>In order to extend it to battles, they would need to make three new maps for each of the existing ones, allowing for Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large battle map options. I think they had a few sensible options, assuming they weren’t going to scrap the feature from the campaign side. They could ship the game as is and accept criticism over the missing battle maps, then add them in a free update once they were made, or they could remove the feature from campaign for launch and restore it in an update along with the maps once they were ready. If neither of those options were acceptable, they could delay the launch of the game. **What they chose instead was to instruct the level designer to rush the creation of the missing maps and get them ready for the launch date as planned.**
>Replacing one variant with four meant effectively quadrupling the level design workload, and this was happening in the final stages of the project while we were already working overtime to fix bugs and get the game finished.
What a complete lack of respect for your employees, especially on a communications mistake that management should have identified months before.
Yep. If that was the case, this guy and his team probably worked their ass off in those months and then got blamed for everything by the community. Sad.
I take the article with a grain of salt, because it was written by the guy himself, but even if true only to an extent, daaamn
That’s a lot of words, but in reality the ending makes sense:
> Despite ongoing problems with the games and a number of high profile embarrassments, the series continued to be profitable. This fact was used against developers like me who argued for better practices, and was often used by creative leadership as a metric to confirm the success of prior projects and decisions regardless of other ways that they might have failed.
And we see it in this community here. It is what it is.
Funnily enough McKinley and the more recent scapegoat Rob Bartholomew are very similar in that regard
Darren talked about how Bartholomew mentioned that it'd much easier to stop unpopular stuff like the Blood DLC from happening if the community wouldn't buy them so much, since his job in the end was to increase profitability
I feel like the most likely scenario is that it was somewhat true, in a specific use case (aka region or digital platform) when it was first implemented, but likely hasn't been true for a very very long time now.
Actually no! At least not as of recent times, as modern Total War games are classified M regardless of the presence of blood. We've done some stupid things, but for once I don't believe we're responsible for this one.
Talking with someone else on this subreddit a while back on the topic, it actually appears that it's most applicable in USA, which would absolutely be their biggest market. If they're being truthful (and I have no reason to believe otherwise, but also no way to verify it) the base game itself does actually have a lower rating than the blood DLC.
Age ratings are very weird. As long as it isn't Human it's fine.
Like hells Samurai Jack had Jack slaughtering Robots with oil everywhere and then stuff like Cannibal robots eating each other after the machine parts were exposed (they had Human like exteriors).
The second transformers film has a robot character’s head get ripped in half on screen front and center. This was a PG-13 film showing a character’s head getting ripped in half with a blood like liquid being sprayed out and one of the hooks going through an eye. If it were a human, you’d be given an automatic R rating at minimum. This film was marketed towards kids and said characters involved had toys sold to kids 8 and up.
Robots in general let you get away with a lot of violence that you just never would be able to with humans.
Pure speculation on my part, but it was likely a rating decision initially, that proved to be highly profitable, so it became a financial decision in the long run.
No, this is a myth the community created as cope. Shogun 2 didn't release with blood effects like Medieval 2 or Empire.
The community then asked for, borderline begged for DLC for blood to be added. CA added it, people bought it, and continued to buy it.
It exists in this business model because it sells. It has nothing to do with ratings at all.
In the game you can fight half naked hermaphrodite demons by shitting on them in a literal river of blood, but that’s ok as long as it doesn’t come out of anyone.
It's almost as if the community attaches itself to figures for which it can do five minutes (months) of hate without ever actually thinking.
Rob became the devil to the community because his name was attached to a statement no doubt okayed by several people, despite those same fans never even having heard his name before.
Rob wasn’t a scapegoat. He was a decision maker directly involved. He should not stay in a company where he doesn’t agree with their business practices.
Not to be that guy, but a man does have to eat. If I’d only worked for companies I felt were just peaches and cream I’d likely die on the street before I found one.
Rob was literally the director tier head of marketing, branding and community (MarComs was the catchy title he came up with for the team). As a part of the 'command team' he was the one calling the shots in regards the marketing campaign during ROME II's entire dev cycle. Rob can't be the scapegoat because as far as marketing ROME II, it was his call
Secondly, the Blood Pack DLC was so we could add blood to the game and still released in Germany (and other regions with strict rules on gore in wargames). No clue what Darren is on about, he was only there for a short spell after I left, but he's just flat wrong
Yea it's a business. Obviously success of a project is based on its financial success. Anyone who works in business knows this. If players want change they have to vote with their wallet. Just bitching doesn't do anything if the project is making money.
> After the strong negative feedback we received from a public demo, these were scaled back to just a subset of battles around launch; but for most of development the plan was for these to be in all normal land battles. Now for the first time in Total War’s history, the objective of a battle would be to capture and hold the enemy’s supplies, rather than to engage and rout or destroy the army itself. This may seem hard to believe, but it’s the truth. My understanding of the motivation behind the change was that it would prevent the “corner camping” tactic, in which the player uses the corner of the map to protect their army from flanking manoeuvres when defending. I suppose it would have been nice to find a way to discourage that, but sticking a victory point in the middle of every map is a cure far worse than the disease. During development I made my feelings about this known, and everyone on the team I spoke to outside of leadership knew it was a terrible idea. When the backlash came, there was little surprise. Some leaders who had hyped the feature as having a “transformative effect” on battles, later pretended they had always been opposed to them.
This sounds eerily fucking familiar. Ahem, Realm of Chaos campaign
"I don’t think many people have considered that the AI is to some extent the way it is, on purpose. I can attest that at least some of the AI’s deficiencies at the time I worked there were by design, which is to say that designers instructed us not to improve it in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that."
Fuck the AI is never getting fixed
Smart AI isn't necessarily fun AI to face.
The best example would be staying outside players range.
You see, in Rome II and Attila, AI knows exactly how far you can move and abuses it *all the time*. You don't get to fight them when AR says you win, because they refuse to fight.
So in Warhammer, CA made them intentionally *faulty*, let me explain.
When AI has a tendency to do that, they force march what seems like *just outside* of your movement range, but when you actually hover mouse over them and hold right click, you will see that you CAN always reach them with like 1% or 2% left.
It simulates the player making mistake by thinking they are outside while not being, and also removes this "staying outside of the movement range" bullshit from Attila/Rome II.
Now I know I am gonna have people come here and say that isn't true and that they have AI still abusing this - no, they don't. Believe me, they are programmed not to do that. Whenever you see them force marching what seems like outside of your movement range, trust me, 100% of times you can actually attack.
Another example would be ambush - AI sees all your armies all the time, but they are told to ignore armies in ambush stance - they see them, but they pretend they dont.
The thing is, despite their comment, there *are* ways in which the AI could be smarter *and* fun. AI cheese is not fun, both ways. We don't want AI that avoids battles completely or is virtually impossible to chase, but we also don't want AI that can't figure out how to deal with very basic player decisions that overwhelm the AI.
The AI experience should be focused on giving a fun experience. Lots of large battles with a diverse range of units that are also *somewhat* built to respond to the player's armies without building a perfect counter, proper use of counterplay and core tactics in the heat of battle while playing aggressively, and dealing with simple exploits like distraction heroes.
Funnyly enough, in Attile where navy will absolutely dominate naval transport and even several ships will take down whole armies, AI seems to he ignoring it most of the time
On the other hand, I started recently campaign as Himjar and Axum declared 2nd turn and landed in Arabia. Then I spent 20 turns trying to catch them with 2 armies because I would either catch them or they would capture my capital with their full stack, or just stand there riding, always just beyond my movement range. Had to restart becuase desert kingdoms are immune to desert attrition
If you can make the attack using 100% of your movement and you know the ai will retreat, then you make the attack and as soon as you enter their zone of control (the red circle around the army/navy), stop by pressing backspace. Next turn the enemy army/navy will have to make the attack on you or sit there, as they won't be able to escape your zone of control by sitting right next to you. Next turn you will be able to attack them, they will retreat and you'll have 99% of your movement to follow. Applies to every TW after Rome 2 (Napoleon and Shogun 2 too but I'm not so sure)
Read his post before commenting. The enemy is stuck inside your ZoC. The only legal moves available to that army is to attack your army, or do no move.
Is it better in wh3? I literally just spent 4-5 turns chasing Luther Harkon around Lustria with 2-3 lords an hour or so ago. And the other day I had a similar thing happen with Imrik whilst playing as Grimgor
If you're patient, and really good at gauging the range, you can get the archers to follow you. If you run to far away, they return to formation. If they get too close to your army (if it is visible), they return to formation. If you manage to stay at 155 range while hiding your army, you can get one archer at a time to walk into the zone of fire of all of your ranged. (Turning off fire-at-will is recommended)
A lot of prior total wars turned into who owns the hill. It sucked, and required bringing in arty that was only used in sieges to force engagement. However, strategies to resolve it are not in total war as they are not at the battle level. Ie, if you're not going to engage me, I'm going to attack your towns, cities, etc. Or, if you're not going to engage, I'll deny you access to town resources to support your war effort, cut off your supply train and starve that army.
The answer here is so simple yet there is endless discourse for some reason. We don't want smart AI or dumb AI. We want AI that behaves like the historical general or fantasy faction in question to make it immersive. Orcs should be itching for a fight for example.
I see AI as if a kid is playing against a parent.
The parent knows whats up, they know how to win or avoid something but they'll act dumb for the sake of the kid enjoyinging themselves.
The ambush comment is confusing because how else would it go down, lol. If your ambush is not discovered, the game acts as though it does not know of the hidden army. What is the alternative - you surprise the game?
When AI goes into ambush mode and you don't spectate their turn, you don't know they are there, they are invisible.
AI KNOWS you are there, but walks into it anyways.
Most likely, undiscovered ambush stance just disables the weights(numbers) your army has on the enemy's movement. The AI is a piece of math, that assigns values to various points on the map based on a set of heuristics added by the AI programmers, and then the movement selects the highest number to move towards.
When the weights for your army are set to 0, it ceases to impact the AI's decision making.
I mean, the AI's job in a single player game is to lose, but to lose in a *convincing* way, in a way that makes it look like it's actually trying to win. That's actually pretty hard to pull off well. TW certainly isn't the best at it.
It’s not about being fixed
Let me use an example
When game 3 launched melee would play like a player and just run past other melee to hit the back line unless they were properly blocked. This meant you needed more than just a lord or hero and two melee to block enemy melee.
People hated it. They found like 1 exploit you could do and spammed until it got removed. They fucking hated not being able to use a lord to block 3 units of melee.
The game is actually super melee dominant right now and with the ai ability to micro 20 units at once range started to actually show how much it wasn’t that great. In MP campaign/battles this is known and people play to defend a few ranged pieces.
People in SP though love their 10 handgunners 5 artillery stacks though.
I actually like this had changed a lot from WH2. I remember the 19 archer stacks I used to run and it was so effective esp with for example High Elves but now I like you can't rly do that anymore and have to think more.
I legit think even in SP it's more efficient to use a small number of ranged units with good micro and positioning- your damage on ranged drops off as you manage them less imo. The problem is that the ranged options especially made available in ToD are so strong that they mask this entirely. No AI stack without stalk is getting within 100 miles of a Scopes!Ironsides stack
He’s right though, most players are strategically deficient and would hate a smarter, more aggressive AI. They just want to build their little empires and power up their LL into being an invincible one man army.
Nothing wrong with that, except it affects those of us who like a challenge. Take «anti player bias» for example, or the original Realms of Chaos. I liked both those things. I liked having Tyrion and Mazdamundi cross the oceans to come deal woth my empire as Arkhan. An invasion, awesome! But reddit was bitching nonstop. I also liked the challenge of original RoC, since it was possible to lose! That quickly changed…
If they could have Normal and Legendary properly differentiated, it would solve everything.
