaws that you want to see fixed.

You know all those other games you talked about being buggy too?

Well, I wouldn't know if they are buggy or not, because I never played any of them.

Pretty much the only games that I have played with any level of seriousness since they began are the TW games, because I think they are hands down the best games ever made.

And every time a new one comes out, I have some problems with things that don't work properly.

So I come here and bitch about them. And guess what happens?

For just about every problem, solutions appear. Either EA corrects the problems with a patch (partly because I think they actually do listen to the complaints of fans on boards like these), or talented members of this community create mods/fixes of their own that make the game that much better.

So it really seems stupid when people start flaming us for voicing our opinions about the game.

What the hell is this forum for, if not to talk about the things you like or don't like about M2TW?

[TopHatJones]

So it really seems stupid when people start flaming us for voicing our opinions about the game.

What the hell is this forum for, if not to talk about the things you like or don't like about M2TW?

I agree.

If no one cared enough to discuss problems with the game, then what incentive would they have to fix them and/or try to catch them before release next time?

[Joshwa]

I've got one. If you have cannon towers (or balista towers if you are Byzantines, but that's another story) and you 'sally', you can just sit in your city/castle and let your wall cannons demolish the enemy army, who will obligingly march into range of your cannons, and stay there until 75% of their army is toast. Using this tactic means you are pretty much guaranteed to win every single siege that the enemy put you under. How did noone notice this?! More to the point, how difficult can it be to programme the AI to stay out of range of wall defences unless it is actually assaulting the walls?

[TopHatJones]

Well IMO there is no doubt that this game was rushed out with little or no playtesting and has an obscene amount of bugs...more numerous and serious bugs than any game I have ever played before TBH.

The issue at this point is if and how quickly CA fixes them that will decide if I remain a customer.

$0.02

[Sid Arthur]

Just taking a look at the credits, it's obvious that there was a LOT of testing going on for this game. Medieval 2 being what it is, I'm sure test cases take a long time to go through and the sheer number of circumstances would require a lot of testers and a lot of time. And just noticing a bug during production does not magically fix it.

You also have to understand that QA, development, production, and publishing are all different departments. The decision to fix a certain bug at all does not generally rest with QA, it's done by Dev and Production, which in turn are usually pressed by publishing. I can easily imagine a bug in the M2 database that says "Units with two-handed axes don't attack cavalry," but it was something that just couldn't be fixed in time.

Yeah, it's a whole messy web of things that determine what bugs are in a game at release. And don't kid yourself about games being released without bugs at all: there are ALWAYS bugs. But blaming the testers for that just isn't cool. It's like being that guy who yells and screams at the cashier for why store prices are so high.

Please don't be that guy.



P.S. No, I don't work for CA or Sega, but I do work as a tester. It just gets tiring reading official forums on games I have worked on that blame QA out of ignorance for bugs in games.

[Foz]

No one is asking for a perfect game. A completely perfect game would take so long to produce that the system it was designed for would be obsolete by release.

What I am saying is that some of those bugs that exist are WAY too significant to not have noticed if any playtesting was done and WAY too numerous and serious to consider the game finished.

This game is a Beta...you can play it and you could even enjoy it, but its NOT finished.

It is possible they DID playtest and DID notice the bugs and didn't have time to fix it before Christmas. But I don't accept that as a valid excuse anymore than I would accept raw meat b/c the chef didn't have time to cook it all the way before the lunch rush.

There's a MAJOR difference between developing software and cooking a steak, and I don't mean in the activities themselves. I mean the situations the people doing them find themselves in. Chefs still get paid during the lunchtime rush, no matter when they get those food orders out. In software, especially gaming, developers get paid for exactly as much work as the guy dumping money into the project is willing to pay for. If the man in charge says you release on a given date come hell or high water, YOU DO, or you don't get compensated for your work, may be in breach of contract, etc. If that means you release a buggy product like 1.0 M2TW is, and the boss doesn't seem to care, then it's what you do. It's entirely likely they knew about some or even all of the issues we're noticing before the release date of the game... but since the people that set important dates like that are usually not members of the dev team and refuse to listen to sense from said experienced developers, developers often find themselves forced to release things they know are not ready, without a damn thing to do about it. The fact is that people less motivated to put out quality products and more motivated to make money quickly are the people more often than not making important timetable decisions, decisions that used to be made by more-informed developers who controlled their own projects. This fact is IMO the single most detrimental trend in software development, as products will continue their downward spiral as long as people who do not care about the product are the ones who get to make decisions about it.