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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

#31

Post by jimnotgym »

zo1 wrote: post #28
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…

But some management jobs are technical themselves. Take CFO for example. It would be very difficult for an engineer to become a CFO in any reasonable timescale.

Marketing, HR, Sales and the aforementioned finance are all things that a frequently trivialised on hn, but none of them would be an easy transition for your average engineer.

I am not in gaming but I run finance at an organisation that has a lot of engineers.

1) I spend a lot of time explaining what our organisation does to our finance team. This is rare in my experience. 2) giving up on engineering focus to want to become commercially focused is a big step, and not one everyone is going to want to take. Imagine suddenly being dragged into a meeting with your holding company to explain why your project is losing money?

Overall I can't believe that they develop games like this. If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine

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

#32

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

intelVISA wrote: post #7

The fall of CA has been sad to watch, many studios wrestle against a similar fate once the money and grifters roll in.

I have mixed feelings about their handling of TW Warhammer III. Parts of it are harder to defend (Initial campaign, buggy releases) but the expectations of the fans are arguably a bit crazy. I have 1.8k hours between TWW II + III, which probably isn't an outlier of the typical fan i read feedback from as a lurker on /r/TotalWar.

People expect a DLC provide them 100s of hours of new/fresh gameplay that will allow them to play the same game for 3-6 months until the next DLC release. Comparatively you could look at the same amount of content and play 50ish hours of game play then set it down and play something else until the next DLC. Even though my play style is closer to the former, I think the expectations of the latter are more healthy. This mismatch of expectations and the pricing of any DLC (which adds in macro factors outside of the Dev's control) has lead to such toxicity on the subreddit at times.

It's also interesting how much that toxicity has subsided in recent months with positive releases, better/consistent developer correspondence. Which maybe points to my expectations opinion being a bit wrong.

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

#33

Post by littlestymaar »

sitharus wrote: post #29
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 t…

That reflects my experience with software team's management for my whole career (12 years).

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

#34

Post by jsiepkes »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #12

[flagged]

Pretty clear from the article why he did the interview:

> What happened is that the community team were getting a lot of questions about AI and asked if I wanted to help give some answers. I agreed. I’ve seen people speculate that I was forced or coerced into giving the interview and I want to be clear that that wasn’t the case at all. I was asked to, but I could have said no. I went ahead with the interview because based on my awareness, and the internal communication on the progress of the project, I believed we were going to ship another game like Shogun 2.

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

#35

Post by meheleventyone »

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…

> However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late, how could this allow any meaningful testing and feedback before going live?

This is a leadership and management problem, it doesn't actually have to be this way and is also why it can be hard to push back on requests that don't make sense because it's hard to tangibly demonstrate the issues when the game just doesn't function. And worse because games are a creative project watching something you've worked on for ages suddenly come together is a really compelling feeling and can be successful so the issue perpetuates until the grenade goes off in your hand.

I also think you're reading too much into the phrasing ten years on. In particular when he's speaking on behalf of his lead at the time rather than anything he directly said.

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

#36

Post by sensanaty »

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...

True in theory, but a lot of the time leadership doesn't care and wants it made NOW, with no care or consideration being given to bugs, because the execs don't play games and don't know (or rather, care) how much buginess can ruin the experience.

For them it's a battle between pushing the broken version ASAP, versus taking an unbounded amount of time to properly do it. To be an exec you have to be short sighted since the only thing that matters is the current and potentially the next quarter, so you get shit like this all the time, since they're incentivized to do it the idiotic way to earn money ASAP and leave for greener pastures right after the money settles.

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

#37

Post by sensanaty »

jimnotgym wrote: post #31
zo1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

But some management jobs are technical themselves. Take CFO for example. It would be very difficult for an engineer to become a CFO in any reasonable timescale. Marketing, HR, Sales and the aforementioned finance are all things that a frequently trivialised on hn, but none of them would be an easy transition for your average engineer. I am not in gaming but I run finance at an organisation that has a lot of engineers…

> If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine

Well the new version of the engine is what makes the programming required :p

Each new Total War game introduces some new mechanics, so obviously it needs a rewrite sometimes. As the author said, they had 2 systems that now had to be merged together, and the engine wasn't built to handle the situation properly.

Even between the Warhammer games, they massively changed things around between 1, 2 and 3, with lots of new mechanics and tweaked old ones.

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

#38

Post by szundi »

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…

These companies somehow always at the brink of bankruptcy and have to ship shit

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

#39

Post by titannet »

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.

Maybe you didn't play Rome I? I also don't understand the death threats but I still remember playing Rome II on launch - after playing Rome I for years - and being absolutely baffled at how bad it was. Apart from the graphics nothing was better and a lot was worse. And I actively avoided playing siege battles, for fans of those it was even worse as explained in the article.

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

#40

Post by langsoul-com »

The problem that everything is good because it's profitable is quite insidious.

Usually, these early warning signs don't come into effect until much much later. And by then it's almost too late. See total war nkw with the latest Pharaoh release. The debt collector has come to get their due, with interest.

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