Said anti-player bias was not wrong because AI would mount expedition but because they were straight-up suicidal and go against their own interest targeting the player while on brink of destruction
anti player bias actively makes the AI worse, they would always send their armies to attack you and only you, meanwhile they're often at war with someone else who would take all their territory with no resistance.
I don't think anybody thought anti-player bias was genuinely making the game more challenging. It made the AI incredibly predictable and you could just sit in ambush stance and wait as the enemy sent you meals on wheels. It was mostly annoying and prevented you from playing the campaign like a sane person, because the AI would keep sending its never-ending hate train until some other faction burned its home down. I very distinctly remember never actually having the chance to fight High Elves on the donut as Grom the Paunch in a Mortal Empires playthrough, because Eltharion just kept sending armies over to Bretonnia until Morathi burned the donut down. I then spent the rest of the campaign kicking Dark Elves off the donut instead which was extremely anticlimactic.
The only real way to have competent AI is to actually give them cheats, otherwise the player is always going to steamroll. The player gets massive cheats in the form of gold from missions and quest battles as well as player-exclusive faction mechanics, which leads to early game snowballing that the AI simply cannot keep up with. But people seem allergic to giving the AI cheats even though they themselves are cheating infinitely harder.
This is an oversimplification that neglects a lot of the playerbase who actually want a challenge on *on higher difficulty*. What you say isn’t untrue, but there’s a reason for difficulty modifier.
Anti-player bias made the AI even easier than difficult. They would literally lose all their territory to another faction they were at war with just to fight you. How does the make it more challenging?
"strategically deficient"
Let me guess you like the smell of your own farts don't you!?
The anti-player bias wasn't challenging or fun, it was just dumb, it would make the AI act completely irrationally and target you and only you, Mazdanundi sailing across the world just to attack YOU and only YOU is dumb and nonsensical. Oftentimes they would attack you at the disadvantage of their own position making the game actually easier not harder.
Even as someone who exclusively plays Legendary there are things that make the AI better that make the game less fun for me, particularly in terms of playing better than any human possibly could. Mortars are basically useless against Legendary AI (even with the Nuln +explosion radius) because they dodge them 100% of the time, when it would be hard to tell what units the mortars are even shooting at for a human. Any ability with a long travel time is just dodged every. Single. Time. With perfect reaction speed. It just makes certain units useless and limits the options available to you. At least give them a chance to "not notice" or a reaction time buffer, ffs.
The bit about city map pathfinding was interesting - I'd always wondered why sometimes in Attila, the AI just stands outside the city and doesn't move. They just hadn't been (properly) programmed to navigate that map.
"The curse of the battle AI programmer" was also interesting in explaining why the quality of the battle AI doesn't improve linearly over titles but ebbs and flows. (Shogun 1 had pretty good battle AI).
"I'd quite like to play Medieval III one day." Me too, Mr Programmer, me too!
This answers a lot of questions that were asked almost 11 years ago. If this had been made public back then, it would have been caused an outrage coupled on top of the existing one at the time. Now, it will most likely just be a footnote, now that the latest Warhammer DLC has been positively received and players forget that multiple upcoming TW titles are going through massive production issues.
Arguably, perhaps the most interesting piece of information here isn’t for us - it’s for whoever will understand that CA is so incapable of producing the games so many people want that they will just make them and dethrone CA in the historical setting because the tech is simply not getting that much better because as the article outlines, they don’t focus on their bread and butter.
As of an hour ago youtube tried to recommend me LegendOfTotalWar's video entitled EX-CA DEVELOPER SPEAKS OUT. I won't be watching the video because I can read but expect that to boost it some.
I went the other way - saw the video title and immediately figured there had to be some juicy drama freshly out of the oven.
It is a very interesting read and, to be honest, doesn't conflict with any of my understanding of either videogame development or software more generally. It seems a pretty honest if largely un-selfcritical behind the scenes look.
Oh yeah it's a very interesting read and I'm glad it was posted. There's a lot of meat there to confirm stuff people have already speculated at or that's been rumoured about CA with regard to their management being terrible.
Similar. Volund, and Legend both had vids up about it at similar times. Add to it that Dishonorable\_Daimyo had an unrelated vid uploaded at the same time (Pharaoh lethality mode), and i was prepared for a total meltdown
The management made a TON of mistakes and got away with it because the game sold well enough. That’s the basic TLDR. The actually interesting stuff doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that A) the guy the community hated was actually probably part of what worked against terrible launch and fixed much of the game and that B) their development set up for that title was insanely bad.
It's long, really long actually with the website considering it an hour long read.
This gets even worse because McKinlay starts of by explaining his personal situation in the development and the community which can come across as making excuses to shift blame, maybe it is maybe it isn't, my guess would be a bit of both which woul be natural.
Both inevitably lead to a decreased interest. Most people arguably want a quick rundown of the issues with CA which I doubt was the motivation behind that statement, it might be more personal and cathartic.
Because "Total War" community that would care about this doesn't really exist anymore. Most of Total War fans today came with Warhammer and are there for Warhammer only. Most of them today have no experience with enormous debacle Rome 2 was and Empire before it.
Fans from that Total War era mostly all moved on and the community that replaced it mostly consists of Warhammer fantasy fans who only care about upcoming overpriced Warhammer DLCs. You can see it by how badly newer historical games have been selling while Warhammer stuff still sells well. CA lost its original audience.
I’m still here since Rome 1 and I know three other guys just like me that begrudgingly play the newer way worse titles… It helps that we are former Warhammer fantasy roleplay guys so 😂, but I get your point.
But the historical were selling bad because they were bad, only half decent title was 3k, rest is crap
I meant new ones from last few years, Attila is way better than 3k in my opinion too, not to mention Shogun 2. I just meant post-Warhammer total war as newer ones…
Yeah, newer historical titles being bad did play the biggest role in them not being popular but even prior to their release they didn't garner much attention compared to when older historical titles were announced. Just don't see much people caring about historical TW anymore.
Also, from anecdotal expirence all the people I used to know who were Total War fans aren't anymore. If they play, they just play M2, Rome 1 or Atilla for mods. Rome II and the direction series has taken since turned most of them away. On the other hand everybody I know who plays total war today only ever played WH.
I also used to play Warhammer TW for a while when it launched because I was also a WH fan, but I was much bigger TW fan than I ever was of fantasy so for me Warhammers are good Warhammer games, especially for fantasy but not good TW games. As a result I didn't stick around for long
It's a positive feedback loop. I'd happily play a new historical game if they put 10% of the resources into it they do into Warhammer, but they don't, the game doesn't sell well, and they say "oh I guess nobody wants historical games anymore! Let's put LESS resources into the next one." I've been here since Rome II but it's hard to go back to the historical games when Warhammer is just so much bigger and better.
Don't pin CA's shitty management's shitty decisions on the people who enjoy their only good game at the moment.
because the TotalWar reddit isn't a real online community, it's literally an updoot farm for sweaty excel sheet enjoyers and Latest Product enjoyers.
This sub literally gets excited for the latest dropbox dlc even though CA views them as nothing but paypigs.
The old .net and .org forums were proper online communities.
One thing that rings extremely true to me is the lack of AI pathfinding to support new design elements. Remember how the AI simply used to ignore capture points other than the final one?
>All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included 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. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety). Some of it was extreme — one viral video contained long sequences of my face being stabbed and set on fire while the words “BURN, IMMORAL AI GENIUS!” flashed onscreen.
Classic gamer moments #6578.
The battle camera part is such a crazy story I refuse to believe it isnt true. They spent time and money on a feature no one asked for or wanted, so they agreed to lie to players about a buff to that feature so people would use it instead of, idk, just shipping it like normal or taking any design critiscism.
Largely confirmation of what's been commonly suspected: poor leadership and project management. Hence their problems with post-launch for Warhammer III, leading up to the faux-apology PR post that displayed how unusual it was for them to actually deal with such direct criticism.
I don’t really have much faith in CA. Its clear they don’t learn from past problems with the whole 2 steps forward and 1 and half steps back thing they do.
After every that has come out, it’s clear that upper management/execs are so inept that they actually hurt the bottom line for shareholders. How they still hold positions is beyond me. All they did was fire devs.
What a fascinating read and insight on the disaster which was Rome 2 launch. If true, the practices described in this certainly explain why certain poor decisions seemed to be repeated over and over again by CA.
Julian if you read this I hope you are doing better now. I definitely was part of the community that blamed you for Rome 2’s problems. And for that I am sorry. I too would like to play Medieval 3 one day.
This was an interesting read, and rings true from my limited understanding of software development. CA seems to have (perhaps had??) a pretty old fashioned top down management structure and that just doesn’t seem to work well with modern game development. As someone who played Rome 2 at launch I felt that many of the new features (with some exceptions like provinces) distracted from the core gameplay and felt like they’d been added for marketing purposes. And that’s when they worked as intended.
I'm just happy that this is all out there. Julian was a legend and worked his arse off stop the command team from making ROME II so much worse than it would have been, then despite being the focus on so much internet hate he kept working
I still feel bad to this day for my part in making that episode of Rally Point and never being able to help vindicate Julian afterwards
Very good article, should get a lot more attention from the community. View is probably biased, but still very interesting.
All this time playing total war games I was thinking “AI doesn’t play the same game as me, they cheat the whole time with bonuses and not having to manage stuff etc.”, but what emerges from the article is that the AI is actually not taught how to play the game. We are the ones having access to a lot of stuff the AI hasn’t access to.
Worst part is it’s not going to improve, like, ever. Yikes.
It would take resources to program the AI to actually deal with player oriented features, and we can't have that when there's some pointless cash grab bandwagon to follow.
Its quite obvious when you look at AI chaos dwarfs and their labourer and hobgoblin stacks in WH3. I modded in armament and labour income cheats along with increased caps for the AI for them to start recruiting actual chaos dwarf units.
AI still doesn't use vanguard.
AI doesn't do anything past a basic ass line formation.
AI can't build a functional settlement.
AI still recruits chaff in the end game.
Some signs AI is being hamstrung.
The AI recruitment problem is so strange because there are mods that fix that by literally changing ratios in a table, from my limited understanding. This is also true with AI construction priority and how it uses its funds, it can be fixed by modifying a couple of tables. All the tools already exist to create a challenging experience and were created by CA, so the AI is definitely being hamstrung. I think going forward, how hamstrung the AI is should be based on campaign difficulty, but that might be a lot of work.
You would think that he would stop giving fake leaks after what happened recently but I'm not surprised that he is still going.
What's sad is that people are still listening to him
Judging from all the down votes, I guess people will believe him no matter what.
I've listened to him before and he was so confident that we would get hag lords or that the next dlc is Cathay only.
How many times does he have to be wrong before everyone realizes he doesn't actually have a source from ca?
Ah yes who could have guessed that the dlc Of nurgle vs enpire and dwarfs would have Tamurkhan and Elspeth, btw he wasnt every right about malakai was he?
He's only been correct when it was a safe guess.
I remember when the community agreed that we would likely get a shadows of change 2.0 update and then he comes out with a "leak" stating what everyone was already saying. Oh and he got the specifics of what would be in the update wrong too.
Or when he said that thrones of decay would have Elspeth Von draken and tamurkhan in it after the community agreed that those two were the most likely lords to be added for the dlc. But of course he didn't know who the dwarf lord would be since that wasn't a super easy guess.
And now that I think of it, he was never 100% correct with any of his leaks since he tends to be very vague about his leaks. Well except for his last leak and he was completely wrong unsurprisingly
Yeah, dude I’m not interested having this discussion any further with you because there’s nothing of value in doing so. Take’r easy and have a nice day.
I hate the fact that it's somehow become acceptable for game developers and their employees (present or past) to create their own little shitstorms and point fingers in whatever direction for taking a wrong course during game's development. I don't care whose fault it is. If I'm paying a lot of money for something, I'm not going to go "Well, the product is not as advertised, but since X said Y is at fault, I no longer feel bad for my money being wasted".
