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Voss wrote:
[A better question is why CA puts so much time into multiplayer, to be honest)

I suspect because it's not that intensive to set up multiplayer battles, especially with co-op campaign being fairly popular and encouraging sales (people buy Total War games because I buy them so we can play co-op). Even if only 10% of the player base ever plays co-op (random number), that's still potentially 600,000 more units solid of a 6,000,000 unit game.

 LordofHats wrote:

Voss wrote:
[A better question is why CA puts so much time into multiplayer, to be honest)

I suspect because it's not that intensive to set up multiplayer battles, especially with co-op campaign being fairly popular and encouraging sales (people buy Total War games because I buy them so we can play co-op). Even if only 10% of the player base ever plays co-op (random number), that's still potentially 600,000 more units solid of a 6,000,000 unit game.

Do they?
Atleast 3 k and the battles there seem greatly working...

Honestly, if any part of Total War could be cut, it probably is the real-time battles XD

I barely engage in them anymore, and certainly not in co-op unless I absolutely have to win. But the real-time battles are so integral to the franchise I doubt they'd ever get rid of them fully (instead they've mostly simplified the mechanics into rock-paper-scissors-archers).

 LordofHats wrote:
Honestly, if any part of Total War could be cut, it probably is the real-time battles XD

I barely engage in them anymore, and certainly not in co-op unless I absolutely have to win. But the real-time battles are so integral to the franchise I doubt they'd ever get rid of them fully (instead they've mostly simplified the mechanics into rock-paper-scissors-archers).

I mean with the complete removal of formations in Warhammer, even though part of why statetroops in the lore were good enough to defend the empire were discipline and formations, should've been the hint.


Also it's more like Rock - paper - scissors < ranged.

Not Online!!! wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Honestly, if any part of Total War could be cut, it probably is the real-time battles XD

I barely engage in them anymore, and certainly not in co-op unless I absolutely have to win. But the real-time battles are so integral to the franchise I doubt they'd ever get rid of them fully (instead they've mostly simplified the mechanics into rock-paper-scissors-archers).

I mean with the complete removal of formations in Warhammer, even though part of why statetroops in the lore were good enough to defend the empire were discipline and formations, should've been the hint.


Also it's more like Rock - paper - scissors < ranged.

Formations were removed mostly, I think, because Warhammer sort of makes it REALLY stupidly complicated to control formations in any sane way.

See you've got dragons, giants, tanks, infantry, cavalry, undead, beasts, etc... Furthermore even for something like infantry you've got a range of types from short and numerous rats or gobilns up to towering chaos warriors and beastmen. The formation you'd use for any one of those groups should, in theory, be different. Furthermore each of those multiple different groups would need its own unique formations. A unit of Skaven needs different formations to a unit of highly trained bretonnian warriors etc...

Ontop of that most units have abilities, several of which are specific triggers. For example Phoenix have a bomb ability that you have to manually trigger, time it right and you can do a lot of damage, or time it wrong it does nothing at all. Then you've got leaders and mages which can easily have over 10 abilities and spells to cast. In my view they cut the formations because it just didn't make as much easy sense and because the micro in the battles shifted from formation control to ability control; a sensible move I felt to keep the game focused.

Also like it or not one thing I noticed with smaller maps and AI is that the TW AI is far more engaging to fight. I recall longer battles in Medieval 2 and Empires and other TW games, but a big part of that was just getting into combat. The AI was far more defensive and more likely to draw itself up (or in a siege even retreat and draw up lines) away from you and force you to come to it. Not bad, but it could make the game go from a battle to a "hunt the enemy over the map" affair. Whilst the TW AI is far more focused on just charging you. I miss the vast maps for sieges, but at the same time I like how you can have armies drawn up and make it feel like you're taking the "whole wall". Like it or not TW's engine and controls are not yet there to let you really siege somewhere with thousands upon thousands of units (on the average home gaming computer).



Also formations and such came back with Three Kingdoms.

