Why Did CA Move From a Highlyl Moddable Game Model To a Less Moddable One?

[UndrState]

And that's why R2TW apologists, who make excuses and claim the it is equal to or greater than it's forebearers, speak the worst sort of herersy. May their souls writhe in torment in the ring of hell resevered for traitors and Michael Bay. AMEN.



I'm not really that serious about it, in case you're worried.

[wilddog]

Because they just forgot that the real secret for producing high-longevity games is to make them good and fully moddable

Not so sure on that. CA originally produced a bunch of txt files which could obviously be 'modded' easily, info on scripting, allowed mapping in a simple form by TGA and released some animation files. Most of the hard modding ability in MTW2/RTW was by the production of various tools which non CA people provided.
Unfortunately longevity simply allowed people to introduce cracks to allow pirating and that led to the 'you only rent and only if we like you' approach marketing which has been prevalent for some time in a lot of software (whether games, graphics, etc). Other than that the tools got harder to make and the number of people producing them reduced. CA has released its own tools to compensate to a certain extent but pretty much still relies on the modder 'obtaining' versions of software they used in making the game (naturally). Unfortunately some of those are too expensive and no one has written anything to use cheaper tools (AFAIK).

[warman222]

Thank you Wilddog, glad some modders understand that fact. I'm going to add to that. Lets say for the sake of argument that GrumpyOldMan and KnightErrant and the other members who made the tools(NOT CA I might add) never did. Those related total war games would be all but impossible to mod. You need people to take the time to learn those tools and at the end of the day, that's something almost no one wants to do anymore.

[irishron]

I have used Versingoterix"s tolls going back to RTW. Some things still pretty much rely on them.

[twmatador]

snip/
So consumers have to be blamed as much as software houses.

I'd like to expand on that.
Games industry is still in its infancy relatively speaking.
I'm hoping at some point that the "gaming culture" and, in turn, game studios start to get more sophisticated and realize that there are different "groups" with different depths levels and market & design accordingly.
Right now the present mentality is to reach as many consumers with each $60 game. Goal unofficially: become another Skyrim.
For me, R2TW is just another Skyrim. More flash and fizz, and less depth. Not my taste. But obviously, popular enough enough in strategic game circles.
So what seems a "bad game" to some of us - may in fact be just what others are looking for more or less.
On the flipside, consumers who have higher demands wanting more moddability on so many levels (like me), well they in turn will have to accept they have to pay more (and think in terms of $ per hour of fun).
And stop dropping the price to ridiculous levels for great games to get the marginals consumers in (current Steam sale is crazy). If it's a great game and well modded - it should still be worth the price years later.

IMO, the rift between R2TW fans and the older TWgames fans (like M2TW) shows that there are two very different consumer groups out there.
If I had to guess, I 'd say that CA leadership got caught up in the more flashy Skyrim approach.
And looking at the commercial sales numbers, "our consumergroup" is not the majority.

That TATW and the various submods were made is an incredible event really.
So we have to look at Games like "Eve Online" for how to possibly support games of our preference.
Because I don't know how often you can rely on TATW type projects.
Just an opinion.

[Prozn856]

Thank you Wilddog, glad some modders understand that fact. I'm going to add to that. Lets say for the sake of argument that GrumpyOldMan and KnightErrant and the other members who made the tools(NOT CA I might add) never did. Those related total war games would be all but impossible to mod. You need people to take the time to learn those tools and at the end of the day, that's something almost no one wants to do anymore.

If you are saying that without those modders we would not be able to mod M2TW and RTW then thats not true. As long as the possibility of modding exists, people will mod. If King Kong had never created TATW, that doesn't mean a Lord of the Rings mod would have never existed. It's just that with warscape, essential things in overhaul mods such as the map cannot be modded completely. There are plenty of historical mods for R2 such as the Constantine and Christianity one but its still the same map, same units, same factions (mostly), same strategy.

