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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

#71

Post by lifeisstillgood »

>>> many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint

I don’t think that is a believable stance anymore.

Social media does not make people say or do stupid, offensive or unlawful things. People do them and social media makes it easier to find what they say.

I think a major cost to the police in future decades will be finding people who just threatened to kill stranger and caution them. It’s all Part of “this is the society we want to live in” cost

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

#72

Post by animal531 »

ossobuco wrote: post #60
animal531 wrote: post #58

I love the Total War games. I missed out on Shogun 1, but after that I've played almost all of them from Medieval onwards. I still figure Rome 1 and Medieval 2 as the best overall versions of the game. Rome 1: Playing the Romans was amazing, all the way to the corner where you could try expanding with the Egyptians and running into the Roman might. They basically perfected the simple gameplay loop in this title. Late…

> I missed out on Shogun 1 I remember when I was a kid and shogun 1 was announced. I spent many hours in excitement, reading over and over gaming magazines reviewing the game announced features. The game concept was simply mindblowing at the time. I was used to RTS like AoE and the likes, and always felt like I wanted more realism. Shogun 1 felt like a dream come true. Such good memories.

Ah nice, I didn't have a graphics card that could run it but I visited a friend who had bought a new Riva TNT and saw it a few times.

Yeah, coming off of normal RTS games with only a few units to squads in a realistic setting was great (even though the sprites looked pretty terrible up close).

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

#73

Post by chongli »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh. The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar. It sounds like they needed people to manually create and o…

That may be the proximate cause of the issues but the ultimate cause was the development methodology. There was absolutely zero reason for the game to not be in a playable state throughout the development lifecycle given that they had Shogun 2 — an incredibly polished and well-built game — to work from. This was a management own-goal as far as I’m concerned.

Go back in time to the beginning of the Rome 2 lifecycle and simply proceed by iteration. Maintain playability throughout. This would’ve given them a much longer lead time on major issues with the gameplay.

It’s absolutely crazy to me that they would tear Shogun 2 down to its individual components and work on them all separately without maintaining a playable version of the game. A ton of it could be done with continuous integration, where they just have a couple of CI servers sitting in the office running the nightly build in an all-AI automated fashion. Heck you could even plug in a monitor to the server so that people can just walk over and watch the AI vs AI battles as a sanity check.

The other baffling part of the whole thing is how little communication was going on. I mean it’s baffling in terms of good design and development practices but it’s understandable from a dysfunctional management perspective.

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

#74

Post by Der_Einzige »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #2

I can't believe it's been 10 years since this game came out. Rome I still has a special place in my heart. Probably spent more hours playing that game than any other. Even inspired me to read some Plutarch to learn about the lives of famous generals. Rome II was somehow a worse game. Especially weird because it came right after Shogun 2 and its amazing expansion pack which are the best games in the series bar none. Q…

Besides divide et impera, there’s also the excellent atilla total war

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

#75

Post by LarsDu88 »

fakedang wrote: post #46
LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh. The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar. It sounds like they needed people to manually create and o…

So how did you capture the Black Ship? I would basically use a bunch of fire arrows from bow kobayas to set it on fire. Others would use a pair of Nanban trade ships on either side to do a double barrage at the same time. And then others go ham with a heavy bune fleet. Which route did you go for?

Just spam my entire fleet at the damn thing and save scum if I accidentally sink the damn thing. Lol.

Endgame campaign.

Really shows that in gamedev, game design trumps everything.

Shogun 2 under the hood was janky as fuck, but boy did they plaster over that shit with some solid game design and playtesting.

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

#76

Post by LarsDu88 »

chongli wrote: post #73
LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh. The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar. It sounds like they needed people to manually create and o…

That may be the proximate cause of the issues but the ultimate cause was the development methodology. There was absolutely zero reason for the game to not be in a playable state throughout the development lifecycle given that they had Shogun 2 — an incredibly polished and well-built game — to work from. This was a management own-goal as far as I’m concerned. Go back in time to the beginning of the Rome 2 lifecycle an…

Quite honestly, I could see why they would want to rework big chunks of Shogun 2.