Really?! I always thought the biggest fixes CA needed to make in their Total War games was loading times and the A.I. turn spin wheel where you wait like 5-10 mins waiting for all the A.I. to take their turns.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Really?! I always thought the biggest fixes CA needed to make in their Total War games was loading times and the A.I. turn spin wheel where you wait like 5-10 mins waiting for all the A.I. to take their turns.

Rome II flashbacks.
I timed it 7minutes man!

Not Online!!! wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Really?! I always thought the biggest fixes CA needed to make in their Total War games was loading times and the A.I. turn spin wheel where you wait like 5-10 mins waiting for all the A.I. to take their turns.

Rome II flashbacks.
I timed it 7minutes man!

You say flashbacks but i like to think of it like PTSD flashbacks from a war-zone.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Really?! I always thought the biggest fixes CA needed to make in their Total War games was loading times and the A.I. turn spin wheel where you wait like 5-10 mins waiting for all the A.I. to take their turns.

Rome II flashbacks.
I timed it 7minutes man!

You say flashbacks but i like to think of it like PTSD flashbacks from a war-zone.

That was if rome II even worked until Patch 8 i also had random crashes and corruptions.

My legendary difficulty this is total war and win all battles aswell as fight all battles manually campaign died 40 turns in that way.

Yes that is not a joke.

 Lance845 wrote:
Pokemon, mario, legend of zelda, metroid, castlevania.

Who is surprised that every surviving major property is a nintendo property or one that got it start on the nintendo?

That company does nothing that makes any sense to me and yet they are the only ones surviving.

It's because although they sometimes have bouts of arrogance, they are in fact the least arrogant large developer for the most part.

A modern AAA game, someone will think of a story and bend the gameplay and designs to fit around it. Nintendo generally starts with gameplay and player experience, and then builds something onto that to fit the setting/story around it. Because they made the story serve the game rather than the other way around, what they made is then more eternal.

The second factor is that they will kill projects. If a project becomes unfun (for the player, not the developer), they will give it the axe. More arrogant developers will not swallow their pride and axe their project, but instead continue it and maybe release a bad game or it goes into development hell, with the pouring away of resources. Nintendo get arrogant when they are doing well. They will start doing weird experimental games and maybe cave to some developer egoism and pet projects. However, if they have a bad season, they have pretty much gone back and created products for people who play games (even if it's disliked by gaming press or hardcore gamers).

What you will find is most big developers are slaves to either developer ego or technology (i.e. new technology). Nintendo are slaves to their customers, so their innovation and products (when at their best) are designed to fit into their customer's lives and are subservient to them, rather than some developer 'vision' or 'future technology'. The irony is, Nintendo games have got far greater length of 'vision' in people being into the worlds (because it plays off the player's imagination, not the developers' ones); and their products generally are more innovative as they solve particular problems to try and fit into a customer's usage, rather than just doing in incremental increase in existing technology, or worse, into white-elephant technology.

Nintendo has a few other bonuses:

1) They are happy to go for the younger and family markets. A lot of the big AAA games aim for teenage to young adults as a market; whilst Nintendo is quite happy going for a much younger audience. This you can see in the artistic style that Nintendo goes for as well as the overall structure and content of many of their games; esp their big core franchises.
This leaves them a big top end market almost all to themselves.

2) Nintendo don't really try to compete with Sony nor MS. They are happier doing their own thing and relying on the strength of their product and IP to carry them forward. Consider the Wii - it was a total experiment. Nintendo weren't aiming for the biggest next greatest thing; they were just happy doing their thing. That is took off and left the others in the dust was a major boon for them that even they didn't expect.

I think the trick is that Nintendo is just taking a very different approach and it works. They aren't trying to copycat the competition at every turn and that gives them a power because it means what market they do secure is theirs alone - or at least theirs with significantly less competition.