[wilddog]

If you are saying that without those modders we would not be able to mod M2TW and RTW then thats not true. As long as the possibility of modding exists, people will mod. If King Kong had never created TATW, that doesn't mean a Lord of the Rings mod would have never existed. It's just that with warscape, essential things in overhaul mods such as the map cannot be modded completely. There are plenty of historical mods for R2 such as the Constantine and Christianity one but its still the same map, same units, same factions (mostly), same strategy.

That was not what was said nor meant. Sure in RTW or MTW2 there were always basic tools (as said) to edit text or TGA's or scripts. The rest of the modding was by using tools produced by the tool makers. So sure as you said a LOTR mod would of been possible without the tool makers providing the modders used the vanilla models and their textures and the cities and the vegetation etc.

[Vlad Dracul]

Why Did CA Move From a Highlyl Moddable Game Model To a Less Moddable One?


Because CA wants to force the players to buy their DLCs, not mod the game themselves.

It might sound unbelievable but trust me, it's the pure truth.

[Prozn856]

Why Did CA Move From a Highlyl Moddable Game Model To a Less Moddable One?


Because CA wants to force the players to buy their DLCs, not mod the game themselves.

It might sound unbelievable but trust me, it's the pure truth.

It's believable. After all, CA makes more money by continuously releasing DLC‘s

[irishron]

It's believable. After all, CA makes more money by continuously releasing DLC‘s

They keep paying the bills until the next game's release. Expansions for S1, M1, R1, and M2 served the same purpose.

[Prozn856]

They keep paying the bills until the next game's release. Expansions for S1, M1, R1, and M2 served the same purpose.

But its alot easier to make DLC's, meaning lots of them = more $$$$

[irishron]

But its alot easier to make DLC's, meaning lots of them = more $$$$

If people buy them, yes. I have not bought a DLC. For RTW I did buy BI but not Alexander with Medieval2 being released on its heels.

[k/t]

"But, in fact, that small little "secret" can be easily forgotten when you realize that you can just produce half-unfinished games, or very bad games, and people buy them anyway because they have been made by <RANDOM COMPANY> (a great example of this is Diablo 3)."

Yes, exactly. Just look at how people on this forum reacted when R2 was announced.

I remember reading in a discussion thread about how crappy D3 was a great comment, something along these lines: "How many people would still be defending Diablo 3 if it had been called something else and been made by somebody other than Blizzard? It would have been called a piece of crap and a failure and promptly forgotten".

"So consumers have to be blamed as much as software houses."

No, only consumers have to be blamed, because they allow the whole scam to be perpetrated. They continue to buy into it, rewarding sleazy, lying companies (like CA) for making crappy games. There are morons who buy games solely based on the name. Why do you think "Total War" now goes before the actual game name? Look at how many morons bought Thief 4, which was clearly garbage, just because it was called "Thief" and they had played the originals.

I have played D2 on and off (mostly on ) since 2002. I still play it. A lot. I would have bought D3 if there had been any reason to. It wasn't Diablo anymore. It was World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Diabloria. I have played all three original Thief games, and I had a fantastic time with my best friend playing those games. We have many great memories of those times. Neither of us bought Thief 4 because it was obviously junk. I have been playing M2 since April 2009 (well, Vanilla for a few months, then mods), and I will play it for many more years (yay, mods!). I got lucky and I found out about M2 several years after it had been released, so CA had had ample time to patch it. I will never buy another CA game, because they're terrible and they don't work. If it takes several gigabytes of patches just so a game can sort-of run, something is wrong. CA has been able to get away with this for many years thanks to morons who are "loyal to the franchise", i.e. they buy anything called "Total War" without any concern for quality. Dumbed down, consolized, buggy trash? For $80 bucks? Sure, why not? IT'S "TOTAL WAR" OMFGZ!!!!11!

