Medieval II Update 2 Feature List

[Whacker]

they almost ceartinlly did the best job they could given their time constraints, the blame as is ushually the case in matters like this lies with the company executives.

Fixed that for ya.

As I've said before, I'm in complete agreement with you, in that the devs themselves did a great job on this game and did as much as they could with the time they had. I feel their pain also because I've done professional dev work in the past, being ridden mercilessly by clueless and greedy project managers and whatnaught doesn't help the situation. It still doesn't change my opinion about the state of the game right now or when it was released, but I do think that I understand why things happened the way they did.

That said, my views on what they should do with the game right now have not changed. I think first and foremost they need to focus on bugs that are a direct result of game code, i.e. stuff we the community can't mod/fix ourselves. Second, they should focus on bugs that are fixable through moddable files, like traits/ancils. Lastly, they should focus on balancing issues.

Cheers!

[Carl]

I largely agree wit your their Whaker, just hadn't piked up on you with that before. TBH it comes down to the fact that when most people say CA, they mean the Devs and it annos that they get flamed so much when really 90% of the stuff thast goes on isn't really their fualt, it's people elswhere in the company that are to blame.

[sapi]

Does it really matter who is to 'blame' for the supposed faults in the game?

Lets keep this thread civilised and on topic, talking about the new things the patch will bring, not how the fixes 'shouldn't have been necessary' or the like

[pike master]

why have i got the feeling that noone is giving any new information

[sapi]

Because there none left to give until the final version of the fixlist?

[Dexter]

Well it would be good if the shield bug and the 2H would be solved now .. originally i did think i was doing something wrong * LoL ...
the fixes here on the forum helped a lot, but still i would expect a knight to fight better than a simple spearmen .. * tis is a personal opinion *
maybe if the patch is released i will reinstall the game ...

[Daveybaby]

Does it really matter who is to 'blame' for the supposed faults in the game?

Heh, for what its worth, *we* (i.e. the game buying general public) are to blame for rushed/bugged games as much as anyone else.

(1) Market forces dictate that a game has to have a certain amount of graphical 'wow factor' in order to sell well. Please lets not kid ourselves that anything else matters for a large majority of gamers.

(2) When designing a modern PC game, you have to decide how good your graphics are going to look at the start. Graphics take just as long to produce as the game code. You have to plan for how technology is going to advance in the (say) 2 years it will take to develop you game.

(3) If you delay your release by too long, your game will start to look old hat. You will have missed your opportunity for the 'wow' factor to be of use. You could always re-do all of the graphics again, and recode the engine again, but thats just going to make you even later.

Case in point : look at those old duke nukem forever screen shots, i seem to remember that they were state of the art at one point. How many times do you think theyve had to recode their engine and redo all of their graphics?

(4) If your game doesnt sell well enough the company *will* go bust. Just take a look throughout the history of game development to see how many fantastic game studios have gone under. Great games are not enough to ensure your survival on their own.

(5) Delaying a game by 3 or 4 months is often not an option. M2TW came out just in time for the big christmas shopping frenzy. Is it reasonable to rush a slightly bugged (but still playable IMO) game out the door to meet this date? Yes, IMHO. If they'd delayed by 3 months they would have missed it - and thus they would have sold far fewer copies of the game. If they'd waited till *next* christmas the game technology would start to look out of date. Meanwhile what are the programmers going to use to buy food with?

So unfortunately the dirty business of market forces and making money is often more important than shipping the 'perfect' game (as if there would ever be a way of making all of your customers 100% happy anyway). Welcome to the real world - anyone who thinks that the bottom line doesnt matter is deluding themselves. You have to deliver great games at the right time. You have to do it to a tight schedule. You have to make enough money to fund the next round of development so that you can get the 'wow' factor for the next game in the series - so that the incredibly fickle and shallow game buying public will notice it's existence for long enough to part with 30 quid for a copy.

And if you get it wrong - no more CA, and no more Total War games.

Just something to bear in mind next time anyone bashes either the devs *or* the 'suits' for rushing a game out.

[Bob the Insane]

I have put down MTW2 until the 2nd patch is released (finally giving my 360 some attention ) but the list of fixes on this post makes me really look forward to getting back into MTW2 once the patch is released...

Nice stuff, really appreciate the effort...

[pike master]

what about the vanilla release that you buy at the store. the average joe may only have dial up and not think to download a patch right off.

that sure would hurt sells. they need to make an upgraded game disc and start stamping it out for sell. but then again they are probably waiting to perfect the game and then release the version as a gold edition 8b

[King Bob VI]

I have dial-up and it doesn't hurt me a bit to download patches, even though they can take a while. What sucks is not being able to download awesome looking mods that are like 100 MB or more.

