Developers are starting to speak out against the Management and Leadership at Creative Assembly. / total-war-rome-ii-and-... • Glassdoor Reviewers De...
This isn’t just CA or the gaming industry. This is the corporate world now. Terrible executives making terrible decision, and holding everyone else, even paying customers responsible instead of themselves.
This part of the article really hit emotionally. Many would've quit on the spot. ''By that time, the rumour had become established that I had been fired, and now that the game was improving, this was taken by many as proof that I was gone and my replacement was doing a better job. So I was having to come into work every day along with those on the patching team and chip away at the problems knowing that those improvements would be taken by many as further evidence of my incompetence. I cannot tell you how demoralizing that was, and the thought of resigning certainly crossed my mind, but I wanted to at least get the game working first.''
That's a good person and i am experiencing rage that people like that are used up and thrown away by suits who then take credit for work they deep down know they didnt do
@PropheticShadeZ so he can be used by the union? Have his savings thrown into some random stock after 18 years of nothing like that happening. My uncle was the president. He has lost over 10k because of follow up presidents decisions.
late stage capitalism. the only thing executives care about is money and they are so protected that there is nearly nothing that can be done so they are held responsible for terrible choices that cost ppl their jobs
Tbh they aren’t even doing that well cause they’ve fucked themselves in the long run and will likely slowly be moved out fucked in their personal lives
@@coffeebeangood1538 yup, management is vastly skewed towards egos, contacts and skills that have nothing to do with management (aka product skills). A lot of managers aren't trained to be managers and stay "workers with more power now" which is a disaster. The middle management (leads, etc) is undervalued as management which leads to oblivious C-Suites. Those are really complex problems to solve - they usually would be adressed by the C-Suite... which lacks incentive (as they have quarterly financial incentive, what do they care), or the owners... which are just not present in publicly traded companies. Yuckiness all around.
This quote from McKinlay's statement is my favorite: "My view is that the continued success of the franchise is better explained by the patience and goodwill of its players than it is by the stewardship of Total War’s management."
The community forgives them because there is literally no competition. As much as I would like to say "F**k CA, I'm gonna go play *total war game from another company* there is none.
Well you can just go play older total war games that will always be good. Instead of pay $100s for the new game plus dlc for a lukewarm experience that may or may not improve over time
Yeah no matter how people hype other series like manor lords, banner lords or age of wonders they arent comparable. Manor lords is more of a fief builder and is culturally and geographically limited, bannerlords is smaller scale and has worse battle Ai than total war, and age of wonders is a turn based Heroes of might and magic game not even remotely similar. We are stuck with this series for now, coping with mods and older titles.
honestly at this point im kinda confused, like surely its not that hard to create a total war like game in unity or unreal, but the closest i ever see are paradox type games and they have their own distinct style of gameplay.
@@loowick4074 Yup, so saying stuff like the 'TW community are the most forgiving' - nicer people or, 'the most effing r worded' - some guy call volound (he is pyschotc btw) is just so empty headed, what options do we have, many do take a break from TW or just wait it out etc, is what it is.
Whenever I see a lot of hype surrounding a new Total War, I always think to myself "Remember Carthage". The disparity between the hype and expectation vs what was delivered was vast, and as such a huge let down. So I always take any new hype with a huge pinch of salt. It's worked well for me so far.
Same, Rome 2 was one of the biggest low points in gaming expectations for me. There were many others, but it was truly a sign of the times. Times we still live in.
After reading the article a few other things started to pop to mind like that. Like the siege artillery on walls in Warhammer or the music used in the trailers never being in game.
As outlined in the article: Time spent on making marketing, is time NOT spent on improving the game. Marketing, in the shape of trailers, demos, and playable builds for industry events (rip in piss, E3) eats up developer time.
Seems to me these executives at development/publishing companies rely heavily on "hype" for their sales numbers. My theory is that they know these games aren't what they advertise and claim them to be. They are aware of all the problems we've come to expect from AAA gaming in 2024, but the hype is what gets their target sales numbers for investors.
I hate how "just gaslight the peasants" is so often used as a "solution" nowadays. "After we manipulated some statistics, the Biden economy is amazing! Disbelieve your own eyes, peasants, and vote Biden."
That camera mode only work if you can go into 3rd person and turn it now into a hack and slash game, like that total war Spartan they made. Imagine controlling a single unit from the whole unit and just run around the map, if that one die select the other or go back to tactical top down. That would be a revolutionary game mode.
That thing about the community forgiving them really gets me. It's crazy how quickly people will flip from being rightfully pissed, to being like "CA DID A THING IT'S TIME FOR US TO FORGIVE THEM!" I think this is a problem that affects all gaming communities. All a developer needs to do to quell outrage is to throw some old dried up bone into the mix, then everyone stops barking and returns to sitting down and wagging their tails while the developers run their wallets with shitty DLC and microtransactions. I guess that old saying is true; a fool and his money are easily parted.
@@michasokoowski6651a classic case of fuck the company for fucking over the game all Sony had to do is sit still and enjoy their money but nope they fucked over a game
Fun bit of trivia about that bloated marketing budget for Rome 2: Without it, we wouldn’t have the famous channel “Extra History”. Back when it was Extra Credits they were approached by CA to make a series on the Punic Wars as a part of their marketing campaign, and that was the first series of Extra History…
Not to mention the irony and incompetence required to believe that pouring money into marketing the sequel to a GANRE defining game is a good use of resources
@@FirstLast-gk6lg yeah, it’s clear the priorities were all out of whack, and the Rome II legacy (like the shitty warscape engine) has been a curse on the franchise ever since, only being ameliorated by the incredible artistry of the visual and sound guys who brought the warhammer fantasy tabletop to life in an amazing way
@@heinrichb just because the narrator is soy doesn’t mean it isn’t a cool series. The extra history on the crusades and the one on the south seas bubble are all time classics
@@thenoblepoptart Extra History has been despised for their blatant historical inaccuracies stemming from their desire to form a cohesive narrative. At least that's the complaints I have always heard from people more knowledgeable than I am on the matter.
I work in a corporate setting, for all the pressure and stress executives are under and for all the statements of how company performance is their job and “on them”, they NEVER accept responsibility for anything negative but always make sure to cover themselves in praise when good things happen. Gaming needs to go back to small studios full of passion, corporate companies making games suck, see almost every AAA game in the last 10 years
That's why I get excited for all the advancements in game engines and tooling out there. The barrier to entry to produce your vision is getting less and less.
Gaming can't go back to small studios, large corporation appear as inevitably as sun sets. Problem with modern games isn't large corporations problem is profit motive.
NDAs typically expire after a few years. 10 years is definitely clear of what any legal system I am aware of will allow. Unless of course, its military/government secrets, those are typically good for decades under official secrets acts and the like
@@andregon4366 They can always sue. A not uncommon tactic is for companies to just pile money onto frivolous lawsuits (Slapp I think it's called) from any court that'll take the case until they can exhaust the defendant's resources and get them to shut up. It doesn't matter if their suit has no grounds...all they have to do is drag people through the mud until it's not worth it to fight back.
This is incredibly damning. The "camera mode increases unit combat performance" lie is hilarious 😂. What an unmitigated dumpster fire. I swear to God nobody hates Total War more than CA management.
The fact their solution to an unused camera feature was to slap an unrelated stat bonus on it speaks volumes of how little these people understand players and how good games work.
You also actually get different camera mobility and a mix of free and fixed camera controls, it's very disconcerting at first, there is also a portion of your unit that gets greyed out, and the camera is basically attached to a specific model with the jumps and all without moving at the same time when it fights
Because that's how you survive in corporate world. If you say that x will take a week and you will do it in a week, then you dont get anything If you say that x will take a week and something bad happens and you are a few days late, you will get punished If you say that x will take a 4 months and you will do it in 3, then you get a bonus. Meanwhile you have to do job of different people because you are understaffed because menagement doesnt want to hire more people because it would mean more expenses and because they do that, they also get a bonus. The whole thing is a cancer
In my limited knowledge: that depends on the engine, on something like UE5 which I have knowledge of this would be rather easy, but I imagine that the Total War engine is purpose built for the type of game they do. So implementing a separate third person mode wouldn't be the easiest thing but doable.
Lying to the player in order for encourage them to do something to their determent or ultimately worsen gameplay is Creative Assembly design philosophy 101.. Its absolutely everywhere in all of their game. Why actually put the work into designing a game when you can just lie to the player.!?
And of course it still doesn't work. Even with the lie, no one uses the first person feature in Rome 2 more than maybe once or twice to try it out and realize it sucks (as a cinematic experience even, quite apart from as a gameplay experience).
To be fair, this is also done in good games for various reasons. Take Subnautica as an example. The game does it's best to make you afraid of the fauna and to use evasion instead of violence. But in truth none of the enemies are really that threatening and you can easily kill them.
@@houndofculann1793 That's one way to look at it and it's true that the game never actually says that it isn't possible but it does its darndest to make you think it.
I can't imagine why they thought that using the cinematic camera mode would be a popular feature for players to use while trying to manage an army of up to 40 different units at the same time. Did those devs ever actually play the game? They even called it a cinematic camera. Obviously it's not something you are going to want to use when you need attention devoted to micro.
I think part of the issue is the static definition of 'full stack'. If optimal play exists of just 20 unit armies, how much tactical variety is there to actually pull a victory out of defeat and vice versa? (when you're not master of cheese, legend himself) And of course the max of 40 units of 1 side being on a battlefield with control large armies. The only place I can imagine it would be useful to sacrifice vision for minor stats is a chokepoint battle where vision doesn't really matter and holding the line is most important.
Yup. It could make some sense as a replay feature. Mount and Blade for example has this option once your character is down, so you can follow the rest of the battle first person, which is kinda fun. But obviously far from a core gameplay feature. Mount and Blade come to think of it does first-person with battle tactics quite well, where you both control the individual hero and give orders to the army. And there is a tradeoff in that game where if you stay back as a general you can pay more attention to managing the army while if you're up close fighting you can have more of a direct impact but getting vision on the army / giving orders is harder. Of course, that game is balanced a lot more heavily towards the first person play, where the army level tactics isn't as strong as total war even if you pay full attention to it.
Yes, they've been desperately trying to crush Fantasy since the early 2000s, that whole mess with throwing Rick Priestly out if his own setting "decanonizing" the way he wanted to take the setting, and then saying "Chaos won, everyone died, characters acted totally OOC or were retconned, go play 40K". I hate them.
Lol, did not realize you had a video on this already. For me, I am interested like I said to you, in what we as a community can do for the time being. 5 key things that I take from this as a player/content creator that our community should do: 1 - Vote with your wallet. Absolutely, works every time. 2 - We never know who is the guilty party. Be reasonable towards those that communicate with us from the ground level, they likely have little say on how things transpire. 3 - Be kind to others in the community with a different view. Rome 2 is still quite good, and so are other games. What he mentions is how good it could have been, but we also need to consider that funding for games always has deadlines that are difficult. So we never get the 100% possible. 4 - Be fine with delays. Stop demanding dlc and titles for yesterday. If time is what they need, assure them they have it and likely management will allow it. 5 - Demand realistic stuff. Honestly this needs to be said. Complete different skeletons and animations serve very little purpose compared to difficulty and AI changes or mechanics. In the end, those are the reasons you return to the game.
I feel like I've seen people be mostly fine about delays recently, especially regarding Thrones of Decay/ Delay. But the counterpart is that the product has to be good after being delayed (looknig at you Warhammer 3's laucnh) and it can't be delayed again and again if you want to be taken seriously. Again, ToD is the example to follow, it got heavily delayed and absolutely delivered.
0 - Vote with your vote as well. Vote for politicians who will be more amenable to being pressured into passing regulations and harsh enforcement against bad corporate behavior that we can create organizations to push for.
