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: medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f my initial video on the article: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ph1gxgfJZHE.html
Empire was a good game ruined by mountains of bugs, crashes, and bad a.i It's my favorite total war which makes it even more aggravating than CA could totally go back and fix it but actively chooses not to
If you imagine that this Siege of Carthage trailer was being presented to shareholders and investors it all makes a lot more sense imho. The way he's talking about how they want to make it like "saving private ryan" in fucking roman era really does it for me. Like, wtf? Why? It has nothing to do with roman battles.
Since then CA and their composers have been allergic to making any music memorable. It's all ambient, with no strong melodies or light motives. I mostly play the Warhammer games, and I can't humm any of the tracks aside from maybe one. And in true CA fashion, all the good music are only in the trailers. I don't blame CA alone for this, as this was a trend on the whole game industry. Walking away from memorable memories to music that's supposed to not take your focus and be in the background. Hollywood suffers from the same problem and it's sad. The days of John Williams and great composers making memorable music is gone.
Same. Shogun 2 was my my first Total war and made a hell of a first impression to the series. And Rome2 was set in my favourite era. I thought it was a safe bet because they cant get worse, surely... I was wrong.
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
yeah i googled out of pure curiosity and saw a modder talking about it being possible with mods but utterly broken, youve provided a great explanation with detail. amazing isnt it?
The more we get into this, the more obvious it becomes that everything is CA's fault and Sega basically had no say in anything. It's funny, because for a DECADE people were saying "oh, it's the fault of Sega, poor, poor CA did nothing wrong, don't hate on CA, hate on Sega". EDIT: I bet everyone has already forgot, but the same thing was actually shown with Hyenas as well. Sega only came in very late to salvage that absolute dumpsterfire (and were unsuccessful).
According to the leaks, 'Hyenas' spawned from CA upper management going "we don't want to be the "just Total War" -studio. This was after they canned the Alien: Isolation sequel. While said game went through development hell to get done and barely broke even... Tangent: I remember some source saying that CA would've had the equivalent return just by putting money, equivalent to the budget, in the bank when development began - and withdrawing it with the interest after the game released. Anyway, despite the disappointing commercial success of the game, it was praised by the critics and the sequel wouldn't have most of the same issues - many of the tools and even the engine were developed same time as the game, leading to bottlenecks and other issues that strained the process. If they would be able to reuse the engine/tools for a sequel, it would've been smooth sailing by comparison.
@@Xazamas And instead, we (didn't) get Hyenas. Good job CA. Also, Alien: Isolation got kind of fucked by Colonial Marines' reputation, which came out just a short while before, so I think if they did a sequel (and did it properly, which I don't really think would've been the case considering almost the entire dev team of A:I left after it was done), that would've been more successful. Oh well, it's not my decision/problem.
They did the same for Warhammer 1, remember the siege to the Drawfen holds? They had artillery in the walls/city itself firing, which never was there in the game upon release.
What I found insane was how the leadership were so emotionally invested in the idea of the immersive third person camera that, when it turned out that playtesters rarely used the feature, the leadership suggested it adding a combat bonus, just so people would use their emotionally invested feature more. When the programmers rightly protested that this goes against the spirit of Total War-gameplay, the leadership were still so emotionally invested that they considered lying to the player, by having a tooltip say that it provided bonuses when it didn't (which I don't even see how it would address the programmers' concern in the first place, since that would still make players think that gameplay were a certain way, and they would act according). To quote the article: "They wanted to explicitly lie to players in order to trick them into using an unpopular feature so that they could save face. I honestly don’t know whether a combat bonus was applied in the end, it’s possible that the button is still lying to this day."
I also remember some of the earlier photos and interviews saying you could have archers garrison the towers and they hinted at taking the old turret towers away, We really did get scammed.
Noting beats EA. But Blizard, Activision, CA, Ubisoft and i woud add Wargaming are making attempts, and for sure are as greedy as EA. ( fun fact Wargaming and CA did Totall war Arena together )
@@yunggopnikdaballr Oh right I forgot about lol but it isn't really related to Blizzard's business strategy to abuse their audience, moreso scummy workplace behavious in the background.
The truly dismaying thing is when you look at this train wreck and the first thing you see is the lack of floating health bars. This was so bad and they had so much further left to fall.