Here's another great comment, about D3's always-online system:

#####################################
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012...a-hollow-game/

19/05/2012 at 01:40 Bonedwarf says:

You say you’re “livid” about the DRM, yet you still bought it…

YOU are the problem. All the time people with more money than sense accept these measures, it doesn’t matter how ing livid you are, you’re the reason we’ll continue to see bull like this because you didn’t have the balls/brains to vote with your wallet and deny yourself something you wanted on principle. You could have taken a stand. Instead you were a pussy who said “I’m Livid! TAKE MY MONEY!”

In short, people like you are why PC gaming is ed. Thanks.
#####################################


Less moddable games mean more opportunities for paid DLC. Even if the DLC is now actually OTDYABBWHTPAIOTUC (on the disc you already bought but will have to pay again in order to use content).

Do highly-moddable games actually hurt the sales of subsequent games? Only if the subsequent games are garbage (which in CA's case has proven to be true). If customers knew they would be getting a fantastic game with an improved engine with more features and greater possibilities, they would buy the new release, play it, enjoy it a lot, and start modding it. If that had been the description of ETW, NTW, S2 and R2, there wouldn't be M2 and RTW modders anymore. Each new game would supersede the last completely.

[wilddog]

Well basically I still think that other than some of the real basic stuff that "moders" can amend with text editing and some minor TGA editing, people simply couldn't mod MTW that well without the non CA MTW2 tools they take for granted. Unfortunately its more tied to the complexity around graphics and the buying power of it "looks nice" rather than the improvement in AI and the people buying them because " it looks nice" actually understanding that look comes with added complexity.

[The Wandering Storyteller]

Bookmarking this thread.

[Causeless]

Warscape has a lot of problems but I only need one to know I don't ever want to play a game based on it. Every melee is a bunch of guys dueling one on one. That's stupid and the fact that it hasn't been fixed since Empire tells me all I need to know about Warscape games.

The whole 1vs1 duelling did happen in Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2, but that's ok - in those time periods and military tactics, it WAS more about 1vs1 duelling. The japanese were thousands of years behind other cultures in terms of military technology, and during the Napoleonic era 1vs1 duelling was prominent because if melee every did occur, it was about hitting hard and fast, not slugging it out in defensive formations (as you are being shot at)

However, in Rome 2 - at release, yes, it was broken... but now? It's a myth that's being spread by people who heard about the game at release and never looked at it again, and I can prove it: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1#post13955825

It's fixed now...

Anyways, to the point: Yes, in terms of how far we can access the games, Warscape is less moddable. Rome 2 is very, very close however, and the only thing really left is battle and campaign map editing. Even so, it's worth remembering that Warscape games don't have the same kind of limitations to faction counts and unit sizes that the older games had! But why, you ask, were the newer games less moddable? Firstly, let me confirm, it's not due to any intentional act on CA's part. It's a complex issue, but I'll try my best to explain here.

Essentially, upon moving to create Empire, the entire game grew in scope. That means poly counts, texture density, unit types and all of their stats, and more. And another thing to note is that reading from text-based data is, very, verrrry slow. If you store the number "255" in a text file, that takes a total of 3 bytes (assuming you use ASCII). If you store it in a binary file format, that's only a single byte. And this gets worse as you scale up - the number "4294967295", that's a whopping 10 bytes in a text format and only 4 in a binary file format.

Ok, so sure, this doesn't sound like much. What's a byte to spare when our computers run at gigahertz and have enough memory to hold these petty numbers millions of times over? It's nothing... right? Well, it would be when you consider a game like Medieval 2. Only a few factions, relatively small campaign maps, pretty simple models, few animations and tiny textures. But Empire? You have a lot more to worry about. Everything has upped ten-fold. So, upon starting the game, the engine needs to actually look through all these game files and get out all the information from them, and the more information there is, the longer it takes to load. So while 1 number may just take an extra byte or so to hold, you aren't holding 1 number. You aren't even holding a couple hundred thousand numbers... nope, you are holding millions, at least! For the sake of the discussion is use the term "number", but in reality, I mean all data here... either way, you are loading in an awful lot more stuff.

