Focusing on the marketing of Rome 2, especially the infamous “Siege of Carthage”.
Julian’s full statement here:
https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f
#rome2 #totalwar #creativeassembly
0:00 Intro and context
2:50 Combined land & sea battles
11:10 Leadership problems mishandling new features
11:50 Marketing Demos
25:15 Spotting the “Siege of Carthage” smoke & mirrors
55:20 Explanation of how the trailer was fake
1:07:45 How marketing HARMS development
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MORE OBSERVATIONS, comment your own and ill add them:
32:15 this is clearly inspired by the proning behind the sandbanks waiting for bangalores to come and blow the gap to charge the pillboxes in saving private ryan. needless to say, the final game has nothing like this
41:25 the sound effects were clearly added in post, notice how the camera position changing doesnt affect the audio.
45:05 units run through right side of the wall. this may have been allowed on purpose because walls and pathfinding were still not working.
51:40 the "cut" was to load a new instance of the game where there are giant smoke pillars and where the complex set piece in the streets could fire to end the trailer.
the article from julian, if you have somehow missed it until now:
https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f
my initial video on the article:
https://youtu.be/ph1gxgfJZHE
hmm a intersting marketing strat, considering rome 2 was a financial success there is much to learn from it.
LegendOfTotalWar must've loved pwning that non responsive AI from the ships. Only a true genius can make a career out of exploiting braindead AI and convince the masses that it makes you a legend.
I know the expanded units mods had multiple ships per unit and it is still bugged to this day. The unmodded rome 2 i believe was a single ship per unit. I think…i need to play Rome 2 unmodded again to be sure.
Side point here:
It baffles me how naive most of the TW community is, I just saw LegendOfTotalWar's recent video 'Some players will get overwhelmed' and he starts the video by encouraging the viewers to leave a positive review on WH3 because some DLC-related reason apparently is 'good behaviour' for CA. Idk what tho.
I don't have anything against people who play WH games, they can play what they want, but I think they must be deliberately ignorant to not point out how shit CA is.
👏🙂
Damn. This reminds me of the dark days… i guess it never ended
I remember working in the insurance industry, the marketing department did NOT have the power to dictate what would be in a program. We'd all sit down in a meeting , Marketing (mostly girls) would give all the things they wanted. The Actuaries and programmers would then bust into laughter ,and discuss what ACUTALLY is needed and can be achieved in the time unto release. jki
the trailer didn't lie about the "Pre-alpha footage" i'll give it that, wasn't even aware companies have been using that term for over a decade now.
reminds me of the infamous Anthem trailer where we learned years later from the dev's who worked on it that the game looked nothing like it, the entire thing was a fake.
Keep it up hoss, transparency is key.
In case you missed it, if you want a reverse example – A high quality game with the worst non-budget trailer, look up HLL Devotion to duty trailer that came out in june 2023
Years ago, a small development team could only dream of making something of such high production quality as a 'Triple A' games studio. Nowdays, the bar for "Triple A" has plummeted to such abyssal depths that any small developer with genuine artistic vision and passion for the art can outdo these bloated, inefficient megacorporations easily in terms of quality and price.
I lost braincells during the spotting smoke and mirrors segment
Good thing they spent money hiring the 300 actor guy to yell at us
It surprised me that so much of the statement talked about all the new features interrupting development. Especially at launch Rome 2 was very superficial. No politics or diplomacy gameplay, no character development – one of the most popular and immersive elements of Rome 1. Even now, characters and politics are weak and factions lack flavour. Seems like with the lack of communication between dev teams, they were all focusing on making the game look better rather than play better, and the aesthetics were the "features". From a project management point of view, you can see how this would happen. Without any direction as to what they should do, they did what they could do – tinker with graphics.
brother, rome 2 is worse!