@@Florensbond not on launch; Attila for example, after Rome 2, and nearly every Rome 2 dlc only after extensive review. Which at that point actually hurt my channel since I was not up to date with latest stuff
Having read the article a lot of that rings so true for the state of W3 when it came out. Complete disregard of the programmers by the designers. Sega cops a lot of blame for some of this (and rightly so) but that shouldn't be at the expense of the terrible CA leadership. It's such a shame that passionate, skilled and dedicated employees can be shown such short thrift, by people only interested in saving face and not the product they ship.
As a member of the community I also would like to apologize to Julian. The sharp disconnect between what was advertised in that infamous interview and what we actually got was impossible to ignore, and it was easy to make him the scapegoat. While I never went so far as death threats, I did assume he lied about the state of the game and the work he did on it. *For that, I am sorry.*
Growing up is realizing that the people you can interact with are scapegoats. Customer Services Reps, Marketing Reps, etc. The people with power are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Julian's statement regarding Management's inability to receive criticism and the lack of internal contact between developer departments really was bad to know about, but the icing on the cake was knowing valuable development time was eaten up by forcing developers to work on misleading marketing ridden scripted demos with the sole purpose of raising the hype and sell more copies. Truly hideous corporate behaviour. After reading through the statement, I think the best way the Total War playerbase can do is unite and make this public, hurt the image of the corporation and coerce the heads of tbe company to change their work ethic company wise. Only through our conjoined might can we save this disaster campaign that has been dragging on far too long. Thanks to Legend once again for being a beacon for this community, he has trult become a Legend of Total War
If CA going under means getting a better total war like game from another company, then let it crash like the hindenburg. I know it's harsh but as a gamer my realationship with a gaming company goes as far as playing their games and no more.
That's basically where I'm at too. I think of the fighting game scene and how Capcom screwing up with SF5 and MVC:I allowed other developers to have some air to breath and build a competitive audience. Before that, Capcom was just so dominate they kind of sucked all the air out the entire space.
My only worry is that if CA goes under, other gaming companies will look at it as “oh there’s no market for that kind of game anymore, let’s stick to the cheap easy stuff that’s guaranteed to make money.” Companies like Larian swinging big with games like Divinity and BG3 are the exception more than the rule, sadly.
Nobody has really tried to follow the formula. There are some old games like King Arthur and Real Warfare 1242 (that one is mostly a cashgrab) and smaller passion projects. But any real attempts to match the effort of CA, there has been none. And if CA folds, I don't consider it likely that anyone else will swoop in and give it a try. The simple fact is that CA has shown us what good Total War is, and people are not settling for less, to the degree that they did in the past. The same would hold true for anyone new. Their first project would have to be GOOD from the start. The customer base would be ruthless if it wasn't at least as good as CA, which is something I wouldn't expect. Maybe a few projects down the road, but would they be allowed to get that far? Doubt it.
Yup. They aren't giving you this crap for free. It's a product with a sometimes hefty price tag. You have no obligation to keep a business that sells bad products afloat. Some of the people engaging in that kind of guilt tripping are engaging in classic toxic positivity. lmfao
Cinematic mode is basically asking to throw the battle. Fine for custom battles where none of it matters, but on the campaign map, the cinematic mode is only making things a hassle.
Ok, I've commented on your videos of that nature in the past. And I've been with you for about a decade now. Nobody can dispute that you know those games and their mechanics inside out. Nobody can deny that you are passionate about the series and want those games to be good. With that out of the way... I do not see any rational way for CA to improve their conduct until either serious competition appears or people start to put their money where their mouth is. I haven't bought a Total War since Attila. I remember how hyped I was when Rome 2 came out and how it was only about the Emperor Edition when the game became what it should have been at launch. It is reasonable to surmise that what CA is doing is a consistent replacement of theirs consumer base. By pushing out the people who have been with the series, they can try to approach the younger audience (who, it would appear to CA at least, might be less demanding). Personally, I have moved on. I have always been a casual (I came to the series as a history nerd) and always loved the idea of rewriting history. At this point I play CK2 for that. Total War will always have a place in my heart (mostly because of Medieval 1 and 2), but if you are treated as an inconvenience at best, you move on. The best thing that could happen to Total War is a challenger. Thank you for all the things you have done for this community. Greetings from Poland.
If CA isn't profitable they're not going to adjust by listening to the community, they're going to adjust by become a mobile game developer. Making games for PC nowadays is thankless and unprofitable work.
I don’t want to count them out yet. I’ve gotten endless amounts of enjoyment from the Warhammer series and WH2 was, by the time 3 came out, the best Total War game since Shogun 2, at least. They still have the capability to produce quality content, and I genuinely think the community feedback to SoC shocked them, as well as people’s responses to the rumored upcoming DLCs. We’ll see what happens going forward, and I’ll cross my fingers that they’ve hopefully learned their lesson. Could just be the dead cat bounce though. I guess we’ll see. 🤷♂️
Rome 2 broke my heart, changed my view of the industry. I had just had major knee surgery and was so excited to spend my recovery gaming and it was near unplayable and felt empty and flat on launch. At the time it seemed a major mess but the truth is those were the new borders of the gaming industry, every year a couple games get pushed out too early as a chaotic mess. After awhile if you get taken by the hype and buy a new game only to find glitches, server issues and a PR campaign you feel guilty for getting suckered again, like an abusive relationship. Cycle continues because it's profitable.
Absolutely true. I guess the standards were much higher when console games on the PS2 generation and earlier could not be updated and needed to be very well polished before launch otherwise the product was completely screwed. Day 1 patches has spoiled the entire industry and enabled poor launches to be the norm. The last game I bought on launch was Skyrim and I swore off of new purchases because as an Elder Scrolls fan I thought the game sucked. Similar story of declining quality over time. I think another factor into the major decline of RTS games is that they peaked when hardware was far more restrictive and these newer genres of first and third person games were either extremely rudimentary or otherwise highly limited. Just look at Warcraft 3 compared to Warcraft 1 in a 7 year span, it was like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 of 2002. However, the writing was likely on the wall once Halo released in 2001. The difference is astounding but today devs are divided into all sorts of new projects in genres that weren't even viable back then and that generate a lot more hype. In turn, with high turnover rates there are fewer programmers that would have the skills to even develop in this relatively niche genre unless they are truly passionate about it. It just feels like it is over for fans of these kinds of games outside of modding or going down memory lane.
Mods are critical for the longevity of a game. Just look at Star Wars Empire at War. Been around for 20 odd years, multiple mods still actively updating with new ones coming still
The worst part with I:R is that a lot of the games problems were called out far before it even released but Johan just went full ostrich and stuck his head in the sand.
Always a shame to see stuff like that happen, it baffles me how those corporations don't see that long term commitment and making a polished product will get them way more in terms of sales and fanbase growth than some awful cash grabs that happen all the time, I won't even go into how dlc for warhammer looks to a fresh player.
CEO bonus is typically tied to quarterly or yearly profit figures. That is the reason. It is a ludicrous practice that encourages harmful actions that are bad for the long-term health of the company, such as torching community goodwill in exchange for a quick profit or laying off experienced staff to inflate profit figures
Iv literally just got into TW over the past 2 weeks. I brought TW Warhammer 1 on sale like 2 years ago but never actually played it till 2 weeks back. I loved it, I’m hooked. But everyone is telling me not to bother with TW Warhammer 1 and just go play 3. Except I’m looking at the price and to actually play immortal empires I need the 2nd game too which is mega expensive. My only option is to wait for the steam summer sale or just not get into the franchise. Does CA not understand that if you have a high mark of entry for new players, it’s going to completely kill growth of your game.
@@RichSmithson Look at key sites, you can get all 3 games in a pack for less than half of one game. And yeah warhammer one has many things that are really bothersome compared to 2 and 3. The worst thing is how you cant use previous games factions in warhammer 3 if you dont have 1 and 2.
@@RichSmithson I think CA only cares about pre-release and week 1 sales. That is what they show off to the investors. If sales fall off a cliff, or people return the game, they don't show that to the investors. Basically, CA really makes their money from lying to investors. That might explain why they are so comfortable with lying to customers as well.
9:43 this is particularly true for programmers/computer scientists. The field is advancing so quickly that they have to be constantly learning and showing new skills just to remain competitive for job interviews. Smart programmers will often leave otherwise good jobs if they can’t build their skills there because they cannot afford to fall behind. Wasting years cutting corners and building garbage can really hurt a programmer’s career, even if they were explicitly told to do so.
Remember to think for yourself, and don't let the toxic positive 'community' push you around. I don't work for CA, but in a similar field, and the amount of astroturfing is ridiculous. Vouland vid TLDR : - CA upper manage genuinely believes that showing up with a new sports car every week is an effective morale counter balance to paying their staff slave wages.
Volund is a terrible sources to proce something, he sings nothing but praise for anything in the old games, but anything even slightly new he'll fight to hell and back to avoid saying anything postive no matter how stupid he has to make himself look to make that point, like in one video he tried to say that warhammer sound desighn was shit because a low teir cannon unit wasn't as punchy as a high teir cannon unit in an older game, ignoring completely how powerful every high teir artillery unit looks and sounds
@calebbarnhouse496 A bit exaggerated for effect, but yeah yer not too far off the mark. I think Volund has important things to say though I disagree with a fair number of his takes
CA isn’t going anywhere, they fill the niche in the gaming community, that niche is realtime strategy games, CA is one of the few big time companies that makes decent large scale RTS games, the one of the few companies that make them, the 2 others are is Blizzard (the sad thing is that they are probably worse then CA) and Paradox . so unfortunately unless a new company makes a 10/10 best game of the year RTS CA isn’t gonna go under
@@jerelly9469 look up Stormgate by Frost giant studios (ex-blizz devs). The rts market is about to receive an absolute banger. And CA games are more 4x than RTS anyways
@@jerelly9469 except that CA is owned by Sega, and if they won't perform well enough it's possible for Sega to shut down the entire studio. Unlikely, of course, but that decision is literally not for CA to make anymore.
I genuinely believe the biggest issue the gaming industry has is the lack of actual strong unions. As we have seen now during this last period, gaming companies has faced NO repercussions from doing mass layoffs industrywide. All it has done is make sure that the suits gets to continue their hog-like feasting of all the profit that a game creates while workers break their backs crunching just to make an average salary. There never was any kind of counter-force towards this change in focus where we went from creating games, to creating profit. This band-aid solution that gamedevs has found of simply jumping ships means the issues with upper management still exist for those the next line of workers replacing them. And often, the reason they quit in the first place often has the exact same issues still existing in the new companies they start at.
One of the biggest issues in any industry is the lack of strong unions, from the perspective of the average worker and customer in general. The entire system is literally built to make money for the very few on the top. Obviously from the opposite perspective having a strong union among your workforce would be terrible, hence why many giant corporations are spending a lot of effort in undermining any attempts at unionising.
yeah I tend to agree. Its not there is not corruption, thuggery and shenanigans in unions. ALL those things on just as large as scale as private ownership enterprise corruption / thuggery and shenanigans but that it tends to provide stability and more money for MORE people overall. its actually the lesser of evils.
@@johns5558 a lot of the corruption is also caused by the employer's side's efforts to directly influence and sabotage the union's efforts. You need a well-organised and motivated union to avoid situations like only one person being the chairperson all the time and getting bribed.
Interesting article in particular given how relatable it is to the business world in general. I used to work for a company in a completely different industry from CA and yet the issues he raises in the article are very similar to the issues I had in my job and which is why the company I worked for went under. Poor communication and consultation between departments. Terrible management decisions, no one taking responsibility for their actions, no real attempt by management to find out what was happening on the ground floor so to speak, leading to broken promises to clients and inevitably customers. You can tell a company is badly run when all of that happens and CA clearly was and is.