[Forward Observer]

what about the vanilla release that you buy at the store. the average joe may only have dial up and not think to download a patch right off.

that sure would hurt sells. they need to make an upgraded game disc and start stamping it out for sell. but then again they are probably waiting to perfect the game and then release the version as a gold edition 8b

The "average joe" that you describe probably wouldn't know a shield bug from Shinola. He would either play and enjoy the game and that might be it, or he might want to expand his involvement with the game enough that he might eventually end up at a forum like this.

Then in very short order he would find out that he should not be enjoying the game because he didn't know that longbowmen eat Wheaties instead of Cheerios for breakfast.

On the other hand, after playing the game for a few hours, and getting nowhere because he is too illiterate to read the manual, your "average joe" decides that the game sucks and he is going back to really great games like the "Sims" or "Quake".


Daveybaby hit the nail precisely on the head. The only point I might add was that Sega/CA also probably wanted to beat the release of Vista and DX10, since neither their game nor the new operating system were optimized to work with each other.

I also would imagine that all those "average joes" who got a new PC for Christmas and later took advantage of their free upgrade to Vista might think twice about purchasing a game that only lists compatability with WindowsXP/2000 on the box. (that of course assumes that they can and do read box copy)

Cheers

[Quillan]

Well, as games have become more complex patches have become the norm. Even aside from the "rush it out the door" mentality there are always bug that slipped through the testing, and I think most gamers know this and look for the patches. Sometimes the patches are too big to conveniently download, though. I saw one recently that was 95 megs in size, and that wasn't one that added new multiplayer maps to the game like some of the Battlefield 2 patches did. It was all bug fixes, anti cheating software, and networking code.

Oh, and FO, in my experience almost nobody reads box copy. I see countless whiny posts every time a game comes out that only certain video cards can run. "Why won't this buggy game work?" Because you don't have a card that supports pixel shaders! "What do you mean?" It says clearly on the box that the game requires a card that supports pixel shaders. "Why do they make a game that requires shaders then and force me to upgrade to play?" It never stops.

[Forward Observer]

Yeah, Quillan. I knew it was a bit of a stretch when I said that--lol

[JCoyote]

I have dial-up and it doesn't hurt me a bit to download patches, even though they can take a while. What sucks is not being able to download awesome looking mods that are like 100 MB or more.

Might want to find yourself a download manager. Something like Gigaget or whatnot. That way, it can pick up downloads again after you lose connection. A little bit here, a little there, some when your asleep or at work, etc and you'll crank through the large files soon enough. It really helps when you don't have to get all of it in one session. I'm on broadband and I use one, that way if I want to play a game online I don't have to worry about a download sucking my bandwidth I can just pause downloads til I'm done.

[antisocialmunky]

Just don't stick it on Rapidshare *bleeeerrrr*.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

So unfortunately the dirty business of market forces and making money is often more important than shipping the 'perfect' game (as if there would ever be a way of making all of your customers 100% happy anyway). Welcome to the real world - anyone who thinks that the bottom line doesnt matter is deluding themselves. You have to deliver great games at the right time. You have to do it to a tight schedule. You have to make enough money to fund the next round of development so that you can get the 'wow' factor for the next game in the series - so that the incredibly fickle and shallow game buying public will notice it's existence for long enough to part with 30 quid for a copy.

And if you get it wrong - no more CA, and no more Total War games.

Just something to bear in mind next time anyone bashes either the devs *or* the 'suits' for rushing a game out.

That is pretty close to what it's like.

And in fact, even in a near-perfect environment, with good funding and minimal corporate interference (near impossible, though with the Sega-CA partnership we come quite close), a top-of-the-line technical team, sound project management and a crack set of designers and artists, there are limits to what you can do. The limits on what is possible in software development eventually catch up with you, and so the perfect game does not exist - which is a good thing too, else I'd be out of a job ;)

It's a continuous balancing act with as ultimate aim to produce something that you will enjoy playing, that we can be proud of, and that keeps Sega and CA in the black and the shareholders happy. The fact that Total War has proven so succesful and that we're still here making more of them means we must be doing something right.

[Garnier]

Just want to show my approval of a CA person posting. Every post a CA person makes on these forums adds to my(and others') opinion of them.

[vonsch]

Just want to show my approval of a CA person posting. Every post a CA person makes on these forums adds to my(and others') opinion of them.

Well, within reason, Garnier. We don't want them JUST posting on forums.

CA strikes a pretty good balance in getting things out and patching. And I'm willing to forgive a lot when games have the legs that this series does. And the modability which extends the life years over the "standard" sort of game.

That's not to say I don't sometimes about some design decisions, or about some bugs that slipped through. It's not meant to be personal.

I am finding the game much better with a few "fix" mods and am eyeing more comprehensive mods now too. But want this patch to stabilize the base before trying to settle on a personal setup to really play with. Maybe then I'll stop playing 50 turns and restarting.

[chickenhawk]

The thing I understand the least is why CA does a very few large patches when some other devs make minor fixes weekly. What is different about the approach to software engineering or the game engine that leads to that approach?