Rome II with all its faults had working cities with plazas and walls. Shogun 2 had maybe 6-8 actually distinct fortresses, where folks just line up on some walls most the time and do tower defense. The AI was always jank.

The "tower defense" gameplay in Shogun 2 was way more enjoyable than in Rome 2 though. Having a small fortress you can tightly defend against overwhelming odds is more fun than having a sprawling city where you're running foot soldiers around plugging gaps along a 20 km long wall.

The other part is the crazy requirement that soldiers be able to fight each other on boats which are very often moving around. Quite honestly naval hand to hand combat is pretty boring, but tacking that requirement on by featuring it in a trailer is an insane decision. Sounds like the marketing team wanted to do Saving Private Ryan in 200 BC. The number of times I actually used this mechanic in a 30 hour campaign was like 3-4 times, and it sucked every time. Typically the soldiers would slowly disembark (quite often literally teleporting to land) and then immediately get run down by enemy cavalry since the AI would get stuck in the "disembark" state and soldiers would stand still barely defending themselves.

Shogun 2 had many of its core problems plastered over with solid game design.

Also CI in gamedev is not nearly as common as in webdev, mainly because the state space for a videogame is far larger than for a web app. These issues are caught at playtesting and QA time, and every stakeholder involved in that process should be well aware that they are shipping a broken game.

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

#77

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

wjnc wrote: post #55
EZ-E wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's common, I still don't think it's good. Some games seem to be made playable way earlier then in the case of Rome 2. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 and soon for Path of Exile 2 - all the content is not there yet but the main "game loop" and features are there, this seems like a great way to get feedback, and have time to adjust if necessary. In the case of Rome 2 I guess the management imposed deadlines that did n…

This might be a partial explanation why indie studios can be in meaningfully competition with the AAA-developers. They often integrate early and use beta, even alpha, early access. As a layman I find that approach more understandable. In my work, I always favore incremental changes to large process overhauls. We do have to understand that 10 years ago early access was a lot less common.

In the specific case of Celeste, the game was playable before development, because it was preceded by the PICO-8 version.

Valve did this a couple times by just buying out teams who made mods or interesting games - Narbacular Drop becoming Portal, that goo thing becoming the goo thing in Portal 2, Counterstrike becoming Counterstrike, then a CS mod becoming Left 4 Dead.

"Every big program that works evolved from a small program that worked" is even true for games

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

#78

Post by LarsDu88 »

chongli wrote: post #73
LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh. The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar. It sounds like they needed people to manually create and o…

That may be the proximate cause of the issues but the ultimate cause was the development methodology. There was absolutely zero reason for the game to not be in a playable state throughout the development lifecycle given that they had Shogun 2 — an incredibly polished and well-built game — to work from. This was a management own-goal as far as I’m concerned. Go back in time to the beginning of the Rome 2 lifecycle an…

The other thing to keep in mind is that CA built their own game engine for this series of games.

Tearing up any part of the game engine (which dates to the late 90s) is sure to have big breaking consequences for other teams and any half decent project manager or mid level manager should be aware that this cannot be done in parallel with other activities without first really carefully communicating and engineering interfaces.

Any sort of navmesh rewrite or fix in the engine would ideally be done BEFORE non artistic assets are laid out. Ideally, they should have set out to automate the mesh generation and built artist tools for mesh editing as a major goal.

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

#79

Post by scott_w »

Arch485 wrote: post #24
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",…

I wouldn’t even blame the authors of the system that existed. Even in a perfect culture, compromises need to be made. If the time needed to adapt land warfare AI to the new sea warfare AI in Empire(?) is high, better to just focus on making the thing you’re building work well than to be “pure.”

Now consider a culture that wasn’t, as reported, particularly healthy and…

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

#80

Post by novaleaf »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #5

Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh. The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar. It sounds like they needed people to manually create and o…

any navmesh alternatives for dynamic worlds? I am toying with gamedev and this one still has me stumped.
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