So then some time during Empire's release cycle, one of the devs sits down, waits 20 minutes for the game to load, and then thinks - hang on - something's not right here. This is hard enough to test with internally, let alone being acceptable for a final release! So they come to the decision that they need to go and optimize the games loading times. What's the first thing on the chopping board? Holding things in simple text files. It's the biggest bottleneck, and so CA decide they need to store this data in their own file format. And suddenly, instead of having huge text files, they're holding things as optimally as they can - and the computer is loving it, too. No more hard work for it, no need to load tonnes of data into RAM, then perform complex parsing. Suddenly the game loads as a whole lot quicker.

Here's the issue - now modders can't touch it. You see, to a computer, all data is identical - inside your PC's RAM, the text on your screen, the music and video playing on youtube, the coloured backgrounds and pretty icons and other graphics, and the numbers you web browser is holding and using internally, are all held identically. What does this mean? Well, imagine listening to a foreign language. You can hear it, but you don't understand it - it's just gibberish! And Empire's file formats, at the time were the same. It's just a huge blob of data. And just like how a language is worthless without understanding, data is useless without context. You need to be able to understand - what parts of this data represents numbers? What part represents text? Audio? Videos? You've got no idea. It's just a big long line of binary. And of course if you don't know what the data is representing, you don't know what to change. If you change a part of this data, anything could happen - maybe you modify a unit subtly? Maybe some text changes? Or perhaps the game crashes? If you've ever opened a picture file with notepad and seen all the random weird symbols, now you know the reason. The text editor opens up the picture, looks at this data, and thinks "well, I was told to look at this, and I'm a text editor, so I guess this must be text!".

Anyways, the end result is that modders can't change things easily. Well, not unless CA tells us how to look at the data - or better yet - gives us tools to look at it! And they have - that's what assembly kit is for. It lets us open these custom file formats and change things. Of course, modders didn't give up: some of them took the painful step of figuring out these formats, just like deciphering a foreign language, and for that, I'm amazingly impressed. Modders don't give up easily. But anyways, as time has gone on, CA have spent more and more time working on these tools, and now CA have given us tools to modify almost everything, and the moddability of CA games is back up. The only thing they haven't given is campaign or map modding tools - but considering that the campaign maps have been rapidly and completely changing between each campaign CA have released for TW:R2, this highly hints that they've finally got some powerful internal tools that they might finish and share, some day. And battle maps - well, Shogun 2 had a battle map editor, so I can see one coming for Rome 2

I hope my post was educational!

[builder680]

I apologize in advance, I've never liked multi-quoting or the people who do it. I promise it won't happen often.

The whole 1vs1 duelling did happen in Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2

I know. I played and saw with my own eyes.

but that's ok - in those time periods and military tactics, it WAS more about 1vs1 duelling.

I really don't feel like debating this. It's been hashed to death, and besides, no one is ever wrong on the internet. My only response to this statement will be this - That's absurd. I am sure there are some, some might even say many, instances of dueling in the history of formation warfare. But to make the general statement that a melee engagement of the time period in question "WAS more about 1vs1 duelling" is just ludicrous.

However, in Rome 2 - at release, yes, it was broken

Again, I know. I read about it and saw it in action on countless videos. After years and years of this being an issue, it was still a problem. It was very disappointing. I followed Rome 2's release pretty closely, because I was interested in giving it a try at one point, and wanted to see if/how this had been addressed.

... but now? It's a myth that's being spread by people who heard about the game at release and never looked at it again

If a Ford Pinto explodes on impact and Ford changes the location of the gas tank to stop their car from exploding, that doesn't make it a myth that Pintos exploded. Maybe they don't now, but it's not a myth that they did. In any case, I said in a later post that the game may be different by now. If that's the case, then cool. One problem down.

and I can prove it: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?658323-Patch-14&p=13955825&viewfull=1#post13955825 It's fixed now...

