17 replies to this topic

[Tigranes]

And this time, let us achieve the miracle of having a single thread chronicle all the Obsidianite negativity from announcement till release.



http://www.eurogamer...ing-it-up-to-xi

Notable points:

a fleet of Roman ships beaches just outside the city and begins to disgorge thousands of centurions, their commanders calling out orders as the massed ranks surge up the sand

I assume the writer is an idiot, rather than Carthage actually being able to build 'Centurion' unit types.

Are we talking a map that stretches from Scotland to Libya? "Oh, bigger than that."

I can only assume we can finally play the glorious civilisations of Atlantis, Huns A Few Hundred Years Early, and the strange nation of African War Pigs.

"The way that you respond to a particular dilemma will influence the dilemmas that you get later on. We want to chain them into story threads, mini-narratives that we want to thread into the gameplay."

Finally, they realised it would be a great thing to steal Paradox' events system

there's a new Province system for quickly administering regions under your control, so that the game doesn't turn into an endless parade of paperwork.

and also their region system

armies and navies can now fight alongside one another and equal treatment is given to battles on sea and land.

Sounds nice alongside Big Huge Cities in tactical maps, actually. Although this surely means no increase in unit sizes.

Russell does say the game's budget is their biggest yet - "about 40 per cent bigger" than anything they've made before.

We'll see if hiring an AI designer was part of that budget.

Anyway, not a lot of actual details, and I doubt they'll bring in anything of what I think TW really needs to stop devolving into the same braindead-AI-bashing battle marathon (that is, better AI, campaign map fortifications and army logistics, etc), but you can't help but wait and see what they're trying to do this time.

[Rosbjerg]

I assume the writer is an idiot, rather than Carthage actually being able to build 'Centurion' unit types.

Well, in this case unfortunately, I think the reader is at fault..

But you sounds skeptcial Tigranes, does is seem a little too easy/lack of creativity or have you been dissapointed with the last couple of games?

[Gorgon]

Seems like it's been done already, and relatively recently. They needed to do a completely new theater. This is Madden NFL syndrome.

[Tigranes]

I meant Romans, actually, brain fail. What kind of army would have thousands of centurions? A late communist Roman regime that's started selling military ranks for cash?

CA went from great to meh to terrible between RTW1 and ETW, and have only shown some signs of good design sense in Shogun 2 (have not tried Napoleon). Now that they are making a 'big fat grand' game, can they actually manage to add lots of new features and keep some semblance of balance, long term playability and AI? I'm skeptical but TW is a unique genre and I still remember the hundreds of hours I put into MTW1 and RTW1.

[Bendu]

Awesome. RTW1 is my favorite setting, but it's outdated, graphical and gameplay wise.

[Tigranes]

RPS Dev interview: http://www.rockpaper...ew/#more-114276
RPS Preview: http://www.rockpaper...rome-2-preview/

Yes, I get all my news from funcroc, my 5-year-old bookmarks, and the Codex. Tidbits:

so I think it’s pretty clear on the human level stuff, we want to have more emotional interactions, you see your buddy get downed and you might try and help him up, or you see more interactions…

RTW2: You zoom in to watch your swordsmen cut some Gauls up, and suddenly you cut to a cinematic:
"MONGUS! YOU'RE WOUNDED!"
"OH, FLATULUS, I WISH I HAD NEVER LEFT MY SMALL, IDYLLIC VILLAGE IN SOME NONDESCRIPT PART OF ITALY. IT HURTS, SO MUCH-"
"WAIT THERE, MONGUS, I'LL SAVE YOU! I'LL-MONGUS! WATCH OUT!"
*press A to save Mongus from the evil Gaul!*

....I need to make that a youtube video for my 2 seconds of internet fame.

also we’ve got multiple ships in a unit, because ancient world battles weren’t fought with eight ships, you had several in a unit.

Ship formations?! *squee*

A legion will have its own legacy, its own gameplay effects and character – so for instance if you’ve lost a great battle or done something very specific with a legion it might get a trait with a particular game effect that reflects how you’ve used it.

OK, you guys do have some cool stuff here.

The map will also be scattered with invisible, branching storyline triggers which demand consequence-laden choices and dilemmas beyond the merely military regardless of which nation/state/tribe/faction you play as. It’s not quite procedural, but you won’t run into the same story ‘Easter eggs’ every time and they’re not locked to specifically Roman history and lore.

Again, they seem to have learnt from EU / King Arthur games, and despite how I sounded earlier, I heartily approve.




d

[Malcador]

Sounds good, I do like that legions get character of sorts based on their record - I guess they can end up specializing against certain enemies or such ?

[pmp10]

Sound a lot like Bioware trying to get emotions into command and conquer franchise.
I guess I'll pass this one - the campaign portions of Shogun 2 were already becoming too tiering.
The whole 'more drama - more action' direction of the series is just not my cup of tea.

[Calax]

I personally am worried that they're pushing to far into the graphics fidelity for the game to play well on older systems. They're talking about armies having facial features and being easy to read their emotional state rather than just having a notification.

[Monte Carlo]

Will I get to holler "UNLEASH HELL!" in an Aussie accent? Y'know, for realism?

[Tigranes]

I personally am worried that they're pushing to far into the graphics fidelity for the game to play well on older systems. They're talking about armies having facial features and being easy to read their emotional state rather than just having a notification.

True. Though they're talking late 2013, which probably means early 2014, and that means either a new console generation officially in the works, or at least, computer games moving on without them.

[Calax]

Well, how much processing power is going to be needed to show 100k individual faces for morale levels in the larger battles? Unless they're going to do it with just the little unit banners being the faces etc.


Also
"VICTORY IS OU[[voice cracking]s!"

[Tigranes]

They already have all the faces rendered, I assume each unit type will get Rage / Normal / Fear face types and then they'll mix them in varying proportions, or something like that. It definitely multiplies the number of textures required to show, but not at an exponential level. Anything more sophisticated, yeah, would be crazy.

[WDeranged]

At the time, Shogun 2 only used one of my GPU's and was barely aware of the extra cores in my i7, they've probably patched it up by now but it was so choppy I just gave up, hopefully they will do a better job with Rome, I totally loved the first one back in the day.

[Calax]

Hopefully they remember to keep things from being to stale and iron out multiplayer issues

[Gorgon]

Don't care about multiplayer. In fact I rather hope they don't spend any ammount of time balancing different factions and units and so on. The effect is not beneficial to the single player experience.

[Tigranes]

CA talk about AI, Scope, etc:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/03/rome-total-war-2/

CA’s PR: What is slightly galling is adopted perception as well – you can see conversations on forums, and someone can quite easily say ‘oh, the AI’s been **** since Empire’ or something like that, and it simply isn’t true. Especially with Shogun 2, so much work went into improvement, and even Napolean was a leap over Empire. It’s just people have a perceived perception. It’s like: here’s a thing I know about Total War, so I’m going to drop that into the conversation, without having actually played through the different iterations.

You stupid, stupid git, I've paid full price for every single TW game and I know just how retarded your AI is.

We don’t make the world and then get the AI to try and deal with it. We design it thinking about how the AI’s going to navigate it, and play with it.

Sounds nice. We'll see.

[entrerix]

im way more excited for this than i was for shogun 2.