I worked in a food processing plant, the manager had no idea what was going on in the building. Telling him about what was going on regularly shocked him. Head in the sand management, it's called.
@@R3GARnator Yep I had that or something similar although in my case this particular manager where I worked couldn't even be bothered to find out what was happening in his department. Made loads of decisions and promises in meetings that weren't grounded in reality and then started setting impossible targets and deadlines for us that no one in the team could possibly ever meet as he never bothered to find out if we could actually do what he promised. Recipe for disaster.
For real. I also work in a different industry, but I recognized me doing the same sort of lying and making promises to management. Then one day I realized "Am I making a AAA game?! 😂" Haven't been able to negotiate my way out yet, but Lord knows I'm trying *sigh*
@@R3GARnator I happen to work in a food processing plant right now and the owner is exactly like this. Worse yet, the manager is also somewhat similar. She does _kind of_ know _something_ of what happens on the ground, but at the same time often responds to things with language like "I'm not paying you for that / that much" even though she's just an employee like the rest of us and is only the one who checks approves our reported hours. Luckily for me at least, our organisation is kind of dumb in a way that strips her of a lot of actual power and places it in the hands of a higher operational manager/marketer who is actually a sane person who is always interested on being filled in on the perspectives of the workers.
Work in a department that was downsized by nearly 80%... we were contributing roughly 40% of total revenue to the company but our salaries were in the realm of $3m a year... so they hacked it down to 11 people, revenue (for the whole of the company) dropped by about 10% after a single season due to overruns, time-delays and failed delivery times... they threatened that more cuts would need to be done and we all joked "go ahead, get rid of the last 11 of us and see what happens" we all got 16% raises over the next few months.
Lets be real here, a lot of us played Medieval Total War when we were kids, and we thought to ourselves "yeah the AI isn't very good, but imagine how great it will be in 20 years!" But here we are, 20 years later and in many ways the AI is worse than it was when we were kids. I never believed that solving the Computer Intelligence problem was impossible, with 20 years to work on it they could literally have hard programmed 1 million responses to simulate intelligence. And yet here we are, finally being told outright that CA intentionally blocks innovation. Steve Jobs said it best, he said tech companies fail because the Artists and Engineers who founded the company, eventually lose their authority and get replaced by incompetent numbers people, accountants, middle management, sales, and marketing. And these people not only don't have the talent, or understand the value proposition, but they fundamentally don't care about the product because the product is artwork and these people are philistines.
I got banned from the steam page because I specifically mentioned the fact that when the game ads state one thing and we receive another, it is not fair to the customer. I did that twice and boom, banned.
If it was not for modders, I would have quit after Attila... the structural focus on doomstacking, everpresent replenishment and nonexisting risk/reward or just failing because of lack of skill instead of statcreep - you literally CANNOT LOOSE in modern TW if you have more than one braincell... CA needs to implode already... just like Bethesda, Bioware and Blizzard - so that the devs that care can make their own indie project. Yes, they will not be on such scale, but they would have creative freedom to actually make game by gamers for gamers.
Just stop consuming. You have already enough with all the games you bought to have fun for years, and if needed you can go throught the workshop. If people don't buy they'll have to change. You can still buy old games to send a message though.
Sad we have to try to save CA from CA. The other issue with the core developers leaving, is the new hiring practices are not bringing in the same quality of people, or worse people with a "modern" narrative in mind.
I just read the thing, this company needs more than boycotting. These leadership people treat their teams like they treat their community on their forums, and they're doing more than delivering bad games, they are depriving us of the wonderful games developpers are willing to make. This company doesn't deserve any success.
Remember when CA defended an obnoxious team member who publicly disdained a waifu mod for Three Kingdoms and this eventually led to the mod being removed from the Steam workshop? I do. For CA it was an opportunity to virtue signal what strong feminist allies they were as the team member was a female who got triggered by some sexy artwork mod for a female character in Three Kingdoms. So when a male CA developer accidentally gets blamed for how Rome 2 turned out due to bad management decisions but CA did jack all to defend him, what does this say about the culture at CA?
"My view is that the continued success of the franchise is better explained by the patience and goodwill of its players than it is by the stewardship of Total War’s management." I've been noticing more and more, especially over SoC, with over the years that this to be the case.
Doesn't surprise. Most companies don't *want* competence anymore. It's not that we ONLY have a competence crisis anymore, it's that we have a an insecurity, narcissism, and also a competency crisis.
Management can be absolutely infuriating. Where I work one of the programs we work on tracks certain objects that users can register if they have one and want to let us know. But sometimes stuff goes wrong and the object gets registered twice. We were told not to do anything about the duplicate data, because that would reduce the total amount of objects and make the application look less impressive in reports.
Havent even gotten the last 2 or 3 Warhammer 3 dlcs. And was looking forward to chaos dwarves from the time i read about them while playing total war warhammer 1
The disastrous decisions like the unfinished WH3 lunch, are deliberate, they are not isolated accidents with no warning, people warn them of asinine mistakes that they have done in the past, yet they still chose to do them.
My first TW game was Rome 2, I got it maybe 2015 or 2016 and by that point it was fine. I spent many hours enjoying it thoroughly and had 0 problem with it at all. Not too long after I got Medieval 2 for cheap because I wanted to play the LotR mod and it took a bit longer for me to get into it because it looked so much worse and basic features like not being able to unselect any unit when just observing bugged me a lot. I started to play it more and appreciate it more and got into Napoleon and Empire (also with mods), Thrones because I love that time period and Warhammer 1, then Atilla, then when WH3 came out got WH2 cheap and WH3 to play with my friends and also just for the huge map lol. It took me some time, but seeing what was lost over the years is obvious. It's a similar story to Fifa, a game I used to love growing up and felt 'nostalgic' about only to realise it wasn't nostalgia, the game just used to genuinely be better. I'm currently on Shogun 2 after watching the Shogun series and will play FotS after that... It seems like in TW's case, going forward looks nice but given Empire/Napoleon, Shogun 2 and Medieval 2 don't look horrible there is no reason to play any others.
It's been clear for a very long time that the problem at CA has been the management. For some companies it's the publisher. For some companies, yes, it's the devs. The thing that really tipped me off that the problem at CA was it's own management was the persistent use of an engine that is not fit for purpose. I am sure the developers would change it if they could, it's obviously a headache for them trying to make it work every game, the publisher is unlikely to be forcing the developers to continue using such a crap engine if the devs were telling them they needed a new one, and they were getting public backlash every game, the clear source of this problem was CA's own management. More came out as time went on that pushed me towards this conclusion, but needless to say it's been satisfying with the leaks both to you and to volound, and the public statements that have finally been putting the blame more firmly where it belongs. Really I wish the developers had been saying this stuff years ago, it might be too late for the company to survive now.
This is endemic to the entire industry. Layoffs despite record shattering profits, enormous swings in upper echelon directives and 'vision' changes leading to dev-hell and work half-finished being shoved out the door... its bad.
Power structure across the world MUST be redistributed, be it life-important decisions or he realm of art and entertainment, our lives are oppressed by mindless elites who have absolutely no merit and ability for handling the money they have at their command.
Julian : "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". This is just an example. By reading Julian's article, it feels like people that have no idea what's possible to implement and what pleases the players are in charge, and that programmers that genuinely care about making a good strategy game are kept under them and denied the freedom to give feedbacks : "We made our feelings about this clear but were told that “the players won’t be able to tell the difference" " This is outrageous.
Yet you still have morons in this comment section who will blame the developers and keep giving CA money. The average person is just not smart enough for this world
It's not that cinematic mode can't be cool. And ofc we, the gamers. appreciate how cool the units look up close- especially when they get visual upgrades. What beats me is that CA hasn't developed and added the option for a cinematic window that sits in the corner of the screen, next to or toggled with the minimap, so you can have best of both worlds- the standard overview camera and cinematic view, simultaneously. There's gotta be a way to do that, right? It would be fine even if there was a slight delay between the actual camera and the cinematic window, assuming that is less taxing on the CPU
I'm so lucky to work for a company that doesn't care how I do my job, only that I give good results and work well with my team. My team lead and boss basically just work to keep crap from interfering with me getting things done.
This seems to be a inevitability when the insentive is money and not the product. The workers start caring more about keeping their position and economical security, causing the "yes man" behaviour. And the product suffers for more than just that reason. The "too many cooks in the kitchen" phenomena also seems to affect all the big game development companies. They seem to start the correction via all the layoffs and downscalin inprojects. There's also the inevitable cultural changes throught the years that alienate the OG fanbase, as the target audience changes to a more young and general audience that has more time to play the game instead of the now older generation that demands better standards. The desition of going to fantasy settings shows this, as it's more popular now to than the historical. I suspect that the only way to go to the old days is outside creative assembly, some indie developer with access to better tools and new tech could bring that vision back to life, like the new Manor Lords game.
Honestly it baffles me how they, and by they I mean most publishers, this stuff isn't exclusive to CA, even manage to release a game at all sometimes when the so-called development process consists almost entirely of *actual insanity*. I wouldn't be able to make a children's board game under these conditions, let alone a Total War game...
I had a conversation recently where a small part of me thinks the upper management is intentionally doing stuff like this to tank the franchise for the purpose of getting SEGA to cut them loose/sell them off to another company. Like not perform so bad they need to be shut down but just enough of diminishing returns/is it still worth the expense to keep them around? COH 3's launch was bad but Relic was able to negotiate buying their freedom from SEGA so hopefully that game will turn around within the year. Still more likely that the CA upper management is just that bad, but I'll be the fool who holds out some small hope.
Thanks for covering this. This article obviously has relevance to the Total War community but it's also shedding light on a lot of bad practices that are probably going on elsewhere in the industry. Glassdoor is also awesome (if you have an account lol)
It doesn't surprise me that so much of Rome 2's budget was blown on marketing. You have the marketing department calling the shots in many game devs/publishers who are after short term buzz to hype the game up to boost the share price.
There is a magic word, wich brings back quality and responsibilty! "You are fired!" 🙂 Lets try it and make CA great again! For this, state intervention has to be pushed back, freedom has to kick in and maybe creativity is coming back!
It would have been so much more lore consistent to give the general the ability to join an unit perspective. Losing the field view but giving the rejoined unit a massive boost
Honestly this makes a lot of sense if you look at Warhammer 3 launch and it seems that the upper management is exactly the same. WH3 had some strange design priorities that I noticed at hindsight. Both the very cinematic tutorial and do-your-own-daemon-prince features are neat, but must require a ton of asset production that can't be recycled in the rest of the game. And in the daemon prince case it messed with future proofing of the faction since tech tree and such was built onto the mechanic so you'd have to rebuild the faction mechanics if you ever wanted to add lords to them. And it feels like they keep slapping on these features that eat a lot of development time, get inappropriate amount of QA resources and ultimately add less than just spending time to iron out existing features. Like imagine if instead of adding the Mirrors of Madness mode they made weapon teams deployable on top of walls?
For years the community was festered with fanboys who made excuses for CA such as the AI can't get any better ... this is the best CA can do, for years I was in the minority to try to put those voices down (from knowledge) shame Julian didn't publish it 10 years ago (although I understand why he didn't). WH is filled with features the AI isn't working with and its killing the game, Battle AI only got 'awareness' to magic and artillery on the '3rd game' ... this would be a joke that was allowed to exist thanks to idiots (some are tubers) that covered for CA. Folks who said Ass ladders were a thing cause making better AI for sieges is impossible XD Julian just dug they grave. As Julian said Post Rome II, there was plenty of justification (and money, due to the success and the DLC) to keep a custodian team to work on the game post patch 14, and CA had preferred to push on a 'new game' that they knew people would recognize as being the same - this is the same situation now and people still allow CA to get away with it. CA can stick with WH3 and fix sieges, Autoresolve, AI, and other core systems - WH3 and its DLCs are super profitable - but they instead rush to the next titles cause they know people will buy them. So while the leadership is at fault, its also the customers who enable it and prominent voices who can't come out and say - I will not buy new TW products untill WH3 has proper sieges - cause CA will do it and has the resources to do so but no incentives.