Err, ok. I had a hard time discerning any actual details of the combat in that video, since the person recording it seemed to get Tourette's of the mouse-hand whenever they were zoomed in next to units fighting each other. But the game has other problems, and (sadly) they're not likely to all go away. I'm still irritated that all the battle indicators, such as running, incoming fire, etc, are in the same place on the unit cards. Whose idea was that?

I still think M2TW does a great many things better than what I have seen from Rome 2, and I truly believe that one of my earlier points is at least close to the truth. It's really not 100% in CA's interest to make Rome 2 as moddable as possible. Doing so can create competition against its own future titles. The problems with Rome 2 might not be enough to prevent my purchase if it was the only quality Total War option available. But since there are so many good mods for M2TW, Rome 2 has lost at least one sale (mine), in large part because they are competing against their own 8 year old game. A game that, in my opinion, does many (not all) things better than their current offering. I doubt I'm the only one.

[Causeless]

I'm no historian and thus am not going to argue about how historical formation keeping was in melee combat, in the era of guns - you probably know more about it than me. All I know is that in Rome 2, it's been fixed.

Video? There was no video there, it was a series of pictures. Perhaps it linked to the wrong post for you or the page didn't load fully. Scroll down until you reach my post.

I still think M2TW does a great many things better than what I have seen from Rome 2, and I truly believe that one of my earlier points is at least close to the truth. It's really not 100% in CA's interest to make Rome 2 as moddable as possible. Doing so can create competition against its own future titles. The problems with Rome 2 might not be enough to prevent my purchase if it was the only quality Total War option available. But since there are so many good mods for M2TW, Rome 2 has lost at least one sale (mine), in large part because they are competing against their own 8 year old game. A game that, in my opinion, does many (not all) things better than their current offering. I doubt I'm the only one.

This is the thing I don't really see. They aren't intentionally gimping the moddability - perhaps it's "in their interest", but they aren't! Not only did I give a long detailed technical explanation, but there's a simpler and easier way to prove it - CA are releasing modding tools. Because of all of these tools, any modder can now almost completely change the game - the only thing that's left is map modding tools. Perhaps it's in CAs interest to stop modding - I don't know - but if it truly is, they at least have the integrity to try and release modding tools anyways. They've set up modding summits, and as a direct result things have been changed for the better of modders, the most notable being the release of music modding tools.

[builder680]

The video was a bit further up in the link. For some unknown reason I assumed that was what you were linking to, so that's what I watched. Not sure why but I scrolled right up past the screens! Those are some decent looking battles. As far as modding tools being released -- if it eventually allows for the creation of mods as good as M2TW has seen, including overhauling the campaign and battle AI, scripting, map tools, creation of buildings, custom units, traits, etc... that would definitely pique my interest. Also we need to be able to change the placements for the unit card indicators.

[Causeless]

The video was a bit further up in the link. For some unknown reason I assumed that was what you were linking to, so that's what I watched. Not sure why but I scrolled right up past the screens! Those are some decent looking battles. As far as modding tools being released -- if it eventually allows for the creation of mods as good as M2TW has seen, including overhauling the campaign and battle AI, scripting, map tools, creation of buildings, custom units, traits, etc... that would definitely pique my interest. Also we need to be able to change the placements for the unit card indicators.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, changing the placement of things on the unit cards may not be possible. It's a small but painful annoyance.

Modding tools do allow for a lot of things - overhauling AI isn't possible, but it never was, not even for Medieval 2. I thought I may have been wrong, so I even just downloaded an AI mod, but yep - all it does is tweak the current AI, not completely overhaul it. Same goes for Rome 2, AFAIK. Scripting is possible - I do it for R2TR. The potential of scripting remains to be seen however, and there is no documentation from CA about how to do it :/. Map tools, I'm hopeful for, definitely. Creation of buildings - do you mean campaign buildings? If so, I think that can already be done, but I'm not 100%. Some people have managed to get new building models onto the battle map, too. Custom units and traits are definitely 100% possible.