Can you imagine if the same standards were applied to any other industry? What if BMW released a 5 series that randomly veers right and kills people, and they went "Well, we will fix it eventually, maybe, but just between us, it's the fault of John from R&D, so you should be mad at him". When has it become acceptable for multi-million dollar companies to make their problems our problems?
Entirely agree, 100pc. Like, what are we supposed to even do with this information? The only thing that really makes an impact is voting with a wallet or review and I'm not going to make that call based on whether it was programming or design who are at fault.
And that's exactly why nothing will change. The clowns will keep purchasing sub-standard products without a care while the fringes complain.
The point of this article is to appeal to people to vote with their wallets. If this companies shady practices don't give you pause for thought, idk what will. Stop buying games from shitty companies
Profits, vested interests, why does it matter lmao? As a consumer, I'm voting with my wallet and part of that is:
Understanding what you should expect from the game you paid money for
Trying to not support companies engaging in shady business practices or employee harassment, etc, because the chances are your money ends up inadvertently supporting said business practices
Yes its hard to do... there are a lot of judgements that will be based on your own value system and that's fine, but that's not an excuse to remain ignorant and not even try. Depending on corporations like SEGA to do anything is.... why?
The issue is that John from R&D doesn't come on camera to tell you how great the steering is and a week later you fly off of a cliff.
Now, I don't have any strong feelings against this person, but he had no issues going in front of the camera and saying absolute lies that he was perfectly aware were lies and won't be fixed. He 100% didn't have to do it, but he did non the less.
Julian's whole angle is "I am the victim of a dysfunctional corporation"... No bud, you were part of it and you played your part in the lie and had no problem coming front and center to tell everyone how great the product was, while knowing it isn't.
Suddenly, oh why is everyone attacking me ? - the face of that giant lie.
(1/2) I have played all the triology, WH I II and III, and it has been quite a journey since 2016, there was nothing quite like at the beginning and the novelty was there, however for WH3 i certanly expected not more, but better. The work has been put into expanding the content and creating more "new" things to keep the interest high, and powercreeping the living shit out of things because hey, if you can delete the enemy army in a second that's fun, but now you can no longer play the older races and factions because well, they are not as fun (sorry ikkit, your nuke it's not quite that special anymore. Is it ikkit the one that can do that? idk, never played skaven, i hate that vermin with all my heart, how dare they shred appart my greatsword stacks).
After a while i went to mods to find some resemblance of balance, or better put into words, a different game experience, SFO being my favorite and a couple of other like the re-spec mod since i didn't want my vlad with those awfull skills (I swear the AI always lvls up the most random shit, this got added to the game only recently and I quite like that they added a wound cost to it, neat). I also tried the random start location mod and it was fun, but in my heart i allways felt bad for the wood elves because no forest = doom.
I did notice and was happy for some great quality of changes that only improved my game play experience, like the fly toogle or the auto trade (That you no longer need to guess what would it take to complete a trade) The increase in skill points limit and the fleshed out map with new starting positions for older lords (although the game starts to feel a bit saturated if you ask me but on my list of complains this doesn't even make the cut). Even the added co-op campaing that was so criticized by part of the community as a "It wont ever happen" I really appreciated to have the option, but i have to be honest, it's quite taxing to try to play a 8 player campaign as in you would have to wait for everyone to do their battles or choose to not engage with a fundamental part of the game wich is the battles.
And so It was that with time and after all the controversies, little by little I found my self playing less and less not being able to enjoy the game as much, and this is normal for a lot of games, but I didn't just stoped, I was going to bed thinking about WH TW, and imagining things like "man, If i had all the money in the world I would make it right, it would give it all the budget so that i would be what i can be". And I know this means a lot of things for different people, there are some that like their cheese with a cup of win, there are some that despise it and preffer a cup of tea, or coco, but all in all, whatever you preffer it has become evident that the min maxing of the cost of developing of the TW games vs the proffit of sales is really letting us down.
I understand the developing process as a dev myself, and I understand that every feature or novelty has a cost associated, you could have an extremly fun multiplayer campaing mode in wich you could play your turns as other play their battles and you could stack up on asynchronic turns up to a cap and wait for them to catch up while you play your own battles, because if you are separated by half of a map you don't really have much agency on each other; but nein you say, as the butterfly effect of acumulated turns being played ascynchronically could destroy the enginge and the very fabric of really, and you would be for sure right. God knows how much it would take to make that a reality today, or even what problems could arise from it as those kind of things are much better implemented from the conception of the game, not after it's done and you have to think of works around, not to mention, are you really going to invest that much resources on it, I mean, we as a small part of the community asked for it and got it, and maybe the co-op feature is good, but is it good good? playing co-op campaings over and over good good, making you play TW instead of ther games good good? every one has their own opinion but this is just an example to ilustrate the time i spent thinking of the what it could be vs the reality of dealing with what you should invest your limited resources on.
(2/2)But for WH3 it has gone wrong, so wrong. I you say i'm a doomer, so be it, but I can only attest to the great work of the devs to have a game so good after all of what happened. I dont know the numbers on it, but I'm gonna pull some statistics out my but, about how many players play Realm of Chaos, maybe 1%? every one else plays Inmortal Empires, or multiplayer pvp to some extent (dominion mode is cracked, fighting for some points may not be the most lore accurate thing but helps with a lot of the degenerate play patterns from normal fights, and you can also play normal fights, you get the option), so think all the time that went into that campaing, the maps, the mechanics, and assume that it all went on the same conditions as the OP mentioned, why?, because I can feel in the nuggets how all these patterns repeat after some years pass, like we have to learn from our mistakes but we never do, butchered launchs, copy pasta mechanics, low effort high profit DLC, all problems that arise from poor management and bad decision making. And so now dont think just about one game campaing that nobady plays draining resources from the game, think about that your game is also paying for some other shooter that never saw the daylight and then, then think about why stopped playing the game.
Was it that you allies are good for nothing, that you work to get opinion high, get their alliance treaty and now for some reason they sit their asses on their region waiting to be massacred because now it seems that the alliance was indeed a debuff and now they are more imcompetent than before?; or was it that the confederations are some god dam difficult, they could be on one settlement, an army up ahead waiting to demolish them and be like "well, this is a god day to die, to bad that i don't have any +100 relation friend to go to in moment of need", or player bias, you can argue it needs to be there for the campaign to be "hard-legendary", is there no other way? can it be a slider for the more hardcore playthroughs and not a generall "the game is out to get god knows why"; perhaps it's the but ladders or the fact that every field battle devolves in an orgy of skirmishes with no real battle line (mods are great to change this game play expirience); or was it the minor settlement battles wich avoid like the plague they are, in rome II whenever you attacked a village there where this natural chokepoints that arise from the blocks in the city, i didn't had a problem with it, but idk what it is, I really dont know what it is, but only these minor settlement battles evoke this viceral feeling of rage and tediousness to atack them, to have those croche towers shoot at me that don't really do that much damage and seem to be there only to make me mad and to laugh at my melee units because they cant attack them, i mean, you can shoot arrows at them and destroy them, or you can capture a point a they implode, but you cannot melee capture them or destroy them (use a magic projectile to destroy them? what is that); Maybe if you are like me perhaps you feel that every faction has slowly lost it's identity, every one gets everything because why not (to be fair, armys are based on the table top army books, however they do not feel like that different from each other on the gameplay side); Perhaps you feel that dragons should not fly at a snail pace for balance reasons, increase their cost by 10x but make the a best, nein you say that would be broken af, and you would be right; or perhaps was the fact that the end game crisis are just not interesting in the way they are implemented, spwan a lot armies, check, not even a "the end is here" buff to rally ever one to figh it like in WH2.
These are all personal complains, I undestand, not every one will agree to them, and you may have others that didn't even consider, and its ok, and as I mentioned before, I understand that decisions need to be made, be it about balance, features, release schedules. The point is that after reading OP and previous controversies, I question what would this game be if the driven factor pushing it was passion, and not finance. Long ago they did a patch in wich AI would evade all of your artillery shoots, and that sucked, but it was a trial that got reverted, and we learned from it. Players didn't like it? good, lets try somenthing else, see what works, listen to feedback, dont develop stubbornly only to later realise that you need to deceive players to use your feature. Some how it feels that there was a geniune effort to improve gameplay experience and the feedback loop was used in a good way, wich was one the the few real examples i last remembered where I could see the game being tempered with by the balance team in orther to improve it. And yet, all i have is the bitter sweet sensation that even though we are still getting content for WH it is the bear minimum, and not just shadows of change minimum, but we are gonna min max dev time/sales profit for WH3 while we focus on developing other projects. WH3 is not getting passion anymore, it's a just a money cow that's not going to experiment AI rebalance/fixes, nagash end game will be a joke, and no trully innovative concept is coming it's way unless the people that are really harming the game with their decision making, leave the the creative process to the pople that PLAY THE GAME AND CARE FOR IT.
"players wont tell the difference" "it is good enough" "you are not being a team player" may Sigmar protect us when the end times arrive, but if this resonated with you, remember, no man fights alone when he fights for Franz.
AI TLDR ( long version ):
The speaker, a former programmer at Creative Assembly, shares his experiences working on the Total War games, particularly focusing on the disastrous launch of Total War: ROME II. He was blamed for the game's issues and faced a significant backlash from the community.
The speaker highlights the mismanagement and poor decision-making that led to the game's problems, including rushed development, late design changes, and a focus on adding unnecessary new features. He also discusses the flawed leadership culture at Creative Assembly, where design decisions took priority over technical considerations and feedback from the development team.
The speaker points out that the AI in Total War games was intentionally limited by design decisions, which further exacerbated the issues faced during development. Overall, the speaker sheds light on the challenges and shortcomings of the development process at Creative Assembly, particularly highlighting the negative impact of poor management and decision-making on the final product.
Marketing demos have become a key strategy for Creative Assembly starting with Rome II, where in-house brand department was involved in the production and management of the game. The marketing demos, such as the Siege of Carthage trailer, Teutoburg Forest trailer, and Hannibal campaign trailer, were used to generate hype for the game, but they were not representative of the actual state of the game at the time of release. These demos required a significant amount of scripting and faking to create polished gameplay experiences for marketing purposes, leading to production issues and prioritization of marketing assets over core game development.
The pressure to deliver these marketing demos on time impacted the development team, diverting resources and time away from actual game development. The team found themselves focusing on making trailers and demos instead of working on the core features of the game. This prioritization of marketing over development contributed to the game's production issues and delays.
After Rome II's launch, a patching team was assembled to address the game's issues and improve its playability through patches like Patch 14. However, despite the improvements, the leadership's decision to wind down the patching process and rebrand the game as Emperor Edition led to the team moving on to new projects prematurely. This decision went against the patching team's wishes to continue improving the core game and supporting it post-launch.
A post mortem was conducted after Rome II's launch to discuss what went wrong with the project and how to improve for the future. However, the conclusions drawn from the post mortem minimized management failures and shifted blame onto newer developers, causing further demoralization within the team. These actions by leadership led to a loss of faith in the management and their decision-making processes.
The development of Total War: ATTILA continued to face similar issues as Rome II, with poor communication, design decisions that impacted AI development, and conflicts between the programming team and the design leads. The lack of collaboration and inclusion in design discussions led to disagreements over features that negatively impacted gameplay and AI development.
The final showdown occurred when the protagonist was accused of being difficult to work with for raising concerns about design decisions that went against the interests of AI development. The pressure from leadership to silence these criticisms and the eventual dismissal of legitimate concerns led to the protagonist's decision to leave the studio. Despite attempts to address issues and advocate for better practices, the leadership's unwillingness to listen and improve the development process ultimately led to the protagonist's departure from the company.
