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
#2I 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.
Quite honestly none of those games have particularly good AI
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#3I 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…
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Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#4I 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…
Our men are running from the battlefield! Shameful display!
---
Good times...
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#5Now 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 optimize these for various maps rather than using an algorithm to generate it automatically.
Additionally there's this big issue with sea battles where each little boat has a little moving navmesh which little soldiers can move around on, including when the ships actually land and have to make the boat navmesh connect with the land navmesh at runtime.
Altering navmeshes at runtime (which are generally static stack allocated) is sure to lead to a bunch of stale references if the code wasn't architected to be flexible to begin with
This sort of detail is probably lost on non-technical folks and needs to be clearly communicated early on.
At the end of the day, I have much fonder memories of capturing the Black Ship in Shogun 2 (which used the old two navmesh system separating boats and land), and virtually no memories of landing troops in sea land battles in Rome 2. The feature was not important to gameplay, but requires refactoring the whole damn navmesh system!
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#6I 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…
Our men are running from the battlefield! Shameful display! --- Good times...
Ah that hit me straight in the nostalgia
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#7The fall of CA has been sad to watch, many studios wrestle against a similar fate once the money and grifters roll in.
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#8I'm going to be honest: I was playing Rome II as this article came up. I didn't play Rome II right at launch, but bought it a couple years on. I play it with mods (DEI). I previously played Shogun 2 (and associated expansions) and Rome: Total War
Overall, I quite like Rome II. And for all of the (valid) criticisms which can be levied at the incomplete state, I am glad many features such as first person command of naval and emplaced artillery ultimately made it in. Due to a modding community, such features become more complete, adding dimensions to amphibious battles which were initially missing. While I do acknowledge these are in many ways labors of love by game devs (or hobbyists) I do hope that ambitiousness in features isn't ultimately abandoned in game development.
I wish there was a "refund point" way of purchasing games: purchase a partially complete game, upon successful delivery of a feature (amphibious landing, nav succes, etc.) it becomes non-refundable. I feel like this may smooth over these issues, but I ultimately know very little about the domain. At least looking 10 years back, I can say I'm happy with Rome II with mods.
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#9For those who like to read these sorts of posts through a case study lens, it's likely of interest to take a look at Mick Gordon's statement[0] on Doom Eternal.
Re: Total War: Rome II and Creative Assembly – My Statement Ten Years On
#10Honestly I remember playing Rome 2 and not thinking that it was that bad. I played it for a while and thought it was really entertaining. I don't remember it being particularly buggy at launch, but being 14 I probably wasn't all that discerning.
But in any case it and Attila didn't quite grab my imagination like Rome 1 and Barbarian Invasion did, and I'm not sure why - the later two were better graphically, more realistic, had more features, but even when I've been working on my own game I still feel indebted to Rome 1. It definitely wasn't childhood nostalgia because I only played Rome 1 the year before Rome 2 came out.
Maybe it's that the lower-fidelity graphics give you more room to imagine, or every settlement being able to be upgraded to the maximum, or the lack of a region system making the world feel bigger.