I played as carthage straight up cause i knew it was gonna be an uphill battle. turn 1, recruit n move troops to the ports
turn 2 emback n set out to sea towards rome.
turn 3 seabattle with basic archers and whole navy had ramming caps early unlocked. find out it one shots with a cooldown, every squad 1 taps an enemy ship while firing at a different ship. easy 2v1 with no casualities.
turn 4 chase down the 1 fleeing unit into rome's port, the entire rome's army and defenses all spawn on the water??? Repeat.
turn 5 walk into empty rome.
i also noticed armies could walk right past each-other instead of having the freeze area around them so armies actually fight each-other, not sprint past(march stance) n burn down your city while your army is waiting for your turn 2 feet away…. so many problems rome 2 im thinkin of warhammer has… bleh
"How do you do seige battles in star wars?"
Hoth.
But that would mean shield generators and trench lines and I wouldn't trust CA to blow thier noses.
You can mod in units having multiple ships, but the ramming and boarding actions are broken, so if you have a unit made up of 3 ships, attacking another unit of 2 ships, you'll have 1 ship that is just idle. Likewise, once the one of the ships beats the other in the boarding action, then it will not automatically re-engage, or attack another ship, it will get stuck and also become idle.
Sometimes, all 3 ships from one unit will all gang up on one ship from another, even if there are more ships in that other unit.
Basically, they never finished programming it
The curved formations are a result of EF lines (entity formation) being placed on the battlemap via the TED battlefield editor. Its the same thing that allows units to hide behind cover in FOTS.
The TED mod tool wasn't made available for modders for Rome 2 (as far as I know) so it's a one and done feature that you'll never see in Rome 2 outside of this demo.
In Attila, the TED tool was released, but the AI is notoriously unstable, often resulting in crashes, and as far as I'm aware, unless it's inbuilt into a building model (such as a castle wall), the AI won't use it unless scripted to do so.
In fact, even with the inbuilt EF lines I was mentioning before, unless you're a map making wizard like the guys making the Dawnless Days mod, it's really difficult to even get those working
Remember Medieval II? It existed. It was real.
remember how instead of fixing the game they rugpulled you with a sweetbabyinc dlc of just girl units
bf4 was a cashgrab because it was no different than bf3 that was released a year earlier
the entire budget of take2 and ksp2 was diverted to marketing department and DEI. they even banned the crew from talking to senior devs of the original game.
we need a purge of these people who manage these things and avoiding ICC world court.
Do you think non-woke AI would do a better job replacing 99% of the devolved troglodytes in CA at all levels of the company?
To think I was once excited to play all that Rome 2 "content".
You can tell the marketing team told them to hit all kinds of buzzwords. "Visceral" "dark" "gritty" "realistic" "huge scale" "human scale" "sense of scale" (more scales than a damn fish!) "cat & mouse" "great enemy" "breaking barriers"
Disingenuous and Disgusting
I played Rome 2 for one day, launch. In that 1 day I realized it was so broken and stupid to waste my time on that it wasn't worth another minute. The memory of the Empire launch was still too fresh. I eventually picked it up again after they did the full overhaul because I loved the idea of sea battles, etc. Sea battles they eventually cut from titles. In the end nearly everything that I loved in Total War was cut out of the games. Bravo.
The real main issue outside of the limitations and growing problems that stem from the engine is their timeline for releases. They release too much broken mediocrity too quickly now. They build off that mediocrity with cash grabs on DLC that usually adds to problems with balance rather than delaying launches to fine tune and patch what are obvious problems in the main games. Rather than fix and reintroduce the best features like naval combat, sieges, and AI pathing and combat feel, they time and again simply cut out or completely strip down features that made the game interesting and fun. Each game as they release them does its best to limit the players ability to play the game with as much freedom as they would like and instead forces gameplay. The addition of artificial scripted difficulties that are more of a nuisance then anything and hero units were amazingly lazy and broken. They managed to make each release less enjoyable than the ones before with only a couple of exceptions. If I did a Yelp review it would be somewhere between "you guys' just stole my money" and "eat a giant bag of shit."