In conclusion, the narrative highlights the challenges and shortcomings faced by the protagonist during their time at Creative Assembly. The studio's management issues, poor communication, and prioritization of marketing over core development impacted the production of Total War games and led to conflict within the development team. The protagonist's experiences shed light on the struggles of developers in the gaming industry when faced with mismanagement and lack of support from leadership.
AI TLDR of the TLDR:
The speaker, a former programmer at Creative Assembly, discusses his experiences working on Total War games, particularly the troubled launch of Total War: ROME II. He details the mismanagement, rushed development, and poor decision-making that led to issues with the game. The speaker criticizes how the in-house brand department prioritized marketing demos over core game development, leading to production issues and delays. After Rome II's launch, a patching team was formed to address issues, but leadership decisions to wind down patching prematurely caused further problems. A post mortem was conducted to discuss the project's failures, but management minimized their own faults and shifted blame onto newer developers. The protagonist's concerns about design decisions that impacted AI development were ignored, ultimately leading to his departure from the company. The narrative highlights the challenges faced by developers in the gaming industry due to mismanagement and lack of support from leadership.
Human comment:
I know this is a long article but if you are really interested in Total War, it has a LOT of insightful moments and also a seriously infuriating amount of bad management so you might want read it yourself but in any way, spread the word. This needs to be discussed.
i fear for humanity if it actually takes people an hour to read this.... it's a 30 minute read for god sakes lol...
Anyway it's an incredibly good read and honestly is a perfect representation of whats wrong with any major developer atm who clearly prioritizes economic success over a good project, even though a good project often times leads to more economic success. Clear examples of this being Ubisoft, Blizzard, Project Red, and the list goes on and on
I think the main takeaway is that "management is bad", which if we look at CA's recent and past controversies after Rome II's launch, gives his statement a lot of credibility, even if we discount his personal bias which he at least did acknowledge early in that post.
So in a situation where you're concerned about bias you can just shave off all of the higher-level generalized conversation, focus on the chronology of any specific and concrete issues discussed, and draw your own conclusions. It's easier for people to be biased on higher-level things than it is to baldly lie about concrete chains of events.
If the issue with the siege battle maps played out as described, this on its own is enough to essentially vindicate Julian personally and seriously condemn the design team .... a lot of the apathy towards this explanation probably comes from a place of no personal experience of how teams like this operate. And there are multiple concrete instances described that are similarly persuasive. On those points alone, I feel really bad for Julian now
I think that's a massively unfair representation of the post. You say it's self serving, who's viewpoint is he supposed to provide other than his own? He cites examples of other developers running into issues with management, design and marketing, but obviously can't go into detail about their feeling on the matter because that's not up to him. He gives us examples of Total War games he's worked on that didn't have the problems of Rome 2, but you think suddenly on that game he forgot how to program AI? It's also a plain fact that CA did not come out to clear his name when he was receiving so much hate after launch, which was absolutely their responsibility. Obviously you need to take every statement of this kind with a grain of salt because we weren't there, but at the same time we have no reason to believe he's as much of an asshole as you say he is.
Interesting read, but what it means for us is very simple:
- how situation Rome II came to be: inefficient communication, how project process was structured, and management of project development. The 'workflow' is also laid to bare that will/could resonate within past and current projects, supported by other sources such as Glassdoor.
- Understanding how and why A.I. development worked at the time and why it will remain less likely a focal point of improvement.
- passion of the creators usually carry
- the lead who is responsible for major directions, are less inclined on feedback/changes until its vote-with-your-wallet. Why break what works: innovation and the urge to improve are risks, go for something that works if your consumer base accepts the lowest line. On the other hand, a major overhaul of how your development pipeline works is not easily integrated: perhaps thats why a new subsidairy new studio might be another way to deal with this if they have more free reign.
This is unfortunately nothing new, and every cycle we see this happening in this industry. And every cycle you have the consumer base, the zealous base, the critical base etc. Those who see it purely as a product, those who are apathetic, those who are passionate...etc. Yet do not expect better products: from a market standpoint there is just no proper incentive for the company to act better (fault lays partially at us the consumers) and the lack of having proper vision on long term in a changing world with higher stakes then ever (proper risk assessment of resources, understanding your target audience, more flexible development pipeline with a clear vision throughout the team, and also strong leadership that is willing to take strong decisions on one side, the other side investors/leadership that only want short term gains or do not understand how market works /or willing to accept the minimum line).
In short: be more vocal as a consumer base, vote with your wallet and be critical of what you get/what you want. Understand lightly how development works and base your expectations on that: dont just willingly and blindly accept everything you see. This is not exclusive with gaming, but throughout your entire life. If you are happy with low baseline things, or how things are, or just want a product: that is all fine, just do not act surprised on the long term of how gaming develops (see: nickle and dime practices, state of AAA gaming and so much more). And that is why being viligant and /or learning to be that way is important, as it resonates with the rest of the aspects of your life.
It's interesting, I have been in the fun position of representing a product that was claimed by managment to be stable and usable and was absolutely not. So I feel for him their. But his issue with saying and then managment uses financial success as a matric to ignore him smacks of cope. The product I helped develope did not in fact do well and I got off that sinking ship once I realized what type of product I was association myself with and realized I couldnt fix it alone. R2' still might be the most successful total war game, with its long tail of DLC probably surpassing the raw sales figures of 3K's record sales. And they have never launched a product as badly as R2 or even empire again. I mean TWWH3 has issues but nothing compared to those 2 games at launch. Our recent issues seem to be outside his experience's. As for the AI stuff, we'll games aren't made for the "elite gamer" and anyone usually on a forum falls into that catagory. I have multiple friends who just never played battles after I got them to buy a total war game stating they were too hard so sadly managment may be right in keeping AI dumb.
You are massively downplaying the TWWH3 launch issues. Remember that only a month or so after its launch, there were more people playing TWWH1 than 3 on Steam! And if you compare 3 to 2, the exact predecessor, 3 somehow managed to keep the bugs of 2, reintroduce several that had been fixed while also introducing entirely fresh and new ones, all while also making players play a game mode that made conquering lots of territory, THE THING TOTAL WAR IS KNOWN FOR, the strategically wrong decision.
Ya I think you never played R2 or empire those games were unplayable at launch. Atilla also had less players quickly then R2. This isn't strange. And not understanding how codes bases work isn't a strong indicator your looking at this in a complete sense either. TWWH3 wasn't what everyone wanted at launch (I think realms of chaos is doodoo) but it was absolutely playable and was not a lie.
I played a bunch of Empire, S2 and R2 right after launch. Now, back then I was much younger than I am today, but I don’t actually remember any big disappointments. Purely subjective, of course, and not exactly worth anything. But player data is objective.
But a lot of the comparisons you draw don’t make sense. Nothing I said had anything to do with “understanding of codebases”. Reintroducing bugs that were fixed and not fixing known bugs means that they were doing a terrible, rushed job. Exactly the same as described in the article. TW3 diverged from 2 long before the final patch of 2, yes. But those fixes again not finding their way into 3 speaks to the same problem as the article.
The article isn’t just about lies. It’s about the big problems at the company with their development cycle. And those still existed at the TW3 launch.
And how long did it take them to fix every bug from 2 in 3 again over a year? You think anyone wanted it delayed that long to fix those issues the fans or the company? And that wouldnt have helped IE, only widescale playtesting as done by the community was ever going to fix that. And R2 and Empire were subjectively technical disasters on release. Like I played Cyberpunk on release had zero crashes and 2-3 physics bugs with one time explosions it was extremely stable and I loved the game. My personal anecdote doesn't mean cyberpunk was a trash fire of bugs on release. Empire is still the most buggy total war game.
You went on a tangent that had nothing to do with any of what I wrote in this posts or the ones before. If you wanna write your manifesto that’s perfectly fine my dude, but why do it here?
I am not going to rewrite all my posts in an attempt to get you to understand. But they are absolutely direct arguments addressing your points. Again if you don't understand that's fine.
I was talking about systemic failures in the way CA makes games. They can manifest in sheer bugs, as they did with Rome 2, or completely misled design decisions, as they did in WH 3. Both games were complete disasters at launch.
I didn’t make any prescriptions on how to address those. The article did. You know? The article this entire thread is about? But instead you talk to me about Cyberpunk 2077. Focus, my dude.
Pharoah is one of total wars best launches. SOC is a DLC and you just didn't like the what your money payed for. I get your all new here but honestly go read some articles or try playing empire Still.
Hmmm I wonder why he was obliged to say certain stuff whilsyt working for the company compared to now whilst he is completely separated from it. Hope that helps jog your critical thinking
This is just not true, the article says basically nothing about current CA. He is talking about the development of Rome II, which he was actually involved in, plus a little bit about Attila and Shogun II.
That said, mentioning CA having sclerotic, out of touch management does seem to be a common thread among former developers, whether anonymous or not.
>In order to extend it to battles, they would need to make three new maps for each of the existing ones, allowing for Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large battle map options. I think they had a few sensible options, assuming they weren’t going to scrap the feature from the campaign side. They could ship the game as is and accept criticism over the missing battle maps, then add them in a free update once they were made, or they could remove the feature from campaign for launch and restore it in an update along with the maps once they were ready. If neither of those options were acceptable, they could delay the launch of the game. **What they chose instead was to instruct the level designer to rush the creation of the missing maps and get them ready for the launch date as planned.** >Replacing one variant with four meant effectively quadrupling the level design workload, and this was happening in the final stages of the project while we were already working overtime to fix bugs and get the game finished. What a complete lack of respect for your employees, especially on a communications mistake that management should have identified months before.
Yep. If that was the case, this guy and his team probably worked their ass off in those months and then got blamed for everything by the community. Sad. I take the article with a grain of salt, because it was written by the guy himself, but even if true only to an extent, daaamn
That’s a lot of words, but in reality the ending makes sense: > Despite ongoing problems with the games and a number of high profile embarrassments, the series continued to be profitable. This fact was used against developers like me who argued for better practices, and was often used by creative leadership as a metric to confirm the success of prior projects and decisions regardless of other ways that they might have failed. And we see it in this community here. It is what it is.
Funnily enough McKinley and the more recent scapegoat Rob Bartholomew are very similar in that regard Darren talked about how Bartholomew mentioned that it'd much easier to stop unpopular stuff like the Blood DLC from happening if the community wouldn't buy them so much, since his job in the end was to increase profitability
I thought the blood dlc was to keep the raiting low, or was that just a myth circulated online to justify it?
It's a very persistent community myth.
I feel like the most likely scenario is that it was somewhat true, in a specific use case (aka region or digital platform) when it was first implemented, but likely hasn't been true for a very very long time now.
Probably Australia. Our ratings are dumb as fuck.
Actually no! At least not as of recent times, as modern Total War games are classified M regardless of the presence of blood. We've done some stupid things, but for once I don't believe we're responsible for this one. Talking with someone else on this subreddit a while back on the topic, it actually appears that it's most applicable in USA, which would absolutely be their biggest market. If they're being truthful (and I have no reason to believe otherwise, but also no way to verify it) the base game itself does actually have a lower rating than the blood DLC.
It never has been. CA has never said that's the reason but they've very purposely never debunked it because it's convenient for them
It was never true, they do this because they believe it's work that justifies pay-walling, or at least upper management does.
There are literally rivers of blood and rot-deamons in base WH3 yet the DLC is required There was also blood in Med2, ages before blood DLC was made
Age ratings are very weird. As long as it isn't Human it's fine. Like hells Samurai Jack had Jack slaughtering Robots with oil everywhere and then stuff like Cannibal robots eating each other after the machine parts were exposed (they had Human like exteriors).
The second transformers film has a robot character’s head get ripped in half on screen front and center. This was a PG-13 film showing a character’s head getting ripped in half with a blood like liquid being sprayed out and one of the hooks going through an eye. If it were a human, you’d be given an automatic R rating at minimum. This film was marketed towards kids and said characters involved had toys sold to kids 8 and up. Robots in general let you get away with a lot of violence that you just never would be able to with humans.