 Overread wrote:
Nintendo has a few other bonuses:

1) They are happy to go for the younger and family markets. A lot of the big AAA games aim for teenage to young adults as a market; whilst Nintendo is quite happy going for a much younger audience. This you can see in the artistic style that Nintendo goes for as well as the overall structure and content of many of their games; esp their big core franchises.
This leaves them a big top end market almost all to themselves.

2) Nintendo don't really try to compete with Sony nor MS. They are happier doing their own thing and relying on the strength of their product and IP to carry them forward. Consider the Wii - it was a total experiment. Nintendo weren't aiming for the biggest next greatest thing; they were just happy doing their thing. That is took off and left the others in the dust was a major boon for them that even they didn't expect.

I think the trick is that Nintendo is just taking a very different approach and it works. They aren't trying to copycat the competition at every turn and that gives them a power because it means what market they do secure is theirs alone - or at least theirs with significantly less competition.

It also does help that Nintendo maintains strict standards in regards to the endproduct.
Not like EA with bugfield f.e.

 Melissia wrote:

Voss wrote:
Indy games... eh. To me its mostly the same ugly junk over and over.

To which I reply: AAA games... eh. To me it's mostly the same ugly junk over and over. And yes, most of them are pretty ugly, with utterly lazy graphical design.

Frankly, I'll take Stardew Valley, or Terraria, or Reigns, or RingRunner, or Risk of Rain, or Magicka, or Pony Island, or La Mulana, or Kingdom: Two Crowns, or Hotline: Miami, or FTL, or Factorio, or SUPERHOT, or Dead Cells, or Into the Breach, or Cook Serve Delicious, or Papers Please, or Raft, or Sunless Sea, or Space Pirates and Zombies, or Stardrive, or Starsector in terms of graphics over your average Call of Duty. Don't mistake graphical FIDELITY for quality. Anyone with enough money can have high fidelity "ultra graphics!" Doesn't make it actually good graphics.

And that's to say nothing of the "medium"/non-AAA publishers/developers like Paradox, or Kalypso, or Eugen, or Egosoft, or Firaxis, or Creative Assembly, or From Software, or Digital Extremes. Granted some of the "medium" publishers are guilty of similar sins (hello, Paradox), but they still have a lot more freedom to develop games they're passionate about as opposed to just Designed-by-Committee games developed after IntenseFocusTesting (tm).

Lately i've started talking about graphics and aesthetics as different things. Next COD will probably have good graphics that look realistic but the Aesthetic design will probably be quite boring and uninteresting

I'll be glad when films and games get off this current "everything is grey" fad that's been going on for a long while. Even way back in the Skyrim early days the whole "grey tones" was a thing.


Then again films have been getting a bit overbearing with their colour filters and jacking the tones up so much that its not just suggesting a "cool blue" moment but thrusting the colour so far over you that everything is alien coloured.

 Overread wrote:
I'll be glad when films and games get off this current "everything is grey" fad that's been going on for a long while. Even way back in the Skyrim early days the whole "grey tones" was a thing.

Don't worry, it will just be something else. Remember when everything was brown, instead? Or when bloom was used everywhere?

A lot of the current graphic trends are a result of shared engines. It takes a lot of work to significantly alter the basic shading and color palette of an engine; though not as bad as the height of the Unreal Brown Engine. Most companies just don't put in the effort to develop a unique style. This is kind of always been true, though it used to be more of a hardware limitation on color palettes and the like.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I'll be glad when films and games get off this current "everything is grey" fad that's been going on for a long while. Even way back in the Skyrim early days the whole "grey tones" was a thing.

Don't worry, it will just be something else. Remember when everything was brown, instead? Or when bloom was used everywhere?

It'll be the fake 80s retrowave/cyberpunk pink (with blues and cyans) look. Likely not too long after 2077 is out.

What's hilarious and enlightening where achievements are concerned is looking at the Steam stats for a game that tracks chapter completion, and realizing that over ten percent of the people who own the game never finished the introductory chapter/mission/level.

That actually tends to be quite common, based on what I've seen.

