Creative Assembly Sorry for Rome 2's Issues

Updated:10:44 AM CEST Sep,20

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Gameguru Mania News - Sep,07 2013 -

Creative Assembly Sorry for Rome 2's Issues - briefly
(hx) 05:26 AM CEST - Sep,07 2013 - Post a comment / read (4)
The Creative Assembly has issued an apology over Rome'2 current state, and hopes to reassure fans that they are working hard to fix the game's problems. Hi everyone and thanks for your attention.

We just wanted to reassure you that we do know it's an extremely annoying and frustrating time for some of you at the moment and we are working around the clock to sort out those issues that you are having. The first patch has just gone up - it's not trouble-free we know and are fixing with a hotfix, but there will be another next week and every week after that till the problems are gone.

At the moment it may seem that the changes are slight, but they aren’t the only ones we are working on currently and bigger changes are happening now for future patches.

If you are having a problem, it is totally unacceptable and a big deal for us, please know that we are spending all our dev effort on fixing outstanding issues.

I realise in our rush to do that we haven’t updated you on the situation, so if you are interested, please read on.

last 10 comments:

Sabot

(02:50 PM CEST - Sep,07 2013 )

The fall of Rome,in one day. Lol. Pretty sad day when CA totally FUBAR a AAA title pumped through the roof with hyped up features. Sooooo many bugs and features nonexistent. Still, those that bought the collectors edition with the onager at £100+ wil at least be playing with that. The post below sums it up maturely.

quote:
I've been suckered again because after being a fan of the series since the first Medieval Total War, I vowed I was done with CA after preordering Empire Total War only to discover I'd been sold a game still in Alpha. Consequently, Empire was the last TW title I played. I did play the the Shogun II demo, but got bored before I'd completed it.
But this was Rome II - the temptation was too great and with a preorder I also allowed myself to get suckered into the standard modern rip-off of getting content that should have been there in the first place. Or thinking I'd get it. Amazon still haven't sent me the code, despite saying it would be sent by yesterday.
I should have realised that trying something comparably ambitious again could only lead to CA screwing it up. But I have only myself to blame for naively believing they'd pull out all the stops to make Rome II truly great.

Some aspects look good. The campaign map gives a real sense of a huge gameworld where other factions can seem very distant and foreign. It's also worth having extended turn times to have every settlement represented by its own faction - far better than the generic rebel faction. Also line of sight is a good idea and the new launcher is nice. And...that's about it for the good stuff.

Aside from its epic scale and bewildering array of factions, from what I've seen so far the campaign map is really a set of rat runs. Rome I had a fully 3d map. Rome 2's map seemingly works in practice rather like Medieval I's Risk style map. I guess CA simply gave up on trying to get the AI to cope with a 3d campaign map and went back to a glorified version of the old 2D one that provides an illusion of 3d movement while the AI only has to negotiate straight lines.

And why is there no longer a family tree? One great aspect of the original Rome was cultivating your family line, choosing your heir, dealing with the negative traits your generals could acquire and occasionally sending total no-hopers on suicide missions. Now, despite much trumpeting about the focus on characters, family members just appear from nowhere and seem to get only buffs. Who are these guys? Where do they spring from? I don't know and I've no reason to care about them. I found myself totally ignoring the whole family thing because it all seems so uninteresting.

I haven't got to grips with city management yet and I daresay the game will be uninstalled long before I do. So far it seems to be a bunch of ugly and confusing icons offering very limited options. Rome I's campaign map UI was a work of art by comparison.

The battles are, of course, a key element of the game. And they're HORRIBLE.

Firstly, I expected them to be too fast, but they're ridiculously fast. CA what is the point of putting all that work into detailed units, a 1st person perspective and all that speech by units when everybody runs round at top speed like a demented Benny Hill sketch, reducing battles to a brief, scrolled back senseless clickfest of coloured blobs racing around? The fast forward feature seems to be broken - I half suspect the issue is it's stuck as on by default.
And everything quickly becomes a mad scrum of units blobbed together in a big mess - there's little to no sense of ancient armies moving to engage in combat - armies collide and are instantly a jumbled, formless heap.
The units look nice, but get magical, totally unrealistic buff powers, and - worst of all - you have CAPTURE POINTS ON AN OPEN BATTLEFIELD - totally throwing the tactical use of terrain right out of the window for some kind of idiotic capture the flag garbage. Being able to win or lose a battle because some guys happen to stand on some arbitrary spot on the battlefield is sublimely stupid. Whoever dreamt that up should be indicted for crimes against game design.