I am not trying to give CA a hard time here, I have gotten my moneys worth and eagerly await the new patch. I am just honestly curious about the process.

[pike master]

nice when they popup just wish they would stay

[Foz]

The thing I understand the least is why CA does a very few large patches when some other devs make minor fixes weekly. What is different about the approach to software engineering or the game engine that leads to that approach?

I am not trying to give CA a hard time here, I have gotten my moneys worth and eagerly await the new patch. I am just honestly curious about the process.

1. It probably saves time. Instead of having to release many patches and make sure each one works correctly, you can put off playtesting until a bunch of changes are in, then sit down to test the entire patched game, looking for all the things you've changed at once. This should save a lot of testing time, and would also make it possible not to have testers in the building all the time to test every little change that you do and want to make into a patch. So, probably saves money too. Time is money though, so that's nearly redundant to say.
2. Organization. From a management standpoint, it makes far more sense to view each patch as a project of its own than to simply slap out fixes whenever they can be finished. This gives a definite timeframe to take community input and discuss ideas for each patch, a development phase, and then a testing phase (it's more complicated than that usually, but that's a good enough explanation for our purposes). That in turn makes it clear to CA how long they're taking suggestions that would get into the current patch, how long they have to develop it, etc. If those phases are too short then you either have to adopt a less structured method that means time is used less efficiently, or you make the phases themselves worthless as not enough could get done in them. Thus it's probably a great benefit to CA to organize and issue the patches as they have - it's easier to be productive when you have a clear idea of the overall picture you're shooting for and a clearly defined method to get there.
3. Perception. You said it yourself: you're eagerly awaiting the 1.2 patch. The patch will almost certainly have a profound impact on the game as we know it, and consequently we will perceive that CA has done a lot of work to accomplish this, and be grateful and understanding of what is required to do it. If the patches came frequently but were never earth-shattering, we would likely simply take them for granted, and it would be far less obvious how much total work was being done by CA to make them happen. As it stands, the patch work is well-known, and it benefits CA to maintain that spotlight - it can be a tremendous plus to them for the community to have big reminders that the game is well-supported.

Constant updating is not without its own benefits, but if you're looking for reasons they'd want bigger patches that encompass more material and development time, these might be some of them.

[Kraggenmor]

To add to Foz's list:

If you have 10 items to fix with one of them being a 'big' issue and 9 being smaller ones, and set about releasing small patches while the big fix guys are working on the big one, it is entirely possible and even likely that patches released to fix the small things will change the game and cause the big fix guys to have to step back in their development of a fix.

Releasing a big patch (theoretically) allows time to fully understand how all the the fixes are going to affect the game and each other.

[player1]

I'm pretty pleased with official Hotseat support.

Something I lobbied from my RTW days...

And personaly, I don't care if I can't play RTS battles againt living human. To me, hotseat was always like cooperative play (humans vs AI).

[econ21]

And personaly, I don't care if I can't play RTS battles againt living human. To me, hotseat was always like cooperative play (humans vs AI).

I don't suppose we can tempt you over to the throne room? We have quite a few cooperative TW games in progress, e.g. a M2TW HRE one (The King of the Romans).

[Razor1952]

IMHO CA are succesful because each incarnation of TW IS better than the last. MTW2 brings a huge improvement in accomodating a wide diversity of playing styles, so although it can never be all things to everyone, it does a pretty good job of appealing to many.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

To add to Foz's list:

If you have 10 items to fix with one of them being a 'big' issue and 9 being smaller ones, and set about releasing small patches while the big fix guys are working on the big one, it is entirely possible and even likely that patches released to fix the small things will change the game and cause the big fix guys to have to step back in their development of a fix.

Releasing a big patch (theoretically) allows time to fully understand how all the the fixes are going to affect the game and each other.

All factors which contribute, and I'll add another good one: with lots of small patches and no auto-patching system, users tend to miss small patches, and it is harder to get them out on things like cover disks on magazines. That means people end up running various different patched versions, fragmenting the user base, which is bad for both the single-player experience and especially multiplayer... With a single big patch, you can make more noise and reach more players.

The major reason though is the testing cost.

[player1]

Personally, I think there should be small patches, for things like hotfixes.

[JCoyote]

Well in this day and age, I think it's a bit backward not to have a game self update and patch. Almost any system that can run M2TW is going to connect to the internet somehow so... there should be a more automated distribution mechanism. Like some games, where it checks the net when it starts for a newer version and offers to update if there is one.

We could use that, it would also allow for more small fixes to be released instead of just big rollups. That proves an advantage for people with slower internet connections as well, they don't get hit with so much all at once.

[einar]

I'm told the Shield bug has indeed been fixed for update 2, Palamedes might be able to fill you in on more of the details surrounding this but I have been told by multiple sources that it is already in and tested.

There are also three new custom battle maps going in today for testing which hopefully should make the final update release.

Savegames from 1.1 version will be compatible with 1.2 version?