While you are right, I think a lot of people seem like fan boys because they are just trying to rationalize to themselves why some of the decisions and features of a game are crap. They are rooting for CA because CA makes an awesome style of mass warfare game that no one else really makes
No Corporation will ever be bullied into making a good product. They will use it as an excuse to start making gacha games. Konami turned the Metal Gear Franchise into slot machines. Corpos are like the Evil AI, that only cares about profit and will destroy the whole world if left unchecked. If people don't like the product, then don't buy it. (I've taken that stance for some of my hobbies.) It won't change anything, but at least you won't be complicit. It's up to each person to how much bullshit they will endure for the experience they crave, when you know nothing will change.
Games as a service is probably the worst thing to ever happen to gaming. It has led to so many devs pushing low quality products under the guise that they will fix it later. And on the flip side devs can also use that model to do amazing things, the same devs we are complaining about made warhammer 2 (IMO) one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played. Corporate greed just kills everything and it ruins good devs.
“I hope they learned from this” are you that dumb? They haven’t been doing this kind of stuff for literally years and across many games. They definitely have learned, with what they can get away with, and the community still won’t get angry. If you think CA will take anything positive away from this, I pray for you
It's sad to see the way corporate destroy everything. There are still some good execs, but these are a small part in ocean of shit. To bad for the future of Total War
7:57 could just be me but anything work related if you lie you get fired. If i work i always tell trueth cause i hired for that too. People who creating lies without really needs are not trust worthy and i would never do buisness with them again .... call me silly
That article really explains a lot. Like how the same issues seem to crop up over and over. Reminds me of the articles about Blizzard that came out a few years ago. Sounds like CA leadership, similar to Blizzard, seems to lie to itself as much as it does its fans. Edit: I think this can only go on so long. I am hopeful I might get to play a few nice things they make in the future, but with leadership like that quality products will eventually grind to a halt.
"The player shouldn't be able to bamboozle the AI. I do it quite often but I shouldn't be able to..." Excellent line! It's true too, the AI should not be designed in such a way that it falls for obvious explorations.
I mean, it should also not be playing at super human level. Making a fun AI to play against is much harder than making an AI that beats a human. What it should do is behave in a way that keeps verisimilitude going, whatever that means for the title in question.
@@ruukinen yes, but the article in question iterates several examples where the devs were prevented or even forbidden from designing the AI to have literally any responses to implemented mechanics, always with the reasoning that either the players will enjoy overpowering the AI easily or not notice in the first place.
@@houndofculann1793 Considering how many people don't like the artillery/spell dodging the ai does, which I find makes it more interesting to play against, I have a hard time believing players actually want a competent AI.
@@ruukinen now you are confusing the concept of a "competent" AI with the "superhuman" AI you used in your previous comment. The artillery/spell dodging is indeed an example of the superhuman capability of an AI to react to inputs in a way that no human can, which is why people dislike it. IF it was "just" a competent AI, mimicing the capabilities of a player, it would dodge some spells and some artillery shots, like it pretty much does actually in lower battle difficulties right now. And in said lower difficulties (IIRC Normal and Hard, haven't played since SoC though so I'm not aware if it has been changed since) I really like the way it works. You won't be hitting any max range slow projectiles or slow-to-impact spells on a non-distracted enemy, but they only slightly move before a faster one already hits. But on Very Hard battle difficulty it kicks in the superhuman gear and, as an AI obviously can, reacts immediately to the direct code of where a projectile/spell is going to hit exactly the very instant it fires instead of taking the time a human needs to process the visual information and determine where the hit is going to be. So if the AI unit has the movement speed to dodge, you're never going to hit an otherwise undistracted target. This is what we don't want, because this is not just competence anymore. However there is a clear spectrum shown here, which can also be applied in the general sense. People definitely _do_ want a competent AI, in the sense that they want the AI to be able to reasonably use all the same information and mechanics the players can, but not be supercompetent at it in a way that is totally impossible for a human to be. It's a tough balancing act, for sure, but that's definitely no excuse to intentionally exclude mechanical information from the AI's capabilities entirely.
@@houndofculann1793 I'll cut you off right there. Pretty much the bottom of the barrel noobs on multiplayer ladder are capable of artillery and spell dodging, and they do it way better than the current iteration of the AI does it. There is absolutely nothing superhuman about it. Also normal and lower AIs don't do it at all. Also a player will dodge even if otherwise "engaged" like ranged units unlike the AI. If the range we are working with is braindead->someone barely capable of thought, then my premise still holds, people don't want the AI to actually do things that are to the players detriment. Or that is how it looks like from the discourse. Obviously anyone commenting isn't representing the silent majority.
As someone who likes to work on game project just for fun I do belive Julian for saying "it’s quite possible to work on a project like this and even a couple of months from launch not really have a clear idea at all of what the final game is going to look like." Ussualy the very first "playable" game project is veeeery bare-bones and there is still much work to do. Why is that? Well because it's easier to split work in parts so you won't get lost when creating it. Now imagine what happends if you divide that work to different people with different experience and ideas, while leading party only give them "instructions" on how this should look like. This can lead to huge mess and someone needs to clean that. And that's always a lot of work. Now, because we are talking about code... well, let's say sometimes it's easier to rewrite everything anew (example: League of Legends old launcher, even if the one we use today is still buggy as hell). The worst part about code is when ppl like to write it in their very specific way. I recall the situation with Yandere Simulator (and let's ignore it's... other problems for now). When another guy tried to help with the game, he quickly started to rewrite code in more efficient way only to get kicked out by the author because he (the author) was getting lost in it. And now, with all that being said, let's all think about what is the literal bane in video games. The Code for AI. Why is that you might ask? Well the more complex the game gets, the more "paths" will be required to create. It can be messed up in a shooter, so imagine keeping that in check with strategy games with sooo many choices, abilities, unit types, faction strenght and weaknesses, very situational tools, etc. etc. It will always take a lot of work and time. For companies time means money and they want money while waving with fire in direction of time for the hope it will work out.
Couldnt agree more that the community is why they get away with this. If this sort of DLC and development practices was in another game holy moly. Warhammer 3 would never see an ounce of positive reviews I can tell you that. Total war is just such a unique game and its built on the back of the devs who made the series what it was before it got ruined and they are just decorating the skeleton.
Honestly, sometimes a business needs to fail, so a new creator can fill the void. Business often clashes hard with creative industry. There is 100% happy middle-ground to be found, but only if everyone involved wants it. Let it fail, and wait a little, the void will be filled. The most disgusting part of this is the people at the top NEVER experience the personal impact that those at the bottom do. OK, never is over-the-top, but it's pretty close to. Where is the supposed responsibility repercussions associated with the position which attracts their pay packet, for bad business decisions?
I remember when I first heard of total war franchise, was with angry Joe's review and rant over how terrible the game was and how it tarnished a great legacy
His Rome 2 Angry Review was shown to the dev team, and they had to sit through it knowing full well that this is what they released. He also gave Pharaoh his 10th most disappointing game position for last year. Ten/eleven years later and that's where it's at for historical. Depressing, really.
Here is a link to the official discord for this channel: discord.gg/6ustjZ3
This isn’t just CA or the gaming industry. This is the corporate world now. Terrible executives making terrible decision, and holding everyone else, even paying customers responsible instead of themselves.
Standard business operation, indeed.
Failing upwards in a nutshell
Disney? Lol
ivy league mates
they are the top
That's true, but they are too big to truly fail and too many idiots keep buying bad products.
This part of the article really hit emotionally. Many would've quit on the spot. ''By that time, the rumour had become established that I had been fired, and now that the game was improving, this was taken by many as proof that I was gone and my replacement was doing a better job. So I was having to come into work every day along with those on the patching team and chip away at the problems knowing that those improvements would be taken by many as further evidence of my incompetence. I cannot tell you how demoralizing that was, and the thought of resigning certainly crossed my mind, but I wanted to at least get the game working first.''
That's a good person and i am experiencing rage that people like that are used up and thrown away by suits who then take credit for work they deep down know they didnt do
Join a union, dont let yourself be vunerable like that
I agree. I know nothing about gaming but I know Julian. He takes this all very seriously and is obviously highly respected in his ongoing career.
@PropheticShadeZ so he can be used by the union? Have his savings thrown into some random stock after 18 years of nothing like that happening. My uncle was the president. He has lost over 10k because of follow up presidents decisions.
@@PropheticShadeZ Unions are hardly better on average
It's shocking how management and leadership are failing upwards accross the entertainment industry!
late stage capitalism. the only thing executives care about is money and they are so protected that there is nearly nothing that can be done so they are held responsible for terrible choices that cost ppl their jobs
It's across the entire corporate sector, the only people that win are the ones that push blame onto others and focus on poltics
Tbh they aren’t even doing that well cause they’ve fucked themselves in the long run and will likely slowly be moved out fucked in their personal lives
Not just the entertainment industry. This is what happens when society rewards surface over substance, and ego over humility.
@@coffeebeangood1538 yup, management is vastly skewed towards egos, contacts and skills that have nothing to do with management (aka product skills). A lot of managers aren't trained to be managers and stay "workers with more power now" which is a disaster. The middle management (leads, etc) is undervalued as management which leads to oblivious C-Suites.
Those are really complex problems to solve - they usually would be adressed by the C-Suite... which lacks incentive (as they have quarterly financial incentive, what do they care), or the owners... which are just not present in publicly traded companies.
Yuckiness all around.
This quote from McKinlay's statement is my favorite: "My view is that the continued success of the franchise is better explained by the patience and goodwill of its players than it is by the stewardship of Total War’s management."
so, we keep getting trash games because the idiot consumers can't help themselves from not buying every game?
If you really want to put it bluntly?@@LucasCunhaRocha
Great quote
The community forgives them because there is literally no competition. As much as I would like to say "F**k CA, I'm gonna go play *total war game from another company* there is none.
they rly have the corner market on this style of game
Well you can just go play older total war games that will always be good. Instead of pay $100s for the new game plus dlc for a lukewarm experience that may or may not improve over time
Yeah no matter how people hype other series like manor lords, banner lords or age of wonders they arent comparable. Manor lords is more of a fief builder and is culturally and geographically limited, bannerlords is smaller scale and has worse battle Ai than total war, and age of wonders is a turn based Heroes of might and magic game not even remotely similar.
We are stuck with this series for now, coping with mods and older titles.
honestly at this point im kinda confused, like surely its not that hard to create a total war like game in unity or unreal, but the closest i ever see are paradox type games and they have their own distinct style of gameplay.
@@loowick4074 Yup, so saying stuff like the 'TW community are the most forgiving' - nicer people or, 'the most effing r worded' - some guy call volound (he is pyschotc btw) is just so empty headed, what options do we have, many do take a break from TW or just wait it out etc, is what it is.
>And the company, of course, doesn't take care of them
Never forget that corporations are *never* your friend.
They try really really hard to be your friend if you are backed by a strong union 🌹
@@PlayerSlotAvailable Unions are corrupt, and fkin suck. fk em.
Unless you're a shareholder. Then they are legally oblidged to care about you.
@@kaltaron1284 Nah, they are only obligated to make you a profit.
@@andrewwaldschmitt4757 That's the only way they can care.