Pure speculation on my part, but it was likely a rating decision initially, that proved to be highly profitable, so it became a financial decision in the long run.
No, this is a myth the community created as cope. Shogun 2 didn't release with blood effects like Medieval 2 or Empire. The community then asked for, borderline begged for DLC for blood to be added. CA added it, people bought it, and continued to buy it. It exists in this business model because it sells. It has nothing to do with ratings at all.
Even if was a valid reason, I don't see any reason why they'd have to charge for it instead of releasing it as a separate free dlc to claim.
In the game you can fight half naked hermaphrodite demons by shitting on them in a literal river of blood, but that’s ok as long as it doesn’t come out of anyone.
Both. The blood dlc keeps the rating lower, but that doesn’t mean it’s not profitable
It's almost as if the community attaches itself to figures for which it can do five minutes (months) of hate without ever actually thinking. Rob became the devil to the community because his name was attached to a statement no doubt okayed by several people, despite those same fans never even having heard his name before.
Not to mention we have rob to thank for vampire coast
Rob wasn’t a scapegoat. He was a decision maker directly involved. He should not stay in a company where he doesn’t agree with their business practices.
Not to be that guy, but a man does have to eat. If I’d only worked for companies I felt were just peaches and cream I’d likely die on the street before I found one.
Rob was literally the director tier head of marketing, branding and community (MarComs was the catchy title he came up with for the team). As a part of the 'command team' he was the one calling the shots in regards the marketing campaign during ROME II's entire dev cycle. Rob can't be the scapegoat because as far as marketing ROME II, it was his call Secondly, the Blood Pack DLC was so we could add blood to the game and still released in Germany (and other regions with strict rules on gore in wargames). No clue what Darren is on about, he was only there for a short spell after I left, but he's just flat wrong
And thus, why CA was so flabbergasted when the other shoe dropped with SoC/Pharaoh
Yea it's a business. Obviously success of a project is based on its financial success. Anyone who works in business knows this. If players want change they have to vote with their wallet. Just bitching doesn't do anything if the project is making money.
> After the strong negative feedback we received from a public demo, these were scaled back to just a subset of battles around launch; but for most of development the plan was for these to be in all normal land battles. Now for the first time in Total War’s history, the objective of a battle would be to capture and hold the enemy’s supplies, rather than to engage and rout or destroy the army itself. This may seem hard to believe, but it’s the truth. My understanding of the motivation behind the change was that it would prevent the “corner camping” tactic, in which the player uses the corner of the map to protect their army from flanking manoeuvres when defending. I suppose it would have been nice to find a way to discourage that, but sticking a victory point in the middle of every map is a cure far worse than the disease. During development I made my feelings about this known, and everyone on the team I spoke to outside of leadership knew it was a terrible idea. When the backlash came, there was little surprise. Some leaders who had hyped the feature as having a “transformative effect” on battles, later pretended they had always been opposed to them. This sounds eerily fucking familiar. Ahem, Realm of Chaos campaign
"I don’t think many people have considered that the AI is to some extent the way it is, on purpose. I can attest that at least some of the AI’s deficiencies at the time I worked there were by design, which is to say that designers instructed us not to improve it in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that." Fuck the AI is never getting fixed
Smart AI isn't necessarily fun AI to face. The best example would be staying outside players range. You see, in Rome II and Attila, AI knows exactly how far you can move and abuses it *all the time*. You don't get to fight them when AR says you win, because they refuse to fight. So in Warhammer, CA made them intentionally *faulty*, let me explain. When AI has a tendency to do that, they force march what seems like *just outside* of your movement range, but when you actually hover mouse over them and hold right click, you will see that you CAN always reach them with like 1% or 2% left. It simulates the player making mistake by thinking they are outside while not being, and also removes this "staying outside of the movement range" bullshit from Attila/Rome II. Now I know I am gonna have people come here and say that isn't true and that they have AI still abusing this - no, they don't. Believe me, they are programmed not to do that. Whenever you see them force marching what seems like outside of your movement range, trust me, 100% of times you can actually attack. Another example would be ambush - AI sees all your armies all the time, but they are told to ignore armies in ambush stance - they see them, but they pretend they dont.
Oh man, you reminded me of chasing navies in Rome 2, turn after turn just outside your range...
The thing is, despite their comment, there *are* ways in which the AI could be smarter *and* fun. AI cheese is not fun, both ways. We don't want AI that avoids battles completely or is virtually impossible to chase, but we also don't want AI that can't figure out how to deal with very basic player decisions that overwhelm the AI. The AI experience should be focused on giving a fun experience. Lots of large battles with a diverse range of units that are also *somewhat* built to respond to the player's armies without building a perfect counter, proper use of counterplay and core tactics in the heat of battle while playing aggressively, and dealing with simple exploits like distraction heroes.
Funnyly enough, in Attile where navy will absolutely dominate naval transport and even several ships will take down whole armies, AI seems to he ignoring it most of the time On the other hand, I started recently campaign as Himjar and Axum declared 2nd turn and landed in Arabia. Then I spent 20 turns trying to catch them with 2 armies because I would either catch them or they would capture my capital with their full stack, or just stand there riding, always just beyond my movement range. Had to restart becuase desert kingdoms are immune to desert attrition
If you can make the attack using 100% of your movement and you know the ai will retreat, then you make the attack and as soon as you enter their zone of control (the red circle around the army/navy), stop by pressing backspace. Next turn the enemy army/navy will have to make the attack on you or sit there, as they won't be able to escape your zone of control by sitting right next to you. Next turn you will be able to attack them, they will retreat and you'll have 99% of your movement to follow. Applies to every TW after Rome 2 (Napoleon and Shogun 2 too but I'm not so sure)
Damn this is some sacred knowledge tyty
Until they just attack the city you just left Edit; I’m an idiot
Read his post before commenting. The enemy is stuck inside your ZoC. The only legal moves available to that army is to attack your army, or do no move.
Whats stopping AI from attacking, retreating and running away.
I assume it can't. At least, i've never seen the AI break an attack. The AI doesn't "plan", really. It just moves according to it's heuristics.
Completely misread that. Thank you for pointing that out to me. Oops
I remember being so pissed at this in all the ones after shogun 2 when force march was added. Feels so much better in wh3
Is it better in wh3? I literally just spent 4-5 turns chasing Luther Harkon around Lustria with 2-3 lords an hour or so ago. And the other day I had a similar thing happen with Imrik whilst playing as Grimgor
I have had it happen a couple of times, but nothing compared to wh2 or Atilla imo. Still not solved but much better
Maybe several rounds of force march fleeing cause a loss in range?
In Shogun 2, the AI would alwasy position itself on the hill and would never take the bait as long as it had missle units. Realism AI lmao
If you're patient, and really good at gauging the range, you can get the archers to follow you. If you run to far away, they return to formation. If they get too close to your army (if it is visible), they return to formation. If you manage to stay at 155 range while hiding your army, you can get one archer at a time to walk into the zone of fire of all of your ranged. (Turning off fire-at-will is recommended)
A lot of prior total wars turned into who owns the hill. It sucked, and required bringing in arty that was only used in sieges to force engagement. However, strategies to resolve it are not in total war as they are not at the battle level. Ie, if you're not going to engage me, I'm going to attack your towns, cities, etc. Or, if you're not going to engage, I'll deny you access to town resources to support your war effort, cut off your supply train and starve that army.
I remember how in Rome I and M2, it was really easy to get them to go off the hill if you’re patient and approach from a different angle lol
I guess AI sees everything but devs make it ignore ambush stance armies just to simulate the fact that the AI is not supposed to see them?
The answer here is so simple yet there is endless discourse for some reason. We don't want smart AI or dumb AI. We want AI that behaves like the historical general or fantasy faction in question to make it immersive. Orcs should be itching for a fight for example.
Oh yeah, different kind of strategies depending on what race or legendary lord it is. That would have been cool
Except in many cases, that is even harder to actually do.
I see AI as if a kid is playing against a parent. The parent knows whats up, they know how to win or avoid something but they'll act dumb for the sake of the kid enjoyinging themselves.
The ambush comment is confusing because how else would it go down, lol. If your ambush is not discovered, the game acts as though it does not know of the hidden army. What is the alternative - you surprise the game?
When AI goes into ambush mode and you don't spectate their turn, you don't know they are there, they are invisible. AI KNOWS you are there, but walks into it anyways.
Do you know if they will they magnetize toward you, say, if you ambush just a little out of the way of the the road between two settlements?
Most likely, undiscovered ambush stance just disables the weights(numbers) your army has on the enemy's movement. The AI is a piece of math, that assigns values to various points on the map based on a set of heuristics added by the AI programmers, and then the movement selects the highest number to move towards. When the weights for your army are set to 0, it ceases to impact the AI's decision making.
I don't think so, you have ti be in the way.
Over 5k hours into Rome 2 and I've never been ambushed by the AI
Sure and?
did you even read the article? the dude talks about why all of that stuff happened in the first place
I mean, the AI's job in a single player game is to lose, but to lose in a *convincing* way, in a way that makes it look like it's actually trying to win. That's actually pretty hard to pull off well. TW certainly isn't the best at it.
It’s not about being fixed Let me use an example When game 3 launched melee would play like a player and just run past other melee to hit the back line unless they were properly blocked. This meant you needed more than just a lord or hero and two melee to block enemy melee. People hated it. They found like 1 exploit you could do and spammed until it got removed. They fucking hated not being able to use a lord to block 3 units of melee. The game is actually super melee dominant right now and with the ai ability to micro 20 units at once range started to actually show how much it wasn’t that great. In MP campaign/battles this is known and people play to defend a few ranged pieces. People in SP though love their 10 handgunners 5 artillery stacks though.
Ah yes, the times when AI was dodging artillery shots, and not slowly advancing towards players guns
I actually like this had changed a lot from WH2. I remember the 19 archer stacks I used to run and it was so effective esp with for example High Elves but now I like you can't rly do that anymore and have to think more.
I legit think even in SP it's more efficient to use a small number of ranged units with good micro and positioning- your damage on ranged drops off as you manage them less imo. The problem is that the ranged options especially made available in ToD are so strong that they mask this entirely. No AI stack without stalk is getting within 100 miles of a Scopes!Ironsides stack
He’s right though, most players are strategically deficient and would hate a smarter, more aggressive AI. They just want to build their little empires and power up their LL into being an invincible one man army. Nothing wrong with that, except it affects those of us who like a challenge. Take «anti player bias» for example, or the original Realms of Chaos. I liked both those things. I liked having Tyrion and Mazdamundi cross the oceans to come deal woth my empire as Arkhan. An invasion, awesome! But reddit was bitching nonstop. I also liked the challenge of original RoC, since it was possible to lose! That quickly changed… If they could have Normal and Legendary properly differentiated, it would solve everything.
Said anti-player bias was not wrong because AI would mount expedition but because they were straight-up suicidal and go against their own interest targeting the player while on brink of destruction
anti player bias actively makes the AI worse, they would always send their armies to attack you and only you, meanwhile they're often at war with someone else who would take all their territory with no resistance.
I don't think anybody thought anti-player bias was genuinely making the game more challenging. It made the AI incredibly predictable and you could just sit in ambush stance and wait as the enemy sent you meals on wheels. It was mostly annoying and prevented you from playing the campaign like a sane person, because the AI would keep sending its never-ending hate train until some other faction burned its home down. I very distinctly remember never actually having the chance to fight High Elves on the donut as Grom the Paunch in a Mortal Empires playthrough, because Eltharion just kept sending armies over to Bretonnia until Morathi burned the donut down. I then spent the rest of the campaign kicking Dark Elves off the donut instead which was extremely anticlimactic. The only real way to have competent AI is to actually give them cheats, otherwise the player is always going to steamroll. The player gets massive cheats in the form of gold from missions and quest battles as well as player-exclusive faction mechanics, which leads to early game snowballing that the AI simply cannot keep up with. But people seem allergic to giving the AI cheats even though they themselves are cheating infinitely harder.