@@smkeybare its been pretty common id say since the late 00s for a lot of devs to turnover after major projects. how many people you know stay to work barely above minimum wage for 15+ years?
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.
*meanwhile in a parallel universe* "LegendOfRealFights here and today I'm gonna show you how to beat old paraplegic people with a stick or Iron tire! First, we use the cheap hospital clothing exploit to infiltrate their spawn zones, and then it's easy pickings! Like they never lock the doors! Just go to any room with the wheelchair icon and start pwning them! Bonus if they are also mute or in a coma, since it's literally just xp farm and no challenge! This Method Will Win you MANY fights, and your kill count will grow exponentially! Personally, I think I won over a hundred fights this way, but the staff blamed it on the Corona! Overall a very good tactic and I recommend it to both beginners and professionals!"
@@denishrg9843 Haha. And if the dementia patients outnumber you, make sure to stand in the corner of the red lines so their wheelchairs can't flank you
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
I remember the promises on the level of "You are gonna see soldiers fighting more than opponent a time and even carrying the wounded out of combat" and "You will now recruit entire armies instead of single units"
Imagine you work on a series centered around a ubiquitous player microing 4,000 people in real-time, you wake up one morning and think: "We gotta animate the inside of that siege tower RIGHT NOW."
This all really reminds me of Cyberpunk. Especially that bit about putting in things that marketing department put in the trailers that weren't even developed yet. Remember that funny bit about CP2077 marketing putting out a huge trailer reveal that was all fake and the developers themselves were seeing it for the first time during the presentation in shock. Thinking something along the lines of "Are we actually gonna be developing all this stuff right now? We don't have anything like that in our plans even."
Shooting that archer unit in the combined land/sea battle you showed early on reminded me of how the computer players would stack around 50% of their armies with cheap archer/skirmisher type units. Not only was the battle ai bad, but you could argue the campaign ai was worse. It felt like it did not know how to manage the then new army and region system introduced in Rome 2. It would just spam low tier units. It felt so passive too, especially compared to Shogun 2 (the previous game) where the computer played very aggressively in the campaign and kept you on your back foot. Rome 2 was easily one of the biggest disappointments in game history for me. Its compounded because it feels like every Total War game since shares the same DNA and could almost be considered a Rome 2 total conversion mod.
The AI doesnt even build economy bildings, it just spams barracks every where. It also has the age old problem of never whanting peace no matther how dier its situation is or if you are on the other sie of the world ( a problem that got worse in Attila where the AI knew where your armies and settlements are and it just chased you acrross the world ).
The AI stacking low tier projectile units was not a bug, its just the total war combat mechanics was like this for at least a decade before they patched it in WH TW3. Basically the missile units were the most damage dealers ingame, thats why AI tried to create a doomstacks that would obliterate your army before you could even reach them on the battlefield, that failed miserably because AI was also stupid in managing units on combat map, thus later they implemented hardcore AI cheat bonuses
26:42 to this day there are still leftovers in the database from this multiship feature. even in Warhammer 3 total war where there are no ships in the game at all. example: two of the data columns in the main_units_tables is min men per ship and max men per ship. And they still fill in these useless datafields with valid data for all units :P it's so silly...
@@Orendiz I will never forgive Bugmen and their sadomasochist wallets! Its the Exact same with Cyberslop 2077! Moaning the first 5 months from deserved anger...only to later moan again by working that corpo shaft after they dropped some patches and bugfixes "THE GAME IS FUCKING AMAZING NOW! WHAT GAMES DO YOU EVEN PLAY" -actual responses
@@denishrg9843 battlefield 2042 came out as a litteral scam. Barrely a skeleton of a game. It came out costing 70$ dollars. An absolute joke and an isult. Litteraly lawsuit worthy. I remember their first roadmap was litteraly adding running animations. Few patches and years later "yooo battlefield is saved its amazing game u should buy it!". Same with fallout 76, idk how this game still up with all the borderline illigal shit that happned to it. Now ppl are cooming and shilling over this game like nothing ever happned.
Well its not. i Will asume no one from the actiall defelopers has lefth. For instance Medieval 2 was made by an Australian studio who didnt make any other totall wars since. The rest where just fased out in time.