 Overread wrote:
Nintendo has a few other bonuses:

Nintendo is also okay with just being profitable. They keep significant cash reserves to weather bad ideas and their CEOs take pay cuts to buy their developers time to do things right. They invest a lot of their profits back into the company and it gives them a lot of freedom to do whatever they want.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Nintendo has a few other bonuses:

Nintendo is also okay with just being profitable. They keep significant cash reserves to weather bad ideas and their CEOs take pay cuts to buy their developers time to do things right. They invest a lot of their profits back into the company and it gives them a lot of freedom to do whatever they want.

They also err on the cuatious side of monetisation.

Yes. I'd honestly wish more company's would be like Nintendo in a way. They're not saints (remember the blacking out of Pokemon YouTubers?), but still. Nintendo has a) some standards about the quality of their product, and b) a culture that stresses the health of the business over the bonus of the CEO. Arguably that last one could be said about basically all non-Anglo businesses to some degree though. We tend to fetishize business runners in the English speaking world, and I don't think it's produced results.

 LordofHats wrote:
Yes. I'd honestly wish more company's would be like Nintendo in a way. They're not saints (remember the blacking out of Pokemon YouTubers?), but still. Nintendo has a) some standards about the quality of their product, and b) a culture that stresses the health of the business over the bonus of the CEO. Arguably that last one could be said about basically all non-Anglo businesses to some degree though. We tend to fetishize business runners in the English speaking world, and I don't think it's produced results.

Nintendo built their business with some incredibly scummy behaviour back when they were competing directly with others.

The ability to make a profit without banging heads against a rival is a huge boon. Quality assurance is one of those things that tend to slide when you are trying to get out ahead of the competition.

 LordofHats wrote:
Yes. I'd honestly wish more company's would be like Nintendo in a way. They're not saints (remember the blacking out of Pokemon YouTubers?), but still. Nintendo has a) some standards about the quality of their product, and b) a culture that stresses the health of the business over the bonus of the CEO. Arguably that last one could be said about basically all non-Anglo businesses to some degree though. We tend to fetishize business runners in the English speaking world, and I don't think it's produced results.

Actually from what i heard (a youtube video from the channel; "find your love in japan" iirc) the anime industry has a lot of those behaviors you'd consider Anglo-sphere behaviors. Something about super poor treatment and pay of artists. I imagine china is worse but that's not exactly video games and not my field of expertise to say.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Actually from what i heard (a youtube video from the channel; "find your love in japan" iirc) the anime industry has a lot of those behaviors you'd consider Anglo-sphere behaviors. Something about super poor treatment and pay of artists. I imagine china is worse but that's not exactly video games and not my field of expertise to say.

Well, in the anime industry the Directors of big projects get massive amounts of attention and pay relative to the "guy on the line." In more recent years this has extended to show writers and head animators.

I'm not saying anyone's a saint, and I'm pretty sure that's the second time I've said that for those hard of reading (and China definitely has a tendency to fetishize the people at the top of big businesses). But I've noticed that the worship of CEOs is not as fierce outside of the US and UK as it is inside of it which is probably a cultural thing. I don't particularly care what Nintendo did as a business 30 odd years ago. I find them much more likable today than many other major publishers. At least they can actually make a solid game to save their own hides and generally make games they think their costumers would want to buy and play, not games that they think they can best monetize to the max. I can't really say the same for EA.

Now now lets not say bad things about TW!!! Its the last game I have left as everything else is pretty crap haha..

I cant think of any game that has as much replayability. Outside of some sort of epic MMO like Eve I don't think any other game has kept taking my time so much.

The battles are my fav part!

Granted they need to be meaningful. Wiping out some rebels or remnant forces gets tedious but when you auto battle it always seems to take the casualties from your most elite units disproportionately. Like Would I really risk sending my war elephants face first against 4 battered units of phalanx and some javelin men?? I sort of wish I was savy enough to do modding however am always enjoying vanilla.

Nintendo is... well Nintendo. Its the anomaly that somehow keeps on going....