Whenever I see a lot of hype surrounding a new Total War, I always think to myself "Remember Carthage". The disparity between the hype and expectation vs what was delivered was vast, and as such a huge let down. So I always take any new hype with a huge pinch of salt. It's worked well for me so far.
I guess Cato the Elder got his way on that one.
Same, Rome 2 was one of the biggest low points in gaming expectations for me. There were many others, but it was truly a sign of the times. Times we still live in.
After reading the article a few other things started to pop to mind like that. Like the siege artillery on walls in Warhammer or the music used in the trailers never being in game.
As outlined in the article: Time spent on making marketing, is time NOT spent on improving the game. Marketing, in the shape of trailers, demos, and playable builds for industry events (rip in piss, E3) eats up developer time.
Seems to me these executives at development/publishing companies rely heavily on "hype" for their sales numbers. My theory is that they know these games aren't what they advertise and claim them to be. They are aware of all the problems we've come to expect from AAA gaming in 2024, but the hype is what gets their target sales numbers for investors.
That cameramode thing is hillarious.
I hate how "just gaslight the peasants" is so often used as a "solution" nowadays.
"After we manipulated some statistics, the Biden economy is amazing! Disbelieve your own eyes, peasants, and vote Biden."
That camera mode only work if you can go into 3rd person and turn it now into a hack and slash game, like that total war Spartan they made. Imagine controlling a single unit from the whole unit and just run around the map, if that one die select the other or go back to tactical top down. That would be a revolutionary game mode.
@@Dayz3O6 this was a Thing in Rise & Fall.
i only found it by mistake about 2 weeks ago, after playing the game for more than 2 years. and i found it to be awful
@@Dayz3O6Have you considered Mount and Blade?
There's your 1st/3rd-person medieval battle.
That thing about the community forgiving them really gets me. It's crazy how quickly people will flip from being rightfully pissed, to being like "CA DID A THING IT'S TIME FOR US TO FORGIVE THEM!"
I think this is a problem that affects all gaming communities. All a developer needs to do to quell outrage is to throw some old dried up bone into the mix, then everyone stops barking and returns to sitting down and wagging their tails while the developers run their wallets with shitty DLC and microtransactions. I guess that old saying is true; a fool and his money are easily parted.
I still haven't bought dlc or played the game since the SoC debacle. They're dead to me.
Yep the comments prove that some people still aren’t ready to hear the truth
Same thing happened to sony and helldivers ;-;
I just blacklist the entire company on steam whenever I see one pull something weird which has included CA due to them being owned by SEGA
@@michasokoowski6651a classic case of fuck the company for fucking over the game all Sony had to do is sit still and enjoy their money but nope they fucked over a game
Fun bit of trivia about that bloated marketing budget for Rome 2:
Without it, we wouldn’t have the famous channel “Extra History”. Back when it was Extra Credits they were approached by CA to make a series on the Punic Wars as a part of their marketing campaign, and that was the first series of Extra History…
Not to mention the irony and incompetence required to believe that pouring money into marketing the sequel to a GANRE defining game is a good use of resources
@@FirstLast-gk6lg yeah, it’s clear the priorities were all out of whack, and the Rome II legacy (like the shitty warscape engine) has been a curse on the franchise ever since, only being ameliorated by the incredible artistry of the visual and sound guys who brought the warhammer fantasy tabletop to life in an amazing way
So that's whom we have to thank for that cesspit. Wonderful.
@@heinrichb just because the narrator is soy doesn’t mean it isn’t a cool series. The extra history on the crusades and the one on the south seas bubble are all time classics
@@thenoblepoptart Extra History has been despised for their blatant historical inaccuracies stemming from their desire to form a cohesive narrative. At least that's the complaints I have always heard from people more knowledgeable than I am on the matter.
10+ years later... I feel ancient, skipping school so I can play Rome 2 on launch after being hooked on Shogun 2 in 2011...
It was horrible 😂
Same here bro, hooked on shogun 2. Was so excited for Rome 2 that game was so bad it killed my excitement for games 😂😂😂
I wasn't aware of it's problems for a long time, because Rome 2 Emperor Edition was my first Total War
rome 2 got fixed mostly at least tho and with mods like DEI is probably the best total war right now.
I did that with the original Shogun, so imagine how old I feel.
@@arkplayer179 DEI - Diveda et Impera, divide and conquer
DEI - Diversity, equity, Inclusion
Hmmmmmmmmmm...
I work in a corporate setting, for all the pressure and stress executives are under and for all the statements of how company performance is their job and “on them”, they NEVER accept responsibility for anything negative but always make sure to cover themselves in praise when good things happen.
Gaming needs to go back to small studios full of passion, corporate companies making games suck, see almost every AAA game in the last 10 years
Great example of the difference between being a boss and being a leader, only one of them takes responsibility.
That's why I get excited for all the advancements in game engines and tooling out there. The barrier to entry to produce your vision is getting less and less.
Gaming can't go back to small studios, large corporation appear as inevitably as sun sets. Problem with modern games isn't large corporations problem is profit motive.
Indie games are where it's at. There have been so many good ones recently.
@@supasnake8138like the dude making Manor Lords entirely by himself, and it’s still better than a lot of city making games AAA studios are putting out
Let's prepare for an unlawful NDA clause in every CA contracts soon ^^
NDAs typically expire after a few years. 10 years is definitely clear of what any legal system I am aware of will allow. Unless of course, its military/government secrets, those are typically good for decades under official secrets acts and the like
@@slb797 Yeah, the legal ones indeed. I'm kinda expecting an abusive/illegal one comming from CA in the few months/years ^^
@@Clem35530 If it's illegal they can't sue when they're broken.
@@andregon4366 Won't win the case probably, but yep.
@@andregon4366 They can always sue. A not uncommon tactic is for companies to just pile money onto frivolous lawsuits (Slapp I think it's called) from any court that'll take the case until they can exhaust the defendant's resources and get them to shut up. It doesn't matter if their suit has no grounds...all they have to do is drag people through the mud until it's not worth it to fight back.
This is incredibly damning. The "camera mode increases unit combat performance" lie is hilarious 😂. What an unmitigated dumpster fire. I swear to God nobody hates Total War more than CA management.
The fact their solution to an unused camera feature was to slap an unrelated stat bonus on it speaks volumes of how little these people understand players and how good games work.
The cinematic camera story is hilarious. How did that feature take that much time to implement, it literally is just a change in the camera position
You also actually get different camera mobility and a mix of free and fixed camera controls, it's very disconcerting at first, there is also a portion of your unit that gets greyed out, and the camera is basically attached to a specific model with the jumps and all without moving at the same time when it fights
TLDR: The camera in itself keeps changing position in FPV since they wanted a stable camera that followed an unstable unit model...
Because that's how you survive in corporate world.
If you say that x will take a week and you will do it in a week, then you dont get anything
If you say that x will take a week and something bad happens and you are a few days late, you will get punished
If you say that x will take a 4 months and you will do it in 3, then you get a bonus.
Meanwhile you have to do job of different people because you are understaffed because menagement doesnt want to hire more people because it would mean more expenses and because they do that, they also get a bonus.
The whole thing is a cancer
In my limited knowledge: that depends on the engine, on something like UE5 which I have knowledge of this would be rather easy, but I imagine that the Total War engine is purpose built for the type of game they do. So implementing a separate third person mode wouldn't be the easiest thing but doable.
@@TheLazyFinn They already have a third person mode for artillery
Lying to the player in order for encourage them to do something to their determent or ultimately worsen gameplay is Creative Assembly design philosophy 101..
Its absolutely everywhere in all of their game.
Why actually put the work into designing a game when you can just lie to the player.!?
And of course it still doesn't work. Even with the lie, no one uses the first person feature in Rome 2 more than maybe once or twice to try it out and realize it sucks (as a cinematic experience even, quite apart from as a gameplay experience).
To be fair, this is also done in good games for various reasons.
Take Subnautica as an example. The game does it's best to make you afraid of the fauna and to use evasion instead of violence. But in truth none of the enemies are really that threatening and you can easily kill them.
@@kaltaron1284 that's not lying to you, that's just you being naturally afraid of unknown things and learning from it.
@@houndofculann1793 That's one way to look at it and it's true that the game never actually says that it isn't possible but it does its darndest to make you think it.
@@kaltaron1284 make you think it's that way is severely different from directly lie to you via actual in game text.
I can't imagine why they thought that using the cinematic camera mode would be a popular feature for players to use while trying to manage an army of up to 40 different units at the same time. Did those devs ever actually play the game? They even called it a cinematic camera. Obviously it's not something you are going to want to use when you need attention devoted to micro.
Sounds like they want you in a dwarven formation every time
I think part of the issue is the static definition of 'full stack'.
If optimal play exists of just 20 unit armies, how much tactical variety is there to actually pull a victory out of defeat and vice versa? (when you're not master of cheese, legend himself)
And of course the max of 40 units of 1 side being on a battlefield with control large armies.
The only place I can imagine it would be useful to sacrifice vision for minor stats is a chokepoint battle where vision doesn't really matter and holding the line is most important.
Yup. It could make some sense as a replay feature. Mount and Blade for example has this option once your character is down, so you can follow the rest of the battle first person, which is kinda fun. But obviously far from a core gameplay feature.
Mount and Blade come to think of it does first-person with battle tactics quite well, where you both control the individual hero and give orders to the army. And there is a tradeoff in that game where if you stay back as a general you can pay more attention to managing the army while if you're up close fighting you can have more of a direct impact but getting vision on the army / giving orders is harder. Of course, that game is balanced a lot more heavily towards the first person play, where the army level tactics isn't as strong as total war even if you pay full attention to it.
rome total war had it yet you are not complaining about its inclusion in that game
@@ПётрПавловский-щ1х that works differently, uses the already existing camera controls and does not lie to the player about what it does.
So many companies are like this tbh, I've worked at several big employers that are just playgrounds for manager/exec egos.
Pretty sure Games Workshop is just as toxic, so these two companies working together is a match made in heaven
Unfortunately GW gets defended on almost every social media platform by positive toxic morons.
Yes, they've been desperately trying to crush Fantasy since the early 2000s, that whole mess with throwing Rick Priestly out if his own setting "decanonizing" the way he wanted to take the setting, and then saying "Chaos won, everyone died, characters acted totally OOC or were retconned, go play 40K". I hate them.
Lol, did not realize you had a video on this already.
For me, I am interested like I said to you, in what we as a community can do for the time being.
5 key things that I take from this as a player/content creator that our community should do:
1 - Vote with your wallet. Absolutely, works every time.
2 - We never know who is the guilty party. Be reasonable towards those that communicate with us from the ground level, they likely have little say on how things transpire.
3 - Be kind to others in the community with a different view. Rome 2 is still quite good, and so are other games. What he mentions is how good it could have been, but we also need to consider that funding for games always has deadlines that are difficult. So we never get the 100% possible.
4 - Be fine with delays. Stop demanding dlc and titles for yesterday. If time is what they need, assure them they have it and likely management will allow it.
5 - Demand realistic stuff. Honestly this needs to be said. Complete different skeletons and animations serve very little purpose compared to difficulty and AI changes or mechanics. In the end, those are the reasons you return to the game.
I feel like I've seen people be mostly fine about delays recently, especially regarding Thrones of Decay/ Delay. But the counterpart is that the product has to be good after being delayed (looknig at you Warhammer 3's laucnh) and it can't be delayed again and again if you want to be taken seriously. Again, ToD is the example to follow, it got heavily delayed and absolutely delivered.
0 - Vote with your vote as well. Vote for politicians who will be more amenable to being pressured into passing regulations and harsh enforcement against bad corporate behavior that we can create organizations to push for.
Vote with your wallet? I love your videos SusaVile but you have been buying every Total War game to date.
