a Lord played MTW2

[Lord Adherbal]

Lord Chretzel (from the Lordz modding team) says he played MTW2:

i played Medieval Total War 2 day before yesterday at the games convention. dont think this hasnt been released anywhere?

visually it really seems like the game is not far from done.
i think they are really testing on game balance.

picked the battles of agincourt and parma. i think they included two more in the preview.
animations doesnt seem to be finished yet as well. soldiers would move strangely slow. there was a unit of arkebusiers. they could change their formations while shooting, the first line would turn around and step back for the next line to come forward and shoot. but in slowmo. horrible to look at. and i dont remember about the reloading but altogether it looked odd, not very fluent.


basicly they put a lot more polys in vegetation. great variety of bushes and plants in different settings. it looked awesome.
the unit models and textures were looking fine. they made a great use of gloss maps
flags looked very nice. they are more important, because of the detail made it even harder for me to distinguish units.

but unit handling seemed to need some more work. maybe i had too many prosecco, but units were really hard to control. i felt like half of my clicks were ignored. surrounding the enemy seemed not to bring any advantage. knights moved slow and fought weak. i tried to rush into the enemy but some units would stop for no appearent reason before getting into melee.

don't wanna be pessimistic yet, but especially the "surrounding the enemy seemed not to bring any advantage" and "some units would stop for no appearent reason" sounds like major problems from the RTW engine that still not fixed?

[Ibn Munqidh]

I must say Im dissappointed, especially from the last paragraph from his writing. The arquebusiers, I really hope they can clean this up too.

Thanks fro posting Addy!

PS: Its old Overlord_63 here ;)

[Doug-Thompson]

More evidence that unit speed and meatcutter kill rates have been toned down.

[x-dANGEr]

Good news..

// They won't releast the game with such clear un-fluent gameplay.. So it will prolly be fixed.

[L'Impresario]

Those will be the days, when we 'll all be lamenting the loss of the awesome RTW gameplay and blaming CA's catering to ages over 80, slow motion movement and all...
They took a masterpiece and turned it into monopoly for inmates.

[CBR]

Well if half his clicks were ignored then the pc was choking when he played. But from the latests vids the overall speed has not been reduced, so I doubt the slow animations he is talking has anything to do about speed and killrate.


CBR

[professorspatula]

In one of those preview videos, you can also see some of the RTW issues weren't resolved, like the cavalry who failed to properly charge down a unit of infantry. At the end of the video, instead of charging straight through them, they turn and hit the end infantry man instead, the kind of nonsense that made chasing down routers in RTW annoying. Hopefully all these issues will be resolved before the game is released.

The final demo could be very telling if the battle engine is finalised for it. I can only remember playing the RTW one and thinking it must be a cut down/easy version of the full game, only to discover, no, the real thing is the same.

[The Wizard]

[...] CA wants to reach all types of players [...]

And that's just it, hmm? They're not reaching all kinds of players. They are only reaching the gimmick kids, arcade runts and gamey fanboys. Meanwhile, they've kindly put the veteran -- just as much a lover of the series if not far more so -- out on the street with no company but the wind and the weather and the eyesore that was RTW gameplay.

I find it so disappointing. Many shreds, yes, but they add up. This is but the latest bit. The surrounded penalty was already taken out in the RTW engine. Little hope that they'll put it back in with this revved up version of the former. What that points to? A game with little tactical depth in its battles, relying on gimmicks such as elephants with cannons and cool-looking sieges to carry your average twelve year old through the oh-so-hard battles.

We better hope to God that CA don't decide to make MTW2 the same "modder's paradise" as RTW was. Remembering my EB days that means a severe limit to our capabilities to actually improve the game.

But for me the question is will the game after modding be comparable to MTW, but with better graphics and some balance issues solved.

Is that not the problem here, Appleton? We are the ones with the responsibility to take the game back to the level it had possessed earlier on?