This reminds me that there is a precedent for lawsuit for trailer "fraud" A movie at least, Watch Yesterday, the studio changed the actress but kept the original on the trailer (Ana de Armas)
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.
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
Feel really sorry for the developers that put their blood, sweat, and tears into attempting to get this working when they damn well knew it was all but impossible within the given time frame. Executive overreach and mismanagement, a story as old as company time, sadly.
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.
At 10:25 I think you are fundamentally wrong, but you have also hit CAs thinking squarely on the head. SW and 40K grand strategy fans I would argue want sieges more than anything. You want those battle of Hoths, those seige of Vraks’s those unwinnable defenses and overwhelming assaults. Also they both love combined arms, the more air, armor, inf, and space support is integrated the bigger the spectral and that’s ultimately what a fan of these franchises, and a player of strategy and tactics games of these kind will want. On the other hand I bet CA has come to the same conclusion; the lovers of these franchises won’t care about sieges.
This comment inspired me to try and math out the number of troops on the battle of Hoth. looking at base numbers just looking at ships and such you easily end up with like 8-10k rebels and 90k stormtroopers. But when you start thinking about how all the passenger slots in the empires ships would've been filled with troopers, the fact that the rebels wouldn't have known about the imperial attack very long before it began and how most reb troops would've died in the ground (I mean half the transports got destroyed anyways), how the empire was def prepared for the invasion and had multiple generals.... You could easily say the battle consisted of multiple dozens of thousands of rebels and hundreds of thousands of troopers all on the ground without even getting close to leaving the realm of speculation. Granted it seems to be impossible to find actual numbers... but even still. Legends battle of Hoth is much better than Disney or Lucas battle of Hoth :). We're talking rebels with tanks, air support (not just snow speeders) attack frigates, heavily armored elite troops that make Vader's Fist look lightly equipped, a last ditch banzai charge from the rebels where only 2 survive to stop a star destroyer... We're talking an Empire with mobile artillery, anti air vehicles, tanks... like this was the kind of battle that hadn't been fought since the outer rim rebelled against the Empire. :) and the crazy thing is how both sides militaries are waaaay bigger. Don't get me wrong... the rebellion stood pretty much zero real chance... but even still it's crazy to think that the rebs could've had their own siege of Vraks if they really wanted to lol.
@@phantomjoker5 Why is that? Like I get why there would be some but in StarWars it tends to be very situational. In 40K it's like every other battle is a siege. The Imperium has a big population, but not as big as StarWars in Legends. And even that aside stuff like planetary shields that can withstand bombardment are less common in 40K, yet there's all these sieges.
What idiot decided that marketing was going to dictate the development of a triple A title? This validates so much of what we thought happened, but couldn’t confirm. No wonder they’ve had exoduses of talent.’
"Lies! Deception! Everyday more lies..." "Volound can feel your thoughts. No lie is safe. Volound will know the truth. The unfortunate side-effect is that one tends to lose one's mind."
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 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.
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.
I watched the trailer, wasnt impressed. I watched the gameplay and screen shot of the map, and cities expanded and that got me excited. Then i watched campaign gameplay and the changes on army building and provinces, which on paper is actually great. How it was implemented....how did they castrate the toral war platform?! Or better yet. Why...what exactly did we expect from Rome II? As a fan base i, i mean. Persoanlly i had so many expectations regarding vanilla rome and gutted it was from historicity. But the sandbox format makes it a good game. Just super imbalanced,.which is fair but eventually lead to my decline in playtime. I was thinking about how CA could really expand on the scope of Roman formations and equipment varying in game by defeating certain enemies and cultures. Establishing satrapies and colonies. Internal politics and government functions. Empire management with a new outlook on building chains. An integral tech tree that isnt a seperate mechanic but incorporated with character traits, based on in game player actions and desicions of governing people and power. Triabl factions with a wider economic and culutural impact as celtic culture was like english back then. Something to really capture the flow and time in recorded history, presented as stepping stones for the indepth mechanics a player can utilize to make the game enjoyable, easy, or challenging. Rome 1 was so inspiring to me i even constructed my own total war system. Mainly roma surrectum fr
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
There's a comment in there that states CA cut out the speeches so that they wouldn't have to pay for voice acting. And for so long I've thought that the voice acting in Rome 2 was dogshit. Not only that, but had about a tenth of the voice acting compared to the trailers and marketing beforehand. I completely forgot about the mini 'cutscene' with the admiral on the ship. Or the "dynamic speech" shown in the siege tower. Both are absolutely nowhere in the game. Good to see, in a twisted sense, that I was right about the atrocious voice acting. They probably had to grab some programmers to yell out some lines.