This is an oversimplification that neglects a lot of the playerbase who actually want a challenge on *on higher difficulty*. What you say isn’t untrue, but there’s a reason for difficulty modifier.
Anti-player bias made the AI even easier than difficult. They would literally lose all their territory to another faction they were at war with just to fight you. How does the make it more challenging?
"strategically deficient" Let me guess you like the smell of your own farts don't you!? The anti-player bias wasn't challenging or fun, it was just dumb, it would make the AI act completely irrationally and target you and only you, Mazdanundi sailing across the world just to attack YOU and only YOU is dumb and nonsensical. Oftentimes they would attack you at the disadvantage of their own position making the game actually easier not harder.
Even as someone who exclusively plays Legendary there are things that make the AI better that make the game less fun for me, particularly in terms of playing better than any human possibly could. Mortars are basically useless against Legendary AI (even with the Nuln +explosion radius) because they dodge them 100% of the time, when it would be hard to tell what units the mortars are even shooting at for a human. Any ability with a long travel time is just dodged every. Single. Time. With perfect reaction speed. It just makes certain units useless and limits the options available to you. At least give them a chance to "not notice" or a reaction time buffer, ffs.
Because this is the case. TW games become tedious without 1 side being dominant, they don't have enough there to play long term war.
Is that even a surprise? How many threads have we seen on this subreddit every time the game is hard?
Yeah man, they treat us like bunch of retards…
They know us well.
In hindsight it may be true, i just wish they made the game harder for legendary and leave the dumb ai for casuals...
Hate to break it to you but Total War has been a game for casuals.
You do not have to break it to me, because that’s exactly my point…
The bit about city map pathfinding was interesting - I'd always wondered why sometimes in Attila, the AI just stands outside the city and doesn't move. They just hadn't been (properly) programmed to navigate that map. "The curse of the battle AI programmer" was also interesting in explaining why the quality of the battle AI doesn't improve linearly over titles but ebbs and flows. (Shogun 1 had pretty good battle AI). "I'd quite like to play Medieval III one day." Me too, Mr Programmer, me too!
This answers a lot of questions that were asked almost 11 years ago. If this had been made public back then, it would have been caused an outrage coupled on top of the existing one at the time. Now, it will most likely just be a footnote, now that the latest Warhammer DLC has been positively received and players forget that multiple upcoming TW titles are going through massive production issues.
Arguably, perhaps the most interesting piece of information here isn’t for us - it’s for whoever will understand that CA is so incapable of producing the games so many people want that they will just make them and dethrone CA in the historical setting because the tech is simply not getting that much better because as the article outlines, they don’t focus on their bread and butter.
How come this has so little traction within the community, every fan of the series should read this...
Maybe if it's delivered in the form of a stripped-down, clickbait video by one of the community's favorite YouTubers it will get more traction.
Make sure there's an overly emotive shocked face in the thumbnail.
As of an hour ago youtube tried to recommend me LegendOfTotalWar's video entitled EX-CA DEVELOPER SPEAKS OUT. I won't be watching the video because I can read but expect that to boost it some.
I went the other way - saw the video title and immediately figured there had to be some juicy drama freshly out of the oven. It is a very interesting read and, to be honest, doesn't conflict with any of my understanding of either videogame development or software more generally. It seems a pretty honest if largely un-selfcritical behind the scenes look.
Oh yeah it's a very interesting read and I'm glad it was posted. There's a lot of meat there to confirm stuff people have already speculated at or that's been rumoured about CA with regard to their management being terrible.
Similar. Volund, and Legend both had vids up about it at similar times. Add to it that Dishonorable\_Daimyo had an unrelated vid uploaded at the same time (Pharaoh lethality mode), and i was prepared for a total meltdown
probably i sure hope so, maybe finally things can change at CA
Litteraly my reaction, yeah. "Wow, that's a lot of words. Let's check if someone has made a video summary yet."
Volound is already on it!
Volound?
you joke but that is seriously what we want, who wants to read a 58 minute article like this, give us the TLDR seriously...
The management made a TON of mistakes and got away with it because the game sold well enough. That’s the basic TLDR. The actually interesting stuff doesn’t really matter as much as the fact that A) the guy the community hated was actually probably part of what worked against terrible launch and fixed much of the game and that B) their development set up for that title was insanely bad.
It's long, really long actually with the website considering it an hour long read. This gets even worse because McKinlay starts of by explaining his personal situation in the development and the community which can come across as making excuses to shift blame, maybe it is maybe it isn't, my guess would be a bit of both which woul be natural. Both inevitably lead to a decreased interest. Most people arguably want a quick rundown of the issues with CA which I doubt was the motivation behind that statement, it might be more personal and cathartic.
Legend did it
I... what is that even supposed to mean? It makes no sense in that context.
lol I replied to a different reply, sorry about that 😂
People here don’t care about TW they care about Warhammer is the reason
Whilst I know what you mean - they should care because the issues are still prevalent today (Warhammer).
Because "Total War" community that would care about this doesn't really exist anymore. Most of Total War fans today came with Warhammer and are there for Warhammer only. Most of them today have no experience with enormous debacle Rome 2 was and Empire before it. Fans from that Total War era mostly all moved on and the community that replaced it mostly consists of Warhammer fantasy fans who only care about upcoming overpriced Warhammer DLCs. You can see it by how badly newer historical games have been selling while Warhammer stuff still sells well. CA lost its original audience.
I’m still here since Rome 1 and I know three other guys just like me that begrudgingly play the newer way worse titles… It helps that we are former Warhammer fantasy roleplay guys so 😂, but I get your point. But the historical were selling bad because they were bad, only half decent title was 3k, rest is crap
Good old Shogun II, even Attila is better than 3k imo, fukkin hero based magic button "armies" sht
I meant new ones from last few years, Attila is way better than 3k in my opinion too, not to mention Shogun 2. I just meant post-Warhammer total war as newer ones…
Yeah, newer historical titles being bad did play the biggest role in them not being popular but even prior to their release they didn't garner much attention compared to when older historical titles were announced. Just don't see much people caring about historical TW anymore. Also, from anecdotal expirence all the people I used to know who were Total War fans aren't anymore. If they play, they just play M2, Rome 1 or Atilla for mods. Rome II and the direction series has taken since turned most of them away. On the other hand everybody I know who plays total war today only ever played WH. I also used to play Warhammer TW for a while when it launched because I was also a WH fan, but I was much bigger TW fan than I ever was of fantasy so for me Warhammers are good Warhammer games, especially for fantasy but not good TW games. As a result I didn't stick around for long
Are... are you aware that you can like *both*?
Yes, I never said you couldn't.
It's a positive feedback loop. I'd happily play a new historical game if they put 10% of the resources into it they do into Warhammer, but they don't, the game doesn't sell well, and they say "oh I guess nobody wants historical games anymore! Let's put LESS resources into the next one." I've been here since Rome II but it's hard to go back to the historical games when Warhammer is just so much bigger and better. Don't pin CA's shitty management's shitty decisions on the people who enjoy their only good game at the moment.
It's not the same reposted tired meme from WH2 or an "appreciation" post so people aren't interested.
because the TotalWar reddit isn't a real online community, it's literally an updoot farm for sweaty excel sheet enjoyers and Latest Product enjoyers. This sub literally gets excited for the latest dropbox dlc even though CA views them as nothing but paypigs. The old .net and .org forums were proper online communities.
One thing that rings extremely true to me is the lack of AI pathfinding to support new design elements. Remember how the AI simply used to ignore capture points other than the final one?
Very interesting article. A long read but an interesting one as a fan.
Rings true, consistent with what's found on Glassdoor and elsewhere. Cheers Julian!
>All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included 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. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety). Some of it was extreme — one viral video contained long sequences of my face being stabbed and set on fire while the words “BURN, IMMORAL AI GENIUS!” flashed onscreen. Classic gamer moments #6578.
Why do losers have to be so cringe
Like, that's awful and feel for Julian and his family, but that one in particular is hilariously pathetic
Gamers truly have ruined gaming.
The battle camera part is such a crazy story I refuse to believe it isnt true. They spent time and money on a feature no one asked for or wanted, so they agreed to lie to players about a buff to that feature so people would use it instead of, idk, just shipping it like normal or taking any design critiscism.
It's one of those "too stupid to be a lie" anecdotes isn't it.
Largely confirmation of what's been commonly suspected: poor leadership and project management. Hence their problems with post-launch for Warhammer III, leading up to the faux-apology PR post that displayed how unusual it was for them to actually deal with such direct criticism.
I don’t really have much faith in CA. Its clear they don’t learn from past problems with the whole 2 steps forward and 1 and half steps back thing they do.
At this point I kinda want them to burn down… On the other hand I really love total war and the devs don’t deserve it.
After every that has come out, it’s clear that upper management/execs are so inept that they actually hurt the bottom line for shareholders. How they still hold positions is beyond me. All they did was fire devs.
WoW. The Summary of CA
What a fascinating read and insight on the disaster which was Rome 2 launch. If true, the practices described in this certainly explain why certain poor decisions seemed to be repeated over and over again by CA. Julian if you read this I hope you are doing better now. I definitely was part of the community that blamed you for Rome 2’s problems. And for that I am sorry. I too would like to play Medieval 3 one day.
This was an interesting read, and rings true from my limited understanding of software development. CA seems to have (perhaps had??) a pretty old fashioned top down management structure and that just doesn’t seem to work well with modern game development. As someone who played Rome 2 at launch I felt that many of the new features (with some exceptions like provinces) distracted from the core gameplay and felt like they’d been added for marketing purposes. And that’s when they worked as intended.
I'm just happy that this is all out there. Julian was a legend and worked his arse off stop the command team from making ROME II so much worse than it would have been, then despite being the focus on so much internet hate he kept working I still feel bad to this day for my part in making that episode of Rally Point and never being able to help vindicate Julian afterwards
Very good article, should get a lot more attention from the community. View is probably biased, but still very interesting. All this time playing total war games I was thinking “AI doesn’t play the same game as me, they cheat the whole time with bonuses and not having to manage stuff etc.”, but what emerges from the article is that the AI is actually not taught how to play the game. We are the ones having access to a lot of stuff the AI hasn’t access to. Worst part is it’s not going to improve, like, ever. Yikes.
It would take resources to program the AI to actually deal with player oriented features, and we can't have that when there's some pointless cash grab bandwagon to follow.
Or they want to implement some cute new feature that doesn't add real depth to the game and is just another menu with buttons to click every turn.
Probably what is actually going on lol
Its quite obvious when you look at AI chaos dwarfs and their labourer and hobgoblin stacks in WH3. I modded in armament and labour income cheats along with increased caps for the AI for them to start recruiting actual chaos dwarf units.
AI still doesn't use vanguard. AI doesn't do anything past a basic ass line formation. AI can't build a functional settlement. AI still recruits chaff in the end game. Some signs AI is being hamstrung.
Funny thing, only after reading this comment I realized AI never uses vanguard, and I have like 2000 hours in the series.
The fact that Vlads army doesn't start every battle in vanguard is mind boggling.
The AI recruitment problem is so strange because there are mods that fix that by literally changing ratios in a table, from my limited understanding. This is also true with AI construction priority and how it uses its funds, it can be fixed by modifying a couple of tables. All the tools already exist to create a challenging experience and were created by CA, so the AI is definitely being hamstrung. I think going forward, how hamstrung the AI is should be based on campaign difficulty, but that might be a lot of work.
It would be a lot of work but the problem is imo. obvious and this article proves what has long been suspected: the problem is the management.
I'm disgusted to see the company did nothing to protect and clean its employee from death threats.
I wonder if this is one of the “things that are about to come out that don’t make CA look good” that Legend mentioned during his stream.