Rather than simulating an ancient battlefield, Rome II battles feel more like a simulation of an old Command and Conquer game on default game speed. I half expected a cutscene explaining how Kane has travelled back in time to conquer the world before the GDI existed or to see Tiberium as a campaign map resource. While the epic turn cycles demand patience, the battles are apparently designed for people with zero attention span. This presumably explains the otherwise mystifying lack of a guard mode - I guess CA think your modern player is too preoccupied with their rocket powered ancient Nod legions whooshing about to consider any unit standing still for more than three seconds - they need to be engaged in formless mayhem asap.
If I want arcadey, frantic clickfest Command and Conquer style battles, I'll play any RTS made ever. I started playing Total War games for strategic battles that tried to simulate real world combat.
The way the battles are, I'm half expecting random power up crates on the battlefields that make elephants instantly appear if your troops capture one to feature in one of the DLCs.

The comments about battle speed are, however, not taking into account the oh so familiar TW battle AI. E.g. on my very first battle over a minor settlement the AI had its army just stand there as my slingers whittled down its superior force, occasionally helpfully shuffling its forces about to place a fresh unit in the line of fire. It's cavalry stood behind some buildings doing nothing. All the AI seemed to care about was sitting next to the capture point. All these years on and the AI is more stupid than ever.

Even the voice acting is awful. I started to play as the Suebi and when entering battle found their different troops had voices that made them sound like either British forces from Empire or a spoof heavy metal band. Then the game crashed out of the blue, perhaps with embarrassment.

Combined land and ship battles are a great new feature in principle, but this isn't really an era of interesting naval warfare and it seems to basically entail some amphibious landings.
And your land forces can walk on water and destroy most navies into the bargain. When really moving armies over the sea should be a risky affair that takes time, as opposed to ships instantaneously appearing.

The combined land /sea battle feature is really just waiting to fail to realise its obvious potential in the inevitable disaster that will be Empire II.

To cap it all, there's the inevitable flood of bugs and performance issues as yet again CA rush an unfinished product out the door. With many of the punters engaging in apologetics about how it will be ok when CA get round to fixing the product they just paid for. It's amazing how computer games are the one product people have come to expect not to work properly when they buy them. And of course the Amazon DLC code fiasco is the cherry on top. I'd have given it two stars if it wasn't for the technical problems plaguing an already very poor game.

But CA will continue to sell half finished, shoddy products by the bucketload as the hype machine switches on for the next one. Maybe the modders will leap to the rescue as they have in the past. Time will tell. Until or unless modders start weaving their magic, I'm putting this purchase down to experience.
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Csimbi

(06:18 PM CEST - Sep,07 2013 )

You know, I'm still waiting for HMM6 to be fixed. That's FUBAR as well, still unplayable due to hangs and crashes.
I used to complain years ago that the games being released a beta and buggy. At least, back then, studios had the decency of fixing/patching them.
Now, it seems, it's all about making a big hype and a quick buck, then moving on to the next title, while customers are left in the dust.
There's a petition for HMM6 already. People are demanding dropping the buggy Conflux, while others demand refunds. I guess it won't take for long until someone files a class-action lawsuit...
And then studios are surprised why the gaming industry is not flourishing as it did a decade ago, lol...

Thudo

(03:47 AM CEST - Sep,08 2013 )

quote:
And then studios are surprised why the gaming industry is not flourishing as it did a decade ago, lol...No truer words have been spoken but the general overall collapse of gaming on ALL platforms. What I find so galling is the industry continues putting forth "dumb" games with each new sequel trying to "appease" the apparent low-attention-span "play a real quick game move to the next" stupid masses. This is becoming an epidemic consideration over the years since ~mid-2005 where the trending downward of "intelligently-designed" games is really becoming rare.

We're simply seeing the epicenter of really stupid feature-lacking games for both PCs and consoles (enuff said) just to make a fast buck because that what society seems to be nowadays lest I mention removing mod support also so you have a "locked down" POS where only limited tweaks can happen.

Gawd.. this is becoming a real cancer of the entire game industry and reflects society at the same time. Catering to what seems like exponentially more stupid brainless customer with basic gaming compared to their predecessors. :x

Apathy Curve	(06:41 PM CEST - Sep,09 2013 )
Has any CA game ever launched any other way? Every TW game I've played (all of them except Rome 2 to this point) was a bugfest with piss-poor AI and chronic CTD issues. Anyone who was expecting anything else from them is delusional.