@@Florensbond not on launch; Attila for example, after Rome 2, and nearly every Rome 2 dlc only after extensive review. Which at that point actually hurt my channel since I was not up to date with latest stuff
Why the F are people responsible for CA's current state still there.. (Management)
Unfortunately, they're the ones that get to fire people
Having read the article a lot of that rings so true for the state of W3 when it came out. Complete disregard of the programmers by the designers. Sega cops a lot of blame for some of this (and rightly so) but that shouldn't be at the expense of the terrible CA leadership. It's such a shame that passionate, skilled and dedicated employees can be shown such short thrift, by people only interested in saving face and not the product they ship.
As a member of the community I also would like to apologize to Julian. The sharp disconnect between what was advertised in that infamous interview and what we actually got was impossible to ignore, and it was easy to make him the scapegoat. While I never went so far as death threats, I did assume he lied about the state of the game and the work he did on it. *For that, I am sorry.*
Growing up is realizing that the people you can interact with are scapegoats. Customer Services Reps, Marketing Reps, etc.
The people with power are insulated from the consequences of their actions.
Julian's statement regarding Management's inability to receive criticism and the lack of internal contact between developer departments really was bad to know about, but the icing on the cake was knowing valuable development time was eaten up by forcing developers to work on misleading marketing ridden scripted demos with the sole purpose of raising the hype and sell more copies. Truly hideous corporate behaviour. After reading through the statement, I think the best way the Total War playerbase can do is unite and make this public, hurt the image of the corporation and coerce the heads of tbe company to change their work ethic company wise.
Only through our conjoined might can we save this disaster campaign that has been dragging on far too long.
Thanks to Legend once again for being a beacon for this community, he has trult become a Legend of Total War
If CA going under means getting a better total war like game from another company, then let it crash like the hindenburg. I know it's harsh but as a gamer my realationship with a gaming company goes as far as playing their games and no more.
That's basically where I'm at too. I think of the fighting game scene and how Capcom screwing up with SF5 and MVC:I allowed other developers to have some air to breath and build a competitive audience. Before that, Capcom was just so dominate they kind of sucked all the air out the entire space.
My only worry is that if CA goes under, other gaming companies will look at it as “oh there’s no market for that kind of game anymore, let’s stick to the cheap easy stuff that’s guaranteed to make money.”
Companies like Larian swinging big with games like Divinity and BG3 are the exception more than the rule, sadly.
Nobody has really tried to follow the formula. There are some old games like King Arthur and Real Warfare 1242 (that one is mostly a cashgrab) and smaller passion projects. But any real attempts to match the effort of CA, there has been none. And if CA folds, I don't consider it likely that anyone else will swoop in and give it a try.
The simple fact is that CA has shown us what good Total War is, and people are not settling for less, to the degree that they did in the past. The same would hold true for anyone new. Their first project would have to be GOOD from the start. The customer base would be ruthless if it wasn't at least as good as CA, which is something I wouldn't expect. Maybe a few projects down the road, but would they be allowed to get that far? Doubt it.
Yup. They aren't giving you this crap for free. It's a product with a sometimes hefty price tag. You have no obligation to keep a business that sells bad products afloat. Some of the people engaging in that kind of guilt tripping are engaging in classic toxic positivity. lmfao
Total War is a niche series. If CA goes bankrupt, nobody will do Total War in the future.
Cinematic mode is basically asking to throw the battle. Fine for custom battles where none of it matters, but on the campaign map, the cinematic mode is only making things a hassle.
"I play these games to show you how corporate people lie to you."
Straight up G.
God I remember Rome 2 ghoul face. What a joke of a launch.
Ok, I've commented on your videos of that nature in the past. And I've been with you for about a decade now. Nobody can dispute that you know those games and their mechanics inside out. Nobody can deny that you are passionate about the series and want those games to be good. With that out of the way... I do not see any rational way for CA to improve their conduct until either serious competition appears or people start to put their money where their mouth is. I haven't bought a Total War since Attila. I remember how hyped I was when Rome 2 came out and how it was only about the Emperor Edition when the game became what it should have been at launch. It is reasonable to surmise that what CA is doing is a consistent replacement of theirs consumer base. By pushing out the people who have been with the series, they can try to approach the younger audience (who, it would appear to CA at least, might be less demanding). Personally, I have moved on. I have always been a casual (I came to the series as a history nerd) and always loved the idea of rewriting history. At this point I play CK2 for that. Total War will always have a place in my heart (mostly because of Medieval 1 and 2), but if you are treated as an inconvenience at best, you move on.
The best thing that could happen to Total War is a challenger.
Thank you for all the things you have done for this community. Greetings from Poland.
If CA isn't profitable they're not going to adjust by listening to the community, they're going to adjust by become a mobile game developer. Making games for PC nowadays is thankless and unprofitable work.
@@kirktown2046 as they say in the Shogun 2 campaign intro "all that begins must end" 😁😁🏯🎎
Rome 2 was the downfall isn't it? That was a while ago geez
Around the time SEGA bought them
Shogun 2 turned out really great.
I don’t want to count them out yet. I’ve gotten endless amounts of enjoyment from the Warhammer series and WH2 was, by the time 3 came out, the best Total War game since Shogun 2, at least.
They still have the capability to produce quality content, and I genuinely think the community feedback to SoC shocked them, as well as people’s responses to the rumored upcoming DLCs. We’ll see what happens going forward, and I’ll cross my fingers that they’ve hopefully learned their lesson.
Could just be the dead cat bounce though. I guess we’ll see. 🤷♂️
Warhammer is a polished up turd. The core gampelay is still the exact same as rome 2, its just a shiny reskin of a fundamentaly flawed game.
Didn’t know who this guy was till I saw that still and said ‘OH ITS HIM?!’ 😮
It really is the boardroom meeting meme between CA management and devs isn't it?
"Upper management" try not to be the worst shit in recent mankind history challenge impossible difficulty
Rome 2 broke my heart, changed my view of the industry. I had just had major knee surgery and was so excited to spend my recovery gaming and it was near unplayable and felt empty and flat on launch. At the time it seemed a major mess but the truth is those were the new borders of the gaming industry, every year a couple games get pushed out too early as a chaotic mess. After awhile if you get taken by the hype and buy a new game only to find glitches, server issues and a PR campaign you feel guilty for getting suckered again, like an abusive relationship. Cycle continues because it's profitable.
Absolutely true. I guess the standards were much higher when console games on the PS2 generation and earlier could not be updated and needed to be very well polished before launch otherwise the product was completely screwed. Day 1 patches has spoiled the entire industry and enabled poor launches to be the norm. The last game I bought on launch was Skyrim and I swore off of new purchases because as an Elder Scrolls fan I thought the game sucked. Similar story of declining quality over time.
I think another factor into the major decline of RTS games is that they peaked when hardware was far more restrictive and these newer genres of first and third person games were either extremely rudimentary or otherwise highly limited. Just look at Warcraft 3 compared to Warcraft 1 in a 7 year span, it was like the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 of 2002. However, the writing was likely on the wall once Halo released in 2001. The difference is astounding but today devs are divided into all sorts of new projects in genres that weren't even viable back then and that generate a lot more hype. In turn, with high turnover rates there are fewer programmers that would have the skills to even develop in this relatively niche genre unless they are truly passionate about it. It just feels like it is over for fans of these kinds of games outside of modding or going down memory lane.
Rome 2 and imperator: rome, two games that were abysmal but now with mod they are praised by the community
Mods are critical for the longevity of a game. Just look at Star Wars Empire at War. Been around for 20 odd years, multiple mods still actively updating with new ones coming still
The worst part with I:R is that a lot of the games problems were called out far before it even released but Johan just went full ostrich and stuck his head in the sand.
@@slb797 I am scrolling comments while I ponder my next move in my Hutt Cartel campaign.
Nah I still hate Rome 2
At least Paradox admitted they made a lot of mistakes and put a lot of financially unrewarded effort into fixing their game.
Always a shame to see stuff like that happen, it baffles me how those corporations don't see that long term commitment and making a polished product will get them way more in terms of sales and fanbase growth than some awful cash grabs that happen all the time, I won't even go into how dlc for warhammer looks to a fresh player.
CEO bonus is typically tied to quarterly or yearly profit figures. That is the reason. It is a ludicrous practice that encourages harmful actions that are bad for the long-term health of the company, such as torching community goodwill in exchange for a quick profit or laying off experienced staff to inflate profit figures
Iv literally just got into TW over the past 2 weeks. I brought TW Warhammer 1 on sale like 2 years ago but never actually played it till 2 weeks back.
I loved it, I’m hooked. But everyone is telling me not to bother with TW Warhammer 1 and just go play 3.
Except I’m looking at the price and to actually play immortal empires I need the 2nd game too which is mega expensive.
My only option is to wait for the steam summer sale or just not get into the franchise.
Does CA not understand that if you have a high mark of entry for new players, it’s going to completely kill growth of your game.
@@RichSmithson Look at key sites, you can get all 3 games in a pack for less than half of one game. And yeah warhammer one has many things that are really bothersome compared to 2 and 3. The worst thing is how you cant use previous games factions in warhammer 3 if you dont have 1 and 2.
@@RichSmithson I think CA only cares about pre-release and week 1 sales. That is what they show off to the investors. If sales fall off a cliff, or people return the game, they don't show that to the investors.
Basically, CA really makes their money from lying to investors. That might explain why they are so comfortable with lying to customers as well.
9:43 this is particularly true for programmers/computer scientists. The field is advancing so quickly that they have to be constantly learning and showing new skills just to remain competitive for job interviews. Smart programmers will often leave otherwise good jobs if they can’t build their skills there because they cannot afford to fall behind. Wasting years cutting corners and building garbage can really hurt a programmer’s career, even if they were explicitly told to do so.
I agree, your observation is right. Dont get involved in older tech stacks building trash.
Remember to think for yourself, and don't let the toxic positive 'community' push you around.
I don't work for CA, but in a similar field, and the amount of astroturfing is ridiculous.
Vouland vid TLDR :
- CA upper manage genuinely believes that showing up with a new sports car every week is an effective morale counter balance to paying their staff slave wages.
"Work hard enough and I'll be able to afford a second sports car next quarter"
Bobby needs a new yacht!
Volund is a terrible sources to proce something, he sings nothing but praise for anything in the old games, but anything even slightly new he'll fight to hell and back to avoid saying anything postive no matter how stupid he has to make himself look to make that point, like in one video he tried to say that warhammer sound desighn was shit because a low teir cannon unit wasn't as punchy as a high teir cannon unit in an older game, ignoring completely how powerful every high teir artillery unit looks and sounds
Slavery got back the moment corporations got THAT big
@calebbarnhouse496 A bit exaggerated for effect, but yeah yer not too far off the mark. I think Volund has important things to say though I disagree with a fair number of his takes
Best case scenario would be for CA to go under and have the Total War franchise get acquired by Larian. CA is unsavable
CA isn’t going anywhere, they fill the niche in the gaming community, that niche is realtime strategy games, CA is one of the few big time companies that makes decent large scale RTS games, the one of the few companies that make them, the 2 others are is Blizzard (the sad thing is that they are probably worse then CA) and Paradox . so unfortunately unless a new company makes a 10/10 best game of the year RTS CA isn’t gonna go under
@@jerelly9469 look up Stormgate by Frost giant studios (ex-blizz devs). The rts market is about to receive an absolute banger. And CA games are more 4x than RTS anyways
@@rockstar6goalkeeper that game is DOA
@@jerelly9469 except that CA is owned by Sega, and if they won't perform well enough it's possible for Sega to shut down the entire studio. Unlikely, of course, but that decision is literally not for CA to make anymore.
I genuinely believe the biggest issue the gaming industry has is the lack of actual strong unions.
