Interview with Mike Simpson on RPS

[Gregoshi]

And what exactly is CA supposed to say about the AI? "The AI is turning out dreadfully bad for S2TW. The other day I started a campaign battle and was promptly called away from the computer. I came back five minutes later and found out I had won the battle." You know they are going to put a positive spin on the game, so it continues to amaze me when people get all worked up over it. It would be nice if they'd say "We think we've made some great strides in the AI. However, the TW fans will have to be the final judge on whether or not we've been successful", but that isn't likely to happen.

[pevergreen]

True, but I believe my last point still stands.

When someone has failed to deliver multiple times, you can't trust what they say anymore. SEGA and CA should realise this and take action to rectify it.

[al Roumi]

And what exactly is CA supposed to say about the AI? "The AI is turning out dreadfully bad for S2TW. The other day I started a campaign battle and was promptly called away from the computer. I came back five minutes later and found out I had won the battle." You know they are going to put a positive spin on the game, so it continues to amaze me when people get all worked up over it. It would be nice if they'd say "We think we've made some great strides in the AI. However, the TW fans will have to be the final judge on whether or not we've been successful", but that isn't likely to happen.

But that last would be sensible marketing aimed at the fans -rather than the insipid tosh they've chucked out so far.

[Gregoshi]

I'm still convinced CA's best course of action would be to remain silent on the game aside from a teaser trailer or two until a couple of weeks before released. For the Org audience at least, they seem to cause more stress than relief, though the MP crowd seems reasonably happy at the moment...but after months of much gnashing of teeth. Too much hype is rarely a good thing.

[Phog_of_War]

Personaly, I dont understand the lack of an open Beta test phase.

Seems to me that many developers have gone away from open testing by their community and do it in-house. As we have seen, in-house testers....well.....suck. Now I'm not trying to come down on the work they do, I am sure its important for game quality, but even if they played a portion of an Empires campaign they would have seen some of the more glaring deficencies in the CAI and BAI. However it seems that the only thing their testers were intrested in was if it looks pretty and do the units properly respond it commands on the Campaign map (yes, for the most part) and pathfinding in battles (no, for the most part)

I dont know. Maybe the testers are told to look for certian things by the developer and not to worry about all those other things. If so, CA (or any Dev for that matter) are shooting themselves in the foot. Having your testers (in-house or otherwise) be so focused on one aspect of a game as complex and huge as the Total War games is foolish and sloppy. I know its expensive these days to get a game like Total War on the shelves in the first place. And then to have the game be even slightly sucessful to the point where you at least get the money back to cover your development costs is an accopmplishment in and of itself.

However, not having a proper Beta phase (open or not) and not taking suggestions by your testers or the community at large (Med2 - ETW) is just plain bad decision making. Kind of like asking a rodeo clown to do brain surgery, you might get it done cheap but, you might not be happy with the results. Or putting it another way: Good work ain't cheap, and cheap work ain't good.

Apologies for the rant.

[Gregoshi]

I don't think it is necessarily that the CA beta testers suck, but that there is just so much to test in a game like TW. It seems that increasing the pool of testers would help cover more ground. However, I do wonder how effective regular gamers are as testers. Most, I'm sure, just want to play the game ahead of time, but do they really test - "lets see what happens when I do this..." and then paying attention for things out of the ordinary? Still, one would think more testers would help quickly find the more glaring problems not necessarily obvious on an individual level but over a large set of testing data - such as the suicide daimyo in STW.

[Magyar Khan]

well greg u do sound a bit on sided... i personally gave a signal in willingly to test the game in their house in london.... i dont want to play the game ahead of anyone else its just i am 100% confident i can tell ca if the game is good or not and whats needs -much- more attention....

we all know the marketing is build around fancy graphics and gamemodes......which sells well in magazines but we are interested in gameplay, replayability and epicness....

the best AI opponent for an sp player would be good human opponents drop in battles is helping here.... but we cant trust CA when the boast these things. History probably repeats itself.... remember what we have seen over the years... like
- unbalanced units
- bad mp networkcode
- crappy foyer or none at all
- shooting thru hills

which btw didnt appear in all releases.... but every release had its own big mp-shortcommings what even a blind mp-player would see....

and some testers we could offer from the org are swoosh, amp, spoon, ducky and perhaps even u greg....

stw/mi had at a given point just like mtw/vi the brilliance to deliver a few epic 3 vs 3 games each night

[Gregoshi]

Magyar, I'm not trying to be one sided - just fair base on what I see as jumping to a conclusion with little basis. Also, regarding gamers as testers, I was refering to the average Joe Gamer, not someone such as yourself and the others mentioned who have a deep understanding of the nuances of the MP aspect of the game. I think it would be great if CA recruited a team of experienced TW players (of high skill) and let them be part of the testing.

You are right in that CA's claims in some areas need to be taken with a grain of salt at this point, but at the same time, just because CA boasts about something, doesn't automatically mean it will be terrible either - despite their track record on these things. We will each make our own assessment of the success of their boasts when we actually play the game. We can only take limited info from the recent battle report which was played in a very relaxed and sloppy manner. The limited info is also of limited value because the game is still under development and things will change (hopefully for the better).

I would only be a good tester of the dumb stuff in the game, not the tougher parts like balance and such. Also, testing is rather tedious and not too much fun in my book.

[TosaInu]

[QUOTE=Magyar Khan
- shooting thru hills
[/QUOTE]

There was and is (???) a problem with the balistics, but it was not shooting through hills nor the 'cruise missile'. It becomes hard to solve a problem when the analysis isn't good. It also doesn't help when a creator is summoned in a way he must feel harsh, for fixing something that isn't there.