Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On

> As far as I know, the only significant example of a “human face” gameplay feature that made it into battles was the cinematic mode that allowed players to control an individual unit from a close third person perspective. This was similar to the unit camera that existed in previous Total War games, but arguably worse because it forced the camera very close to the unit, reducing players’ tactical awareness.

> During testing it became clear that no-one was using this feature, and design leads were unhappy that a feature they had spent a lot of time on was being ignored by players. They then announced that a combat bonus would be given to units while in this camera mode in order to encourage its use, which prompted controversy with programmers arguing that the camera mode should not influence the outcome of the battle.

> Eventually design leadership settled on the following compromise: The user interface would tell players that it gave a combat bonus, but the combat bonus wouldn’t actually be applied. They wanted to explicitly lie to players in order to trick them into using an unpopular feature so that they could save face. I honestly don’t know whether a combat bonus was applied in the end, it’s possible that the button is still lying to this day.

And I’m not saying that it’s the “project manager(s)” who are the most important role, because most roles are actually equally important, if one role gets it wrong, the whole project has the potential to fail.

Let’s look at Hollywood movies quickly, your average person looks at headline names in movies like actors, directors and sometimes composers, but these roles while being essential contributors to a successful movie are by no means the most important roles within a movie project.

Movie projects are the work of hundreds of people and any successful movie is a somewhat monumental achievement of everyone doing their part at the right time so as to not delay parts for others and cause cost overruns. Think of shooting a scene, you have at least dozens or hundreds of people on a set and if someone comes unprepared on the day, they’re burning the salary and equipment rental costs for everyone and everything there.

Software development can be the same, rockstar or even smart developers aren’t the “most important” due to their coding skills on large projects. Of course competent technical skills are essential, but success is largely a factor of how effective communication is between all members of a project, this is from developers/QA/artists etc at the lowest level all the way up to the executives.

Everyone needs to be on the same page as to what’s most important right now, what the road ahead looks like, and spotting potential issues so they can be addressed.

According to this blog post, a large amount of the problems with Rome II were that everyone was working in silos and the risks and challenges of trying to integrate everyone’s work at the final hour was largely ignored by management.

Certainly project management here was largely responsible for the problems at launch.

That seems rather common for many projects? If you have so many pieces developed in isolation, putting them together only really starts to happen when you get higher time pressure.

Outside of the navel stuff, Rome II's combat wasn't wildly different from Rome I, Shogun, Medieval, etc. This made it kinda jarring what a step backwards it ended up being.