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

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

#21

Post by dobin »

> This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish.

I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why they generally suck.

While a normal board meeting style development, i feel completely bamboozled by this approach. Indie games in contrast usually start with an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, to test the basic concept. Then make the basic game loop fun. Then do the rest of the game like maps, sound, graphics, to support the central idea.

AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.

And people still preorder.

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

#22

Post by chupasaurus »

satisfice wrote: post #20

Reading this is bizarre, because I played a lot of Rome II and enjoyed it. I experienced very few problems with it (except the technology tree is tiresome and just feels like paperwork to navigate… I want an auto mode for that). Some people just play things and enjoy things and have no idea that there is controversy. Death threats over a game? jeezuss.

> Death threats over a game?

Now, Doom fans are not like Disney fans. If Doom fans don't like what you've done, they burn your house down. © Mick Gordon @ GDC 2017

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

#23

Post by indigochill »

dobin wrote: post #21

> This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish. I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why t…

As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it.

At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.

Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).

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

#24

Post by Arch485 »

EZ-E wrote: post #14

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any exp…

As somebody who's worked in game dev, I can relate to the author.

You could totally argue that the incompatibility and non-modularity of the land + naval AI systems is bad design, but that does not put the blame on the author: they may not have had anything to do with it!

In my opinion, it is very much leadership who is at fault in this example. When the programming team says "this can't be done in time for release", and then leadership says "that's rough buddy, do it anyways", that's 100% leadership's fault.

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

#25

Post by robotpepi »

EZ-E wrote: post #14

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any exp…

> we couldn’t guarantee that it would be stable by the end of the project.

He said that the time was not enough. Also, we don't know the exact way he communicated the problem.

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

#26

Post by oreally »

EZ-E wrote: post #14

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any exp…

> An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

And what if the leadership/culture just responds 'screw you do it anyway, you're really elite right? You can do anything right?'. So the employees in the trench just goes on a death march because hey, passion and whatever.

And then at the postmortem leadership just plays the blame game for the broken product. Which is fine if you don't care about politicking, but now someone upside is convinced you suck and the layoffs come for you. In the author's case there seems to be even some sort of reputational harm. THIS is how the worker gets incredibly jaded.

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

#27

Post by fallous »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #15

Reading accounts like this has lead me to the conclusion that for any non-trivial sized project, the overall project management and effective cooperation between people (or often teams) is probably the hardest thing to get right. 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…

Choosing and managing people well is maximizing your chance for success. Good teams with good communication internally and externally ensure a good culture. Good management does everything it can to create and actively maintain that culture.

When you encounter an internal failure you can be certain it was because management failed in creating or actively maintaining that culture.

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

#28

Post by zo1 »

EZ-E wrote: post #14

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any exp…

> "An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z""

In practice this never goes as smoothly as you think.

It's a constant antagonistic battle between management and the people on the ground doing the work. Let's face it, the devs also want to have a chill time and develop at their own pace (because it allows them to not stress, slack off, but also because they can focus on quality and the art of it, etc). Management knows about this, they just suffer from a lack of ability to tell the difference between which one the dev is doing when when he asks for "more time".

Either way, you need engineering leadership that has clear goals and priorities. Having management with non-technical people that don't trust the technical people, along with conflicting and opposing constraints, will give you Boeing and this game disaster.

We need to bring back meritocracy.

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

#29

Post by sitharus »

EZ-E wrote: post #14

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any exp…

> An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

Yes, and from the article it seems that the author also agrees. However from my reading the leadership was so top-down and closed minded that if you said this the best case is that you’d be told you’re wrong and it was completely achievable because they felt that it should be.

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

#30

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

indigochill wrote: post #23
dobin wrote: post #21

> This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish. I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why t…

As someone with both AAA and game jam experience, you just put my vague misgiving about the AAA process right into words. This is exactly it. At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it'…

Interesting in the context of BGIII and its extended early access. I had to stop playing after a play through or two of EA because i wanted the game to still feel fresh when the entire game came out.
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