As we have seen now during this last period, gaming companies has faced NO repercussions from doing mass layoffs industrywide.
All it has done is make sure that the suits gets to continue their hog-like feasting of all the profit that a game creates while workers break their backs crunching just to make an average salary.
There never was any kind of counter-force towards this change in focus where we went from creating games, to creating profit.
This band-aid solution that gamedevs has found of simply jumping ships means the issues with upper management still exist for those the next line of workers replacing them. And often, the reason they quit in the first place often has the exact same issues still existing in the new companies they start at.
One of the biggest issues in any industry is the lack of strong unions, from the perspective of the average worker and customer in general. The entire system is literally built to make money for the very few on the top. Obviously from the opposite perspective having a strong union among your workforce would be terrible, hence why many giant corporations are spending a lot of effort in undermining any attempts at unionising.
yeah I tend to agree. Its not there is not corruption, thuggery and shenanigans in unions. ALL those things on just as large as scale as private ownership enterprise corruption / thuggery and shenanigans but that it tends to provide stability and more money for MORE people overall. its actually the lesser of evils.
@@johns5558 a lot of the corruption is also caused by the employer's side's efforts to directly influence and sabotage the union's efforts. You need a well-organised and motivated union to avoid situations like only one person being the chairperson all the time and getting bribed.
Interesting article in particular given how relatable it is to the business world in general. I used to work for a company in a completely different industry from CA and yet the issues he raises in the article are very similar to the issues I had in my job and which is why the company I worked for went under. Poor communication and consultation between departments. Terrible management decisions, no one taking responsibility for their actions, no real attempt by management to find out what was happening on the ground floor so to speak, leading to broken promises to clients and inevitably customers. You can tell a company is badly run when all of that happens and CA clearly was and is.
I worked in a food processing plant, the manager had no idea what was going on in the building. Telling him about what was going on regularly shocked him. Head in the sand management, it's called.
@@R3GARnator Yep I had that or something similar although in my case this particular manager where I worked couldn't even be bothered to find out what was happening in his department. Made loads of decisions and promises in meetings that weren't grounded in reality and then started setting impossible targets and deadlines for us that no one in the team could possibly ever meet as he never bothered to find out if we could actually do what he promised. Recipe for disaster.
For real. I also work in a different industry, but I recognized me doing the same sort of lying and making promises to management. Then one day I realized "Am I making a AAA game?! 😂" Haven't been able to negotiate my way out yet, but Lord knows I'm trying *sigh*
@@MasterObservato Oh well I hope you escape soon
@@R3GARnator I happen to work in a food processing plant right now and the owner is exactly like this. Worse yet, the manager is also somewhat similar. She does _kind of_ know _something_ of what happens on the ground, but at the same time often responds to things with language like "I'm not paying you for that / that much" even though she's just an employee like the rest of us and is only the one who checks approves our reported hours.
Luckily for me at least, our organisation is kind of dumb in a way that strips her of a lot of actual power and places it in the hands of a higher operational manager/marketer who is actually a sane person who is always interested on being filled in on the perspectives of the workers.
Work in a department that was downsized by nearly 80%... we were contributing roughly 40% of total revenue to the company but our salaries were in the realm of $3m a year... so they hacked it down to 11 people, revenue (for the whole of the company) dropped by about 10% after a single season due to overruns, time-delays and failed delivery times... they threatened that more cuts would need to be done and we all joked "go ahead, get rid of the last 11 of us and see what happens" we all got 16% raises over the next few months.
Lets be real here, a lot of us played Medieval Total War when we were kids, and we thought to ourselves "yeah the AI isn't very good, but imagine how great it will be in 20 years!" But here we are, 20 years later and in many ways the AI is worse than it was when we were kids. I never believed that solving the Computer Intelligence problem was impossible, with 20 years to work on it they could literally have hard programmed 1 million responses to simulate intelligence.
And yet here we are, finally being told outright that CA intentionally blocks innovation.
Steve Jobs said it best, he said tech companies fail because the Artists and Engineers who founded the company, eventually lose their authority and get replaced by incompetent numbers people, accountants, middle management, sales, and marketing. And these people not only don't have the talent, or understand the value proposition, but they fundamentally don't care about the product because the product is artwork and these people are philistines.
I got banned from the steam page because I specifically mentioned the fact that when the game ads state one thing and we receive another, it is not fair to the customer. I did that twice and boom, banned.
I'm not surprised, I've not stopped complaining about CA since Rome 2, and they keep adding more fuel to the fire that whole time.
If it was not for modders, I would have quit after Attila... the structural focus on doomstacking, everpresent replenishment and nonexisting risk/reward or just failing because of lack of skill instead of statcreep - you literally CANNOT LOOSE in modern TW if you have more than one braincell...
CA needs to implode already... just like Bethesda, Bioware and Blizzard - so that the devs that care can make their own indie project. Yes, they will not be on such scale, but they would have creative freedom to actually make game by gamers for gamers.
Just stop consuming. You have already enough with all the games you bought to have fun for years, and if needed you can go throught the workshop. If people don't buy they'll have to change. You can still buy old games to send a message though.
Jesus these bots are fast
Keep it up smitty your war against the bots is a just one
ikr?
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Abominable Intelligence strikes back
I tried to put a comment in a different reply and was blocked by UA-cam
Sad we have to try to save CA from CA. The other issue with the core developers leaving, is the new hiring practices are not bringing in the same quality of people, or worse people with a "modern" narrative in mind.
I just read the thing, this company needs more than boycotting. These leadership people treat their teams like they treat their community on their forums, and they're doing more than delivering bad games, they are depriving us of the wonderful games developpers are willing to make. This company doesn't deserve any success.
Remember when CA defended an obnoxious team member who publicly disdained a waifu mod for Three Kingdoms and this eventually led to the mod being removed from the Steam workshop? I do. For CA it was an opportunity to virtue signal what strong feminist allies they were as the team member was a female who got triggered by some sexy artwork mod for a female character in Three Kingdoms. So when a male CA developer accidentally gets blamed for how Rome 2 turned out due to bad management decisions but CA did jack all to defend him, what does this say about the culture at CA?
If I hear Voland say shill one more time I will crack
"My view is that the continued success of the franchise is better explained by the patience and goodwill of its players than it is by the stewardship of Total War’s management."
I've been noticing more and more, especially over SoC, with over the years that this to be the case.
Doesn't surprise. Most companies don't *want* competence anymore. It's not that we ONLY have a competence crisis anymore, it's that we have a an insecurity, narcissism, and also a competency crisis.
thats my observation aswell. Loyalty with stupidity (stupidly loyal) is much more highly valued. not joking
Management can be absolutely infuriating. Where I work one of the programs we work on tracks certain objects that users can register if they have one and want to let us know. But sometimes stuff goes wrong and the object gets registered twice. We were told not to do anything about the duplicate data, because that would reduce the total amount of objects and make the application look less impressive in reports.
Its going to be fun reading Steam Forums after that one. I'm not even playing the game since 2022 btw if that matters.
What game?
Havent even gotten the last 2 or 3 Warhammer 3 dlcs. And was looking forward to chaos dwarves from the time i read about them while playing total war warhammer 1
Thank you Julian for speaking out and thank you legend for covering this.
The disastrous decisions like the unfinished WH3 lunch, are deliberate, they are not isolated accidents with no warning, people warn them of asinine mistakes that they have done in the past, yet they still chose to do them.
My first TW game was Rome 2, I got it maybe 2015 or 2016 and by that point it was fine. I spent many hours enjoying it thoroughly and had 0 problem with it at all. Not too long after I got Medieval 2 for cheap because I wanted to play the LotR mod and it took a bit longer for me to get into it because it looked so much worse and basic features like not being able to unselect any unit when just observing bugged me a lot. I started to play it more and appreciate it more and got into Napoleon and Empire (also with mods), Thrones because I love that time period and Warhammer 1, then Atilla, then when WH3 came out got WH2 cheap and WH3 to play with my friends and also just for the huge map lol. It took me some time, but seeing what was lost over the years is obvious. It's a similar story to Fifa, a game I used to love growing up and felt 'nostalgic' about only to realise it wasn't nostalgia, the game just used to genuinely be better. I'm currently on Shogun 2 after watching the Shogun series and will play FotS after that... It seems like in TW's case, going forward looks nice but given Empire/Napoleon, Shogun 2 and Medieval 2 don't look horrible there is no reason to play any others.
It's been clear for a very long time that the problem at CA has been the management. For some companies it's the publisher. For some companies, yes, it's the devs. The thing that really tipped me off that the problem at CA was it's own management was the persistent use of an engine that is not fit for purpose. I am sure the developers would change it if they could, it's obviously a headache for them trying to make it work every game, the publisher is unlikely to be forcing the developers to continue using such a crap engine if the devs were telling them they needed a new one, and they were getting public backlash every game, the clear source of this problem was CA's own management. More came out as time went on that pushed me towards this conclusion, but needless to say it's been satisfying with the leaks both to you and to volound, and the public statements that have finally been putting the blame more firmly where it belongs. Really I wish the developers had been saying this stuff years ago, it might be too late for the company to survive now.
This is endemic to the entire industry. Layoffs despite record shattering profits, enormous swings in upper echelon directives and 'vision' changes leading to dev-hell and work half-finished being shoved out the door... its bad.
Power structure across the world MUST be redistributed, be it life-important decisions or he realm of art and entertainment, our lives are oppressed by mindless elites who have absolutely no merit and ability for handling the money they have at their command.
Julian : "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".
This is just an example. By reading Julian's article, it feels like people that have no idea what's possible to implement and what pleases the players are in charge, and that programmers that genuinely care about making a good strategy game are kept under them and denied the freedom to give feedbacks :
"We made our feelings about this clear but were told that “the players won’t be able to tell the difference" "
This is outrageous.
I think Bethesda said the same. If the AI is smart, uses cover, flanking etc then players get frustrated and quit. They want to feel like superheroes.
Yet you still have morons in this comment section who will blame the developers and keep giving CA money.
The average person is just not smart enough for this world
It's not that cinematic mode can't be cool. And ofc we, the gamers. appreciate how cool the units look up close- especially when they get visual upgrades. What beats me is that CA hasn't developed and added the option for a cinematic window that sits in the corner of the screen, next to or toggled with the minimap, so you can have best of both worlds- the standard overview camera and cinematic view, simultaneously.
There's gotta be a way to do that, right? It would be fine even if there was a slight delay between the actual camera and the cinematic window, assuming that is less taxing on the CPU
I'm so lucky to work for a company that doesn't care how I do my job, only that I give good results and work well with my team.
My team lead and boss basically just work to keep crap from interfering with me getting things done.
there needs to be a class action lawsuit against the management the studio should be held liable to its customers
I didn't even know about that camera mode in Rome 2 with the "bonus" to it. That's funny as hell.
I would say the success of Total War is mainly based on the lack of a better alternative...
This seems to be a inevitability when the insentive is money and not the product. The workers start caring more about keeping their position and economical security, causing the "yes man" behaviour.
And the product suffers for more than just that reason. The "too many cooks in the kitchen" phenomena also seems to affect all the big game development companies. They seem to start the correction via all the layoffs and downscalin inprojects.
There's also the inevitable cultural changes throught the years that alienate the OG fanbase, as the target audience changes to a more young and general audience that has more time to play the game instead of the now older generation that demands better standards. The desition of going to fantasy settings shows this, as it's more popular now to than the historical.
I suspect that the only way to go to the old days is outside creative assembly, some indie developer with access to better tools and new tech could bring that vision back to life, like the new Manor Lords game.