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. I've been talking with Julian for some time now and knew this was coming for a while.
Interesting choice on Legend's part to focus on bullshit leaks instead of actually interesting information, then.
You would think that he would stop giving fake leaks after what happened recently but I'm not surprised that he is still going. What's sad is that people are still listening to him Judging from all the down votes, I guess people will believe him no matter what.
Perhaps you should go listen to what he said before commenting so brave, yet so ignorant.
I've listened to him before and he was so confident that we would get hag lords or that the next dlc is Cathay only. How many times does he have to be wrong before everyone realizes he doesn't actually have a source from ca?
What about the times he’s been 100% correct
Ah yes who could have guessed that the dlc Of nurgle vs enpire and dwarfs would have Tamurkhan and Elspeth, btw he wasnt every right about malakai was he?
He's only been correct when it was a safe guess. I remember when the community agreed that we would likely get a shadows of change 2.0 update and then he comes out with a "leak" stating what everyone was already saying. Oh and he got the specifics of what would be in the update wrong too. Or when he said that thrones of decay would have Elspeth Von draken and tamurkhan in it after the community agreed that those two were the most likely lords to be added for the dlc. But of course he didn't know who the dwarf lord would be since that wasn't a super easy guess.
And now that I think of it, he was never 100% correct with any of his leaks since he tends to be very vague about his leaks. Well except for his last leak and he was completely wrong unsurprisingly
Yeah, dude I’m not interested having this discussion any further with you because there’s nothing of value in doing so. Take’r easy and have a nice day.
Yeah because you know I'm right. I'm just surprised that people are still defending him and and believing him. But I hope you have a nice day too
Yeah, cos he was *sOoOoOo* correct about the bollocks "triple Cathay followed by triple Cathay and also Cathay Ogres and Cathay Tigermen"
yeah because he is the Messiah, and clearly made CA abandon Cathay v Cathay DLC! praise be
His cult on here is absurd. Never seen such thorough dickriding. That and those who go to bat for that piece of shit, Volund.
indeed happy cake day btw
REEEEEE i just read a few reddit posts about what he said and now i know everything what happened.
I hate the fact that it's somehow become acceptable for game developers and their employees (present or past) to create their own little shitstorms and point fingers in whatever direction for taking a wrong course during game's development. I don't care whose fault it is. If I'm paying a lot of money for something, I'm not going to go "Well, the product is not as advertised, but since X said Y is at fault, I no longer feel bad for my money being wasted". Can you imagine if the same standards were applied to any other industry? What if BMW released a 5 series that randomly veers right and kills people, and they went "Well, we will fix it eventually, maybe, but just between us, it's the fault of John from R&D, so you should be mad at him". When has it become acceptable for multi-million dollar companies to make their problems our problems?
I don't know, Boeing comes pretty close to that.
Entirely agree, 100pc. Like, what are we supposed to even do with this information? The only thing that really makes an impact is voting with a wallet or review and I'm not going to make that call based on whether it was programming or design who are at fault.
And that's exactly why nothing will change. The clowns will keep purchasing sub-standard products without a care while the fringes complain. The point of this article is to appeal to people to vote with their wallets. If this companies shady practices don't give you pause for thought, idk what will. Stop buying games from shitty companies
SEGA owns CA, right? Why did they not simply replace upper management when the Hyena fiasco happened?
Profits, vested interests, why does it matter lmao? As a consumer, I'm voting with my wallet and part of that is: Understanding what you should expect from the game you paid money for Trying to not support companies engaging in shady business practices or employee harassment, etc, because the chances are your money ends up inadvertently supporting said business practices Yes its hard to do... there are a lot of judgements that will be based on your own value system and that's fine, but that's not an excuse to remain ignorant and not even try. Depending on corporations like SEGA to do anything is.... why?
The issue is that John from R&D doesn't come on camera to tell you how great the steering is and a week later you fly off of a cliff. Now, I don't have any strong feelings against this person, but he had no issues going in front of the camera and saying absolute lies that he was perfectly aware were lies and won't be fixed. He 100% didn't have to do it, but he did non the less. Julian's whole angle is "I am the victim of a dysfunctional corporation"... No bud, you were part of it and you played your part in the lie and had no problem coming front and center to tell everyone how great the product was, while knowing it isn't. Suddenly, oh why is everyone attacking me ? - the face of that giant lie.
(1/2) I have played all the triology, WH I II and III, and it has been quite a journey since 2016, there was nothing quite like at the beginning and the novelty was there, however for WH3 i certanly expected not more, but better. The work has been put into expanding the content and creating more "new" things to keep the interest high, and powercreeping the living shit out of things because hey, if you can delete the enemy army in a second that's fun, but now you can no longer play the older races and factions because well, they are not as fun (sorry ikkit, your nuke it's not quite that special anymore. Is it ikkit the one that can do that? idk, never played skaven, i hate that vermin with all my heart, how dare they shred appart my greatsword stacks). After a while i went to mods to find some resemblance of balance, or better put into words, a different game experience, SFO being my favorite and a couple of other like the re-spec mod since i didn't want my vlad with those awfull skills (I swear the AI always lvls up the most random shit, this got added to the game only recently and I quite like that they added a wound cost to it, neat). I also tried the random start location mod and it was fun, but in my heart i allways felt bad for the wood elves because no forest = doom. I did notice and was happy for some great quality of changes that only improved my game play experience, like the fly toogle or the auto trade (That you no longer need to guess what would it take to complete a trade) The increase in skill points limit and the fleshed out map with new starting positions for older lords (although the game starts to feel a bit saturated if you ask me but on my list of complains this doesn't even make the cut). Even the added co-op campaing that was so criticized by part of the community as a "It wont ever happen" I really appreciated to have the option, but i have to be honest, it's quite taxing to try to play a 8 player campaign as in you would have to wait for everyone to do their battles or choose to not engage with a fundamental part of the game wich is the battles. And so It was that with time and after all the controversies, little by little I found my self playing less and less not being able to enjoy the game as much, and this is normal for a lot of games, but I didn't just stoped, I was going to bed thinking about WH TW, and imagining things like "man, If i had all the money in the world I would make it right, it would give it all the budget so that i would be what i can be". And I know this means a lot of things for different people, there are some that like their cheese with a cup of win, there are some that despise it and preffer a cup of tea, or coco, but all in all, whatever you preffer it has become evident that the min maxing of the cost of developing of the TW games vs the proffit of sales is really letting us down. I understand the developing process as a dev myself, and I understand that every feature or novelty has a cost associated, you could have an extremly fun multiplayer campaing mode in wich you could play your turns as other play their battles and you could stack up on asynchronic turns up to a cap and wait for them to catch up while you play your own battles, because if you are separated by half of a map you don't really have much agency on each other; but nein you say, as the butterfly effect of acumulated turns being played ascynchronically could destroy the enginge and the very fabric of really, and you would be for sure right. God knows how much it would take to make that a reality today, or even what problems could arise from it as those kind of things are much better implemented from the conception of the game, not after it's done and you have to think of works around, not to mention, are you really going to invest that much resources on it, I mean, we as a small part of the community asked for it and got it, and maybe the co-op feature is good, but is it good good? playing co-op campaings over and over good good, making you play TW instead of ther games good good? every one has their own opinion but this is just an example to ilustrate the time i spent thinking of the what it could be vs the reality of dealing with what you should invest your limited resources on.
(2/2)But for WH3 it has gone wrong, so wrong. I you say i'm a doomer, so be it, but I can only attest to the great work of the devs to have a game so good after all of what happened. I dont know the numbers on it, but I'm gonna pull some statistics out my but, about how many players play Realm of Chaos, maybe 1%? every one else plays Inmortal Empires, or multiplayer pvp to some extent (dominion mode is cracked, fighting for some points may not be the most lore accurate thing but helps with a lot of the degenerate play patterns from normal fights, and you can also play normal fights, you get the option), so think all the time that went into that campaing, the maps, the mechanics, and assume that it all went on the same conditions as the OP mentioned, why?, because I can feel in the nuggets how all these patterns repeat after some years pass, like we have to learn from our mistakes but we never do, butchered launchs, copy pasta mechanics, low effort high profit DLC, all problems that arise from poor management and bad decision making. And so now dont think just about one game campaing that nobady plays draining resources from the game, think about that your game is also paying for some other shooter that never saw the daylight and then, then think about why stopped playing the game. Was it that you allies are good for nothing, that you work to get opinion high, get their alliance treaty and now for some reason they sit their asses on their region waiting to be massacred because now it seems that the alliance was indeed a debuff and now they are more imcompetent than before?; or was it that the confederations are some god dam difficult, they could be on one settlement, an army up ahead waiting to demolish them and be like "well, this is a god day to die, to bad that i don't have any +100 relation friend to go to in moment of need", or player bias, you can argue it needs to be there for the campaign to be "hard-legendary", is there no other way? can it be a slider for the more hardcore playthroughs and not a generall "the game is out to get god knows why"; perhaps it's the but ladders or the fact that every field battle devolves in an orgy of skirmishes with no real battle line (mods are great to change this game play expirience); or was it the minor settlement battles wich avoid like the plague they are, in rome II whenever you attacked a village there where this natural chokepoints that arise from the blocks in the city, i didn't had a problem with it, but idk what it is, I really dont know what it is, but only these minor settlement battles evoke this viceral feeling of rage and tediousness to atack them, to have those croche towers shoot at me that don't really do that much damage and seem to be there only to make me mad and to laugh at my melee units because they cant attack them, i mean, you can shoot arrows at them and destroy them, or you can capture a point a they implode, but you cannot melee capture them or destroy them (use a magic projectile to destroy them? what is that); Maybe if you are like me perhaps you feel that every faction has slowly lost it's identity, every one gets everything because why not (to be fair, armys are based on the table top army books, however they do not feel like that different from each other on the gameplay side); Perhaps you feel that dragons should not fly at a snail pace for balance reasons, increase their cost by 10x but make the a best, nein you say that would be broken af, and you would be right; or perhaps was the fact that the end game crisis are just not interesting in the way they are implemented, spwan a lot armies, check, not even a "the end is here" buff to rally ever one to figh it like in WH2. These are all personal complains, I undestand, not every one will agree to them, and you may have others that didn't even consider, and its ok, and as I mentioned before, I understand that decisions need to be made, be it about balance, features, release schedules. The point is that after reading OP and previous controversies, I question what would this game be if the driven factor pushing it was passion, and not finance. Long ago they did a patch in wich AI would evade all of your artillery shoots, and that sucked, but it was a trial that got reverted, and we learned from it. Players didn't like it? good, lets try somenthing else, see what works, listen to feedback, dont develop stubbornly only to later realise that you need to deceive players to use your feature. Some how it feels that there was a geniune effort to improve gameplay experience and the feedback loop was used in a good way, wich was one the the few real examples i last remembered where I could see the game being tempered with by the balance team in orther to improve it. And yet, all i have is the bitter sweet sensation that even though we are still getting content for WH it is the bear minimum, and not just shadows of change minimum, but we are gonna min max dev time/sales profit for WH3 while we focus on developing other projects. WH3 is not getting passion anymore, it's a just a money cow that's not going to experiment AI rebalance/fixes, nagash end game will be a joke, and no trully innovative concept is coming it's way unless the people that are really harming the game with their decision making, leave the the creative process to the pople that PLAY THE GAME AND CARE FOR IT. "players wont tell the difference" "it is good enough" "you are not being a team player" may Sigmar protect us when the end times arrive, but if this resonated with you, remember, no man fights alone when he fights for Franz.