Pretty much all the audio was cringy as hell. From agents, to diplomacy, to clicking on your dudes. And the audio for the battles.....don't even get me started. Abysmal efforts on ingenuity.
With Divide et Impera, some old music mod plus some others, I play Rome II as a cinematic game to cope with the lack of good action movies in recent times. It can look absolutely stunning, but it's not a good Total war game. They had a lot of potential but messed it up. My word is it an annoying game play mechanic that there are no last stands. Yes, sometimes it makes sense for defending units to flee a settlement, but many times I had my garrison army defeated due to an arbitrary number tick and a thousand men start fleeing and getting slaughtered while surrounded. We had fight to the death mechanics which incentivised you to take the words of sun tzu serious and allow the enemy an illusion of escape. Why strip it? All they had to do was make fleeing to city centre or to flee the town context specific, like it always had been. Why make siege defenders flee if defeat = full death like in every other game? It shows they didnt think it through enough. There are so so many issues with the game that indicate it was made for the shareholders and not the consumer. Many such cases these days in many industries. Absolute disaster on a macro level too - the industries work for the managerial groups, not for the people who actually play the game. Much like Architecture being built for the egoes of architects and the investors, not for the people who actually have to work and operate inside those disgusting abominations of glass, brick and steel.
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.
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."
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.
yeah literally did the hardest challenge in all of anno a few months ago. currently doing an ambitious run in songs of syx. this is the channel where i cover AAA games so all the videos are currently about pointing out how games are shit.
That's crazy this entire time I didn't even know you had a dedicated gaming channel, and I'm halfway through the anno vid, forgot how rare competence of your level is not to fan the ego lol
I love that at one point in the video it says "pre-alpha footage". Seems they took some real liberties with the meaning. This should have been nothing more than an internal video to show the objective or end-goal or whatever. I mean this is clearly false advertising.
Bro I have read the letter and the reason why cities occupy the entire region when fully expanded it's the most stupid thing I have ever read come on how can you direct a project that badly 🤣 and the fact that AI is that poor because managment wanted it to be that way so players could feel satisfited with themselves it's hilarious too
Goodness I remember the R2 hype train. The release killed any interest I had in CA and havent purchased a game since. I won a TW: Atilla giveaway on a Lionheart stream once and didn't like that much either. Its like they knew historical fans were done so they grabbed a WH license because those fanboys have deep pockets for their plastic crack and that setting isn't about strategy as much as it is roleplay and magic, as far as games are concerned.
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
I remember thinking I'd buy a new up-spec computer and take a week off work to play this game. Never quite had the umph to do it - thank god. Then saw a review (angry Australian somethingorother) and never did end up buying the game at all. Now struggling with a hyper-passive TotalWar Warhammer III, where the campaign AI strategy appears to be 'Puppy Dog'. That said Volound old chap, have bought the Thrones DLC and its not bad. Question is, will CA continue producing 6/10+ DLCs or revert to their farming behavior 2/10 and overpriced?
I clicked off before watching the video to check the trailer. Even the Carthage siege trailer looks like dogsh*t and it straight up lags at some points. It feels they pumped the graphics to max and the pc was barely holding it together 😂
because an ex-developer just published a 15,000 word exposé on the game and the company. youre welcome for jamming a crowbar under that rock you live under.
Why are you rushing to the defense of the disingenuous (fixed your spelling there for you champ) marketing of a video game that came out 11 years ago? I hope that you're on CA's payroll, because the idea that you're doing that for free is just sad.
@@LazarusWilhelm Your statement has as much connection to reality as this trailer did at the time. So now I'm convinced that if you're not on CA's payroll then you truly would be an ideal candidate for their marketing team. With your room temperature IQ you'll be the smartest person in the room. It'll be a new and novel feeling for you.