14:02 "It's important to be respectful" then immediately goes to a Volund video, the most toxic narcissist you could possibly find
Thanks for continuing to fight for the community, Legend
Honestly it baffles me how they, and by they I mean most publishers, this stuff isn't exclusive to CA, even manage to release a game at all sometimes when the so-called development process consists almost entirely of *actual insanity*. I wouldn't be able to make a children's board game under these conditions, let alone a Total War game...
I admit I have sometimes been almost unable to work in any reasonable way because I have found the insanity and stupidity of decision making too much.
The only way things will change is if the company loses enough money or there is direct competition. I think the latter is the better solution.
I want Total War: Arena back. Could be a massive esport filling up stadiums if done right.
I had a conversation recently where a small part of me thinks the upper management is intentionally doing stuff like this to tank the franchise for the purpose of getting SEGA to cut them loose/sell them off to another company. Like not perform so bad they need to be shut down but just enough of diminishing returns/is it still worth the expense to keep them around?
COH 3's launch was bad but Relic was able to negotiate buying their freedom from SEGA so hopefully that game will turn around within the year.
Still more likely that the CA upper management is just that bad, but I'll be the fool who holds out some small hope.
It is common Corporate Culture.
Thanks for covering this. This article obviously has relevance to the Total War community but it's also shedding light on a lot of bad practices that are probably going on elsewhere in the industry. Glassdoor is also awesome (if you have an account lol)
It doesn't surprise me that so much of Rome 2's budget was blown on marketing. You have the marketing department calling the shots in many game devs/publishers who are after short term buzz to hype the game up to boost the share price.
There is a magic word, wich brings back quality and responsibilty! "You are fired!" 🙂 Lets try it and make CA great again! For this, state intervention has to be pushed back, freedom has to kick in and maybe creativity is coming back!
Corporate management being corporate management. This is the same kind of thing happening at just about every large studio industry wide
It would have been so much more lore consistent to give the general the ability to join an unit perspective.
Losing the field view but giving the rejoined unit a massive boost
Too bad the community can't just buy the company. We need more gamer owned companies. By us for us!
Honestly this makes a lot of sense if you look at Warhammer 3 launch and it seems that the upper management is exactly the same. WH3 had some strange design priorities that I noticed at hindsight. Both the very cinematic tutorial and do-your-own-daemon-prince features are neat, but must require a ton of asset production that can't be recycled in the rest of the game. And in the daemon prince case it messed with future proofing of the faction since tech tree and such was built onto the mechanic so you'd have to rebuild the faction mechanics if you ever wanted to add lords to them. And it feels like they keep slapping on these features that eat a lot of development time, get inappropriate amount of QA resources and ultimately add less than just spending time to iron out existing features. Like imagine if instead of adding the Mirrors of Madness mode they made weapon teams deployable on top of walls?
For years the community was festered with fanboys who made excuses for CA such as the AI can't get any better ... this is the best CA can do, for years I was in the minority to try to put those voices down (from knowledge) shame Julian didn't publish it 10 years ago (although I understand why he didn't). WH is filled with features the AI isn't working with and its killing the game, Battle AI only got 'awareness' to magic and artillery on the '3rd game' ... this would be a joke that was allowed to exist thanks to idiots (some are tubers) that covered for CA. Folks who said Ass ladders were a thing cause making better AI for sieges is impossible XD Julian just dug they grave.
As Julian said Post Rome II, there was plenty of justification (and money, due to the success and the DLC) to keep a custodian team to work on the game post patch 14, and CA had preferred to push on a 'new game' that they knew people would recognize as being the same - this is the same situation now and people still allow CA to get away with it. CA can stick with WH3 and fix sieges, Autoresolve, AI, and other core systems - WH3 and its DLCs are super profitable - but they instead rush to the next titles cause they know people will buy them.
So while the leadership is at fault, its also the customers who enable it and prominent voices who can't come out and say - I will not buy new TW products untill WH3 has proper sieges - cause CA will do it and has the resources to do so but no incentives.
While you are right, I think a lot of people seem like fan boys because they are just trying to rationalize to themselves why some of the decisions and features of a game are crap. They are rooting for CA because CA makes an awesome style of mass warfare game that no one else really makes
No Corporation will ever be bullied into making a good product. They will use it as an excuse to start making gacha games. Konami turned the Metal Gear Franchise into slot machines. Corpos are like the Evil AI, that only cares about profit and will destroy the whole world if left unchecked.
If people don't like the product, then don't buy it. (I've taken that stance for some of my hobbies.) It won't change anything, but at least you won't be complicit. It's up to each person to how much bullshit they will endure for the experience they crave, when you know nothing will change.
Games as a service is probably the worst thing to ever happen to gaming. It has led to so many devs pushing low quality products under the guise that they will fix it later.
And on the flip side devs can also use that model to do amazing things, the same devs we are complaining about made warhammer 2 (IMO) one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played. Corporate greed just kills everything and it ruins good devs.
I remember him. It's sad to hear this kind of dishonest practice was allowed. I hope they learned from this.
“I hope they learned from this” are you that dumb? They haven’t been doing this kind of stuff for literally years and across many games. They definitely have learned, with what they can get away with, and the community still won’t get angry.
If you think CA will take anything positive away from this, I pray for you
They did not learn shit
It's sad to see the way corporate destroy everything. There are still some good execs, but these are a small part in ocean of shit. To bad for the future of Total War
7:57 could just be me but anything work related if you lie you get fired. If i work i always tell trueth cause i hired for that too. People who creating lies without really needs are not trust worthy and i would never do buisness with them again .... call me silly
sounds like the old angry legend is back.
That article really explains a lot. Like how the same issues seem to crop up over and over. Reminds me of the articles about Blizzard that came out a few years ago. Sounds like CA leadership, similar to Blizzard, seems to lie to itself as much as it does its fans.
Edit: I think this can only go on so long. I am hopeful I might get to play a few nice things they make in the future, but with leadership like that quality products will eventually grind to a halt.
Not even just CA and Blizzard. It's almost every studio industry wise - and beyond.
"The player shouldn't be able to bamboozle the AI. I do it quite often but I shouldn't be able to..." Excellent line! It's true too, the AI should not be designed in such a way that it falls for obvious explorations.
I mean, it should also not be playing at super human level. Making a fun AI to play against is much harder than making an AI that beats a human. What it should do is behave in a way that keeps verisimilitude going, whatever that means for the title in question.
@@ruukinen yes, but the article in question iterates several examples where the devs were prevented or even forbidden from designing the AI to have literally any responses to implemented mechanics, always with the reasoning that either the players will enjoy overpowering the AI easily or not notice in the first place.
@@houndofculann1793 Considering how many people don't like the artillery/spell dodging the ai does, which I find makes it more interesting to play against, I have a hard time believing players actually want a competent AI.
@@ruukinen now you are confusing the concept of a "competent" AI with the "superhuman" AI you used in your previous comment. The artillery/spell dodging is indeed an example of the superhuman capability of an AI to react to inputs in a way that no human can, which is why people dislike it.
IF it was "just" a competent AI, mimicing the capabilities of a player, it would dodge some spells and some artillery shots, like it pretty much does actually in lower battle difficulties right now. And in said lower difficulties (IIRC Normal and Hard, haven't played since SoC though so I'm not aware if it has been changed since) I really like the way it works. You won't be hitting any max range slow projectiles or slow-to-impact spells on a non-distracted enemy, but they only slightly move before a faster one already hits.
But on Very Hard battle difficulty it kicks in the superhuman gear and, as an AI obviously can, reacts immediately to the direct code of where a projectile/spell is going to hit exactly the very instant it fires instead of taking the time a human needs to process the visual information and determine where the hit is going to be. So if the AI unit has the movement speed to dodge, you're never going to hit an otherwise undistracted target. This is what we don't want, because this is not just competence anymore.
However there is a clear spectrum shown here, which can also be applied in the general sense. People definitely _do_ want a competent AI, in the sense that they want the AI to be able to reasonably use all the same information and mechanics the players can, but not be supercompetent at it in a way that is totally impossible for a human to be. It's a tough balancing act, for sure, but that's definitely no excuse to intentionally exclude mechanical information from the AI's capabilities entirely.
@@houndofculann1793 I'll cut you off right there. Pretty much the bottom of the barrel noobs on multiplayer ladder are capable of artillery and spell dodging, and they do it way better than the current iteration of the AI does it. There is absolutely nothing superhuman about it. Also normal and lower AIs don't do it at all. Also a player will dodge even if otherwise "engaged" like ranged units unlike the AI. If the range we are working with is braindead->someone barely capable of thought, then my premise still holds, people don't want the AI to actually do things that are to the players detriment. Or that is how it looks like from the discourse. Obviously anyone commenting isn't representing the silent majority.
As someone who likes to work on game project just for fun I do belive Julian for saying "it’s quite possible to work on a project like this and even a couple of months from launch not really have a clear idea at all of what the final game is going to look like."
Ussualy the very first "playable" game project is veeeery bare-bones and there is still much work to do. Why is that? Well because it's easier to split work in parts so you won't get lost when creating it. Now imagine what happends if you divide that work to different people with different experience and ideas, while leading party only give them "instructions" on how this should look like.
This can lead to huge mess and someone needs to clean that. And that's always a lot of work. Now, because we are talking about code... well, let's say sometimes it's easier to rewrite everything anew (example: League of Legends old launcher, even if the one we use today is still buggy as hell). The worst part about code is when ppl like to write it in their very specific way. I recall the situation with Yandere Simulator (and let's ignore it's... other problems for now). When another guy tried to help with the game, he quickly started to rewrite code in more efficient way only to get kicked out by the author because he (the author) was getting lost in it.
And now, with all that being said, let's all think about what is the literal bane in video games. The Code for AI. Why is that you might ask? Well the more complex the game gets, the more "paths" will be required to create. It can be messed up in a shooter, so imagine keeping that in check with strategy games with sooo many choices, abilities, unit types, faction strenght and weaknesses, very situational tools, etc. etc. It will always take a lot of work and time. For companies time means money and they want money while waving with fire in direction of time for the hope it will work out.
They actually have the capacity to make better AI but choose not to because they believe that players enjoy being able to dominate the AI WTF
Couldnt agree more that the community is why they get away with this. If this sort of DLC and development practices was in another game holy moly. Warhammer 3 would never see an ounce of positive reviews I can tell you that.
Total war is just such a unique game and its built on the back of the devs who made the series what it was before it got ruined and they are just decorating the skeleton.
What do these executives add to the company?
Money valuation and illusion of *size and *success
Bad PR.
Thanks for the coverage. Your *spotlighting** [edit] the issue is much appreciated! 🙏
Honestly, sometimes a business needs to fail, so a new creator can fill the void. Business often clashes hard with creative industry. There is 100% happy middle-ground to be found, but only if everyone involved wants it. Let it fail, and wait a little, the void will be filled.
The most disgusting part of this is the people at the top NEVER experience the personal impact that those at the bottom do. OK, never is over-the-top, but it's pretty close to. Where is the supposed responsibility repercussions associated with the position which attracts their pay packet, for bad business decisions?
Listening to this while playing Warhammer II.
Wh2 > Wh3
... am i supposed to care?
@@ПётрПавловский-щ1х you obv cared enough to comment
@@ПётрПавловский-щ1х you cared enough to comment.
I remember when I first heard of total war franchise, was with angry Joe's review and rant over how terrible the game was and how it tarnished a great legacy
His Rome 2 Angry Review was shown to the dev team, and they had to sit through it knowing full well that this is what they released. He also gave Pharaoh his 10th most disappointing game position for last year. Ten/eleven years later and that's where it's at for historical. Depressing, really.
I haven't heard about AngryJoe in years, what year is this, 2015
I remember Angry Joe wondering if the additional budget for Rome II went to the marketing. Turns out he was right.
Back when rome 2 realsed i actually showed my mother that video to shiw her how bad the game is.