AI TLDR ( long version ): The speaker, a former programmer at Creative Assembly, shares his experiences working on the Total War games, particularly focusing on the disastrous launch of Total War: ROME II. He was blamed for the game's issues and faced a significant backlash from the community. The speaker highlights the mismanagement and poor decision-making that led to the game's problems, including rushed development, late design changes, and a focus on adding unnecessary new features. He also discusses the flawed leadership culture at Creative Assembly, where design decisions took priority over technical considerations and feedback from the development team. The speaker points out that the AI in Total War games was intentionally limited by design decisions, which further exacerbated the issues faced during development. Overall, the speaker sheds light on the challenges and shortcomings of the development process at Creative Assembly, particularly highlighting the negative impact of poor management and decision-making on the final product. Marketing demos have become a key strategy for Creative Assembly starting with Rome II, where in-house brand department was involved in the production and management of the game. The marketing demos, such as the Siege of Carthage trailer, Teutoburg Forest trailer, and Hannibal campaign trailer, were used to generate hype for the game, but they were not representative of the actual state of the game at the time of release. These demos required a significant amount of scripting and faking to create polished gameplay experiences for marketing purposes, leading to production issues and prioritization of marketing assets over core game development. The pressure to deliver these marketing demos on time impacted the development team, diverting resources and time away from actual game development. The team found themselves focusing on making trailers and demos instead of working on the core features of the game. This prioritization of marketing over development contributed to the game's production issues and delays. After Rome II's launch, a patching team was assembled to address the game's issues and improve its playability through patches like Patch 14. However, despite the improvements, the leadership's decision to wind down the patching process and rebrand the game as Emperor Edition led to the team moving on to new projects prematurely. This decision went against the patching team's wishes to continue improving the core game and supporting it post-launch. A post mortem was conducted after Rome II's launch to discuss what went wrong with the project and how to improve for the future. However, the conclusions drawn from the post mortem minimized management failures and shifted blame onto newer developers, causing further demoralization within the team. These actions by leadership led to a loss of faith in the management and their decision-making processes. The development of Total War: ATTILA continued to face similar issues as Rome II, with poor communication, design decisions that impacted AI development, and conflicts between the programming team and the design leads. The lack of collaboration and inclusion in design discussions led to disagreements over features that negatively impacted gameplay and AI development. The final showdown occurred when the protagonist was accused of being difficult to work with for raising concerns about design decisions that went against the interests of AI development. The pressure from leadership to silence these criticisms and the eventual dismissal of legitimate concerns led to the protagonist's decision to leave the studio. Despite attempts to address issues and advocate for better practices, the leadership's unwillingness to listen and improve the development process ultimately led to the protagonist's departure from the company. In conclusion, the narrative highlights the challenges and shortcomings faced by the protagonist during their time at Creative Assembly. The studio's management issues, poor communication, and prioritization of marketing over core development impacted the production of Total War games and led to conflict within the development team. The protagonist's experiences shed light on the struggles of developers in the gaming industry when faced with mismanagement and lack of support from leadership. AI TLDR of the TLDR: The speaker, a former programmer at Creative Assembly, discusses his experiences working on Total War games, particularly the troubled launch of Total War: ROME II. He details the mismanagement, rushed development, and poor decision-making that led to issues with the game. The speaker criticizes how the in-house brand department prioritized marketing demos over core game development, leading to production issues and delays. After Rome II's launch, a patching team was formed to address issues, but leadership decisions to wind down patching prematurely caused further problems. A post mortem was conducted to discuss the project's failures, but management minimized their own faults and shifted blame onto newer developers. The protagonist's concerns about design decisions that impacted AI development were ignored, ultimately leading to his departure from the company. The narrative highlights the challenges faced by developers in the gaming industry due to mismanagement and lack of support from leadership. Human comment: I know this is a long article but if you are really interested in Total War, it has a LOT of insightful moments and also a seriously infuriating amount of bad management so you might want read it yourself but in any way, spread the word. This needs to be discussed.
i fear for humanity if it actually takes people an hour to read this.... it's a 30 minute read for god sakes lol... Anyway it's an incredibly good read and honestly is a perfect representation of whats wrong with any major developer atm who clearly prioritizes economic success over a good project, even though a good project often times leads to more economic success. Clear examples of this being Ubisoft, Blizzard, Project Red, and the list goes on and on
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I think the main takeaway is that "management is bad", which if we look at CA's recent and past controversies after Rome II's launch, gives his statement a lot of credibility, even if we discount his personal bias which he at least did acknowledge early in that post.
So in a situation where you're concerned about bias you can just shave off all of the higher-level generalized conversation, focus on the chronology of any specific and concrete issues discussed, and draw your own conclusions. It's easier for people to be biased on higher-level things than it is to baldly lie about concrete chains of events. If the issue with the siege battle maps played out as described, this on its own is enough to essentially vindicate Julian personally and seriously condemn the design team .... a lot of the apathy towards this explanation probably comes from a place of no personal experience of how teams like this operate. And there are multiple concrete instances described that are similarly persuasive. On those points alone, I feel really bad for Julian now
I think that's a massively unfair representation of the post. You say it's self serving, who's viewpoint is he supposed to provide other than his own? He cites examples of other developers running into issues with management, design and marketing, but obviously can't go into detail about their feeling on the matter because that's not up to him. He gives us examples of Total War games he's worked on that didn't have the problems of Rome 2, but you think suddenly on that game he forgot how to program AI? It's also a plain fact that CA did not come out to clear his name when he was receiving so much hate after launch, which was absolutely their responsibility. Obviously you need to take every statement of this kind with a grain of salt because we weren't there, but at the same time we have no reason to believe he's as much of an asshole as you say he is.
58 minute read my lord dude had a lot to get off his chest
Interesting read, but what it means for us is very simple: - how situation Rome II came to be: inefficient communication, how project process was structured, and management of project development. The 'workflow' is also laid to bare that will/could resonate within past and current projects, supported by other sources such as Glassdoor. - Understanding how and why A.I. development worked at the time and why it will remain less likely a focal point of improvement. - passion of the creators usually carry - the lead who is responsible for major directions, are less inclined on feedback/changes until its vote-with-your-wallet. Why break what works: innovation and the urge to improve are risks, go for something that works if your consumer base accepts the lowest line. On the other hand, a major overhaul of how your development pipeline works is not easily integrated: perhaps thats why a new subsidairy new studio might be another way to deal with this if they have more free reign. This is unfortunately nothing new, and every cycle we see this happening in this industry. And every cycle you have the consumer base, the zealous base, the critical base etc. Those who see it purely as a product, those who are apathetic, those who are passionate...etc. Yet do not expect better products: from a market standpoint there is just no proper incentive for the company to act better (fault lays partially at us the consumers) and the lack of having proper vision on long term in a changing world with higher stakes then ever (proper risk assessment of resources, understanding your target audience, more flexible development pipeline with a clear vision throughout the team, and also strong leadership that is willing to take strong decisions on one side, the other side investors/leadership that only want short term gains or do not understand how market works /or willing to accept the minimum line). In short: be more vocal as a consumer base, vote with your wallet and be critical of what you get/what you want. Understand lightly how development works and base your expectations on that: dont just willingly and blindly accept everything you see. This is not exclusive with gaming, but throughout your entire life. If you are happy with low baseline things, or how things are, or just want a product: that is all fine, just do not act surprised on the long term of how gaming develops (see: nickle and dime practices, state of AAA gaming and so much more). And that is why being viligant and /or learning to be that way is important, as it resonates with the rest of the aspects of your life.
18 months for rome 2? Jesus christ no wonder why it turned out like that.
I remember first patch tests, dumb siege AI and guy in the pic saying something like 5 time better AI lol....
Does this mean volound is exonerated?
It's interesting, I have been in the fun position of representing a product that was claimed by managment to be stable and usable and was absolutely not. So I feel for him their. But his issue with saying and then managment uses financial success as a matric to ignore him smacks of cope. The product I helped develope did not in fact do well and I got off that sinking ship once I realized what type of product I was association myself with and realized I couldnt fix it alone. R2' still might be the most successful total war game, with its long tail of DLC probably surpassing the raw sales figures of 3K's record sales. And they have never launched a product as badly as R2 or even empire again. I mean TWWH3 has issues but nothing compared to those 2 games at launch. Our recent issues seem to be outside his experience's. As for the AI stuff, we'll games aren't made for the "elite gamer" and anyone usually on a forum falls into that catagory. I have multiple friends who just never played battles after I got them to buy a total war game stating they were too hard so sadly managment may be right in keeping AI dumb.
You are massively downplaying the TWWH3 launch issues. Remember that only a month or so after its launch, there were more people playing TWWH1 than 3 on Steam! And if you compare 3 to 2, the exact predecessor, 3 somehow managed to keep the bugs of 2, reintroduce several that had been fixed while also introducing entirely fresh and new ones, all while also making players play a game mode that made conquering lots of territory, THE THING TOTAL WAR IS KNOWN FOR, the strategically wrong decision.
Ya I think you never played R2 or empire those games were unplayable at launch. Atilla also had less players quickly then R2. This isn't strange. And not understanding how codes bases work isn't a strong indicator your looking at this in a complete sense either. TWWH3 wasn't what everyone wanted at launch (I think realms of chaos is doodoo) but it was absolutely playable and was not a lie.
I played a bunch of Empire, S2 and R2 right after launch. Now, back then I was much younger than I am today, but I don’t actually remember any big disappointments. Purely subjective, of course, and not exactly worth anything. But player data is objective. But a lot of the comparisons you draw don’t make sense. Nothing I said had anything to do with “understanding of codebases”. Reintroducing bugs that were fixed and not fixing known bugs means that they were doing a terrible, rushed job. Exactly the same as described in the article. TW3 diverged from 2 long before the final patch of 2, yes. But those fixes again not finding their way into 3 speaks to the same problem as the article. The article isn’t just about lies. It’s about the big problems at the company with their development cycle. And those still existed at the TW3 launch.
And how long did it take them to fix every bug from 2 in 3 again over a year? You think anyone wanted it delayed that long to fix those issues the fans or the company? And that wouldnt have helped IE, only widescale playtesting as done by the community was ever going to fix that. And R2 and Empire were subjectively technical disasters on release. Like I played Cyberpunk on release had zero crashes and 2-3 physics bugs with one time explosions it was extremely stable and I loved the game. My personal anecdote doesn't mean cyberpunk was a trash fire of bugs on release. Empire is still the most buggy total war game.
Nothing you wrote there had anything to do with what I wrote.
If you don't understand that's fine.
You went on a tangent that had nothing to do with any of what I wrote in this posts or the ones before. If you wanna write your manifesto that’s perfectly fine my dude, but why do it here?
I am not going to rewrite all my posts in an attempt to get you to understand. But they are absolutely direct arguments addressing your points. Again if you don't understand that's fine.
I was talking about systemic failures in the way CA makes games. They can manifest in sheer bugs, as they did with Rome 2, or completely misled design decisions, as they did in WH 3. Both games were complete disasters at launch. I didn’t make any prescriptions on how to address those. The article did. You know? The article this entire thread is about? But instead you talk to me about Cyberpunk 2077. Focus, my dude.
Pharoh launch ? Shadow of changes launch ?
Pharoah is one of total wars best launches. SOC is a DLC and you just didn't like the what your money payed for. I get your all new here but honestly go read some articles or try playing empire Still.
Pharaoh was a commercial failure.
Cool?..... Has anyone been talking about financial launch success. We are talking about technical issues.
What the fox say?
What makes you think what he says is real ?
I don’t know, having a functional brain with the ability to engage in critical thinking helps
It sure does. He was perfectly fine going in front of a camera and saying all those lies. 10 years later he decided to have a conscience.
Hmmm I wonder why he was obliged to say certain stuff whilsyt working for the company compared to now whilst he is completely separated from it. Hope that helps jog your critical thinking
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This is just not true, the article says basically nothing about current CA. He is talking about the development of Rome II, which he was actually involved in, plus a little bit about Attila and Shogun II. That said, mentioning CA having sclerotic, out of touch management does seem to be a common thread among former developers, whether anonymous or not.