Originally Posted by
WoollyMammoth
As I was politely pointed here in another topic.
1. Find it odd that CA releases EE, after having to wait almost a year for it to be bugfixed, only to announce it's Attila is to be released 6 months later. So basically when you buy a CA game play value is 6 months?
2. How does CA expect there to be long term commitment to a title with practices like that?
3. Why not put family trees in an expansion for Rome II instead of Attila, when so many people asked for it. Why not take a Paradox Interactive approach and build on the longevity of titles with expansions such as CKII and EUIV? Attila for a fair price, could have been a great expansion for Rome II, improving on that game.
4. The marketing on Attila is revolting. Quite a number of things that have been ignored and said it would not happen the last year and a half, now all of a sudden is possible. New graphics for sea and land will make the game and more beautiful and more optimized. CA wants to add fires everywhere, yet one of the main sources of lag the last year and a half was smoke from fires. Is CA overreaching itself too much?
5. Are YouTube commentators reimbursed/ paid to fly out to presentations? And if yes, if they do not provide positive reviews are they banned from further engagements? Is CA using a press bridle/ paying writers to write articles/ comments?
6. Has all this been calculated in before hand (profit/ loss margins), and were the numbers even so that this course was taken?
7. Was CA aware of/ working on Attila, and things such as the family tree to be in Attilla, when Rome II was released?
8. Why were customers not told that in a future Rome like total war game family trees would appear again? Was CA afraid of unsatisfied customers if they would have announced that earlier?
('family tree' being one of the most requested features for Rome II after release, and one which CA was consistent of that it would not appear any time soon, however at the release of Attila did not want to dissapoint the fans as they are so important. The fans, customers, wanted the family tree in Rome II. A similar situation with the unit cards (and how the notices are displayed.))
9. What is the multiplayer community expected to be for RomeII? And will the release of Attila influence this in anyway? Will the multiplayer community become too fragmented? Not everyone has or wants to spend the money on multiple games taken place in Roman Times released by the same publisher. (especially if it takes a year after release to be up to par in an EE edition (which is almost right away obsolete again)).
10. The strategic map announced for Attila was already announced more or less for RomeII, this is not a 'new' feature as such, and was dumbed down for RomeII at release. Will the same thing happen with Attila? Should CA be more careful what to show in pre-alpha releases, and state more clearly the odds of those features getting into release? Not only based on what is shown, but how presenters pitch the product? (e.g. customer expectation management).
I will not pre-order Attila nor buy it on release, and probably a year or more after on sale somewhere, if ever. Several TW games continue to have bugs, which CA does not fix, while still selling the game. I don't see Attilla to be any different at the moment. When I first played a total war game it was magic. That magic is gone. Replaced with the negative experience of things like Empire, Rome II and follow up Napoleon and Attila (which in the trend of CA's renewal business model one can't even play as Attila?). Attila looks awesome, but so did Rome II on pre-release alpha.
Judging by the very tempered reception of the release, I'm not the only one that is completely lost on the product promotion and development of CA.
The presentation of the game itself looked awesome. Credit where credit is due. However pre-alpha presentations and demo's have left people excited before, with not getting the same results on release, and leading to day one apologies from CA, and a year and 15 patches later the (almost immediately obsolete) EE edition. Is development going faster (in a business model) than fans can keep up?