 LordofHats wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Actually from what i heard (a youtube video from the channel; "find your love in japan" iirc) the anime industry has a lot of those behaviors you'd consider Anglo-sphere behaviors. Something about super poor treatment and pay of artists. I imagine china is worse but that's not exactly video games and not my field of expertise to say.

Well, in the anime industry the Directors of big projects get massive amounts of attention and pay relative to the "guy on the line." In more recent years this has extended to show writers and head animators.

I'm not saying anyone's a saint, and I'm pretty sure that's the second time I've said that for those hard of reading (and China definitely has a tendency to fetishize the people at the top of big businesses). But I've noticed that the worship of CEOs is not as fierce outside of the US and UK as it is inside of it which is probably a cultural thing. I don't particularly care what Nintendo did as a business 30 odd years ago. I find them much more likable today than many other major publishers. At least they can actually make a solid game to save their own hides and generally make games they think their costumers would want to buy and play, not games that they think they can best monetize to the max. I can't really say the same for EA.

Removed - do NOT circumvent the language filter is french btw.
And they certainly are on the damaging side of Monetisation.
And korrea also has a tendency there.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Argive wrote:
Now now lets not say bad things about TW!!! Its the last game I have left as everything else is pretty crap haha..

I cant think of any game that has as much replayability. Outside of some sort of epic MMO like Eve I don't think any other game has kept taking my time so much.

The battles are my fav part!

Granted they need to be meaningful. Wiping out some rebels or remnant forces gets tedious but when you auto battle it always seems to take the casualties from your most elite units disproportionately. Like Would I really risk sending my war elephants face first against 4 battered units of phalanx and some javelin men?? I sort of wish I was savy enough to do modding however am always enjoying vanilla.

Nintendo is... well Nintendo. Its the anomaly that somehow keeps on going....

Take this from a Veteran.
TW has been needlesly dummbed down, in many ways.
Don't get me wrong but also the DLC slicing is found here. RTW 2 with greek city states. I mean you can't cut a more known group of factions out except if you remove Rome itself

The difference though is, that CA has had not a good enough standing after RTW2 and The britanias cashgrab.To push the envelope much farther in that regard.
They certainly would but it is also difficult to really monetisie a game and the TW series is and was a niche at best. Pissing off their customer base will be a lot more damaging there and i think they know that.

As for the Engine and other things out of the Perspective of a campaign map and other issues.

 LordofHats wrote:
At least they can actually make a solid game to save their own hides and generally make games they think their costumers would want to buy and play

They seem to have their formula down pretty well. Zelda, pokemon, mario, mario, mario, yoshi, mario, zelda, tetris?, mario, and... mario looks to be the line up this year.


Scummy monetization aside, i'm waiting to see whether Cloud Imperium poisons the kickstarter well forever or actually manages to release. It's the ultimate expression of the 'pay and pray' season ticket schemes that have been popping up lately.

I can think of quite a few AAA series that are still going strong / will have future releases.
As someone else mentioned they tend to go in cycles, flavours of the month and how much the developer/publisher think they can recoup VS investment.

I think some titles have survived, and continue to survive longer than others due to pace of release, content, and mechanics changes.

IMO, Assassins' Creed is a franchise that is still going relatively well. With Origins, they finished changing up the engine which made a much more dynamic (and better, imo) combat system, and that was continued on with Odyssey. Now, say what you want about the quality of the storyline produced, but I think that the length of time between each individual game means that we keep having a historical setting that is about as well researched as any other title in the series (To be fair, I have not played the French Revolution one, nor have I played the England Industrial/Dickens era one).

Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:


Borderlands is preparing to release its third full game after a lengthy hiatus/development time, and it is one where I think it doesn't so much "get away" with being a shoot and loot game, it actively thrives on it and seems to garner a certain level of praise for it.

Considering Borderlands practically created the genre, or at the very least popularized it. I would hope it thrives off it. However, we will see how 3 actually does sales-wise. It's an Epic store exclusive on PC and is getting tons of microtransaction cosmetic items.