Kingdoms Patch..Same old story....

[Xtiaan72]

Does anyone else think it's kinda ridiculous that Creative Assembly continues to give such terrible product support for fans that are so loyal to their games?

In comparison.... Sins of a Solar Empire has already released two patches in the week the game has been out and has promised another patch by the end of the month... It's really shameful... Think of how much money each of us has forked out over the years... CA makes great games...but honestly they have the worst product support I've ever seen...

[Swiss Halberdier]

@Xtiaan72
I totally agree with you. Creative Assembly is an awesome gaming company which produces great games since years. But the terrible product support is a shame.

Here in Switzerland Kingdoms came out on the 29. of August 2007. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM CA??? No patch after 6 Months?

M2TW is for me only worth playing with DLV! The MOD-Team has done such great work that they could earn money for that

[Xtiaan72]

When you put in perspective the love and time the mod community for Total War puts into the games it is really shameful. It's like they use the mod community to finish their games... I'm sorry but it's true. 'Here's the tools to make the game good, sorry we are busy working on another game we aren't going to finish'.....Crazy...

[d3v]

i've come to the conclusion that CA will make the game but it's the mod community who make it worth playing longer than 1 month.

I cannot play M2TW without DLV

[roy34543]

Well you cant really compare one company to another in all conditions . Sins of a solar empire is now officially a flagship project and needs to be taken care of . Kingdoms is relegated to second place in comparison to empires.
Nontheless. i admit its kind of poor they didnt at least give a small patch for just the tuetonic campaign and then go through them one by one to encoruage us.

[tvalentine]

i got perma banned for ranting on their site about how irresponsible and lazy CA has been with their games. CA is down with SOE as far as "mainting" games is.

[Valantine]

I think that whilst we are suffering from lack of support from CA, there are many companies that treat their customers far worse. The two examples that I can pull out of the hat are Ubisoft - terrible support for both Silent Hunter 3 and 4 with patches only being released when enough poeple had returned their copies to the store as a faulty product. SH4 was so bad that it really felt that we had paid £35 to be Beta testers!
Another example is THQ who have messed around with STALKER patches for so long that the community for that has all but died.
Whilst CA needs to give us some community support at least they released a game that was PLAYABLE on release showing that they have at least some competance when it comes to it!
V

[Xtiaan72]

I didn't feel the M2TW was playable until after the first patch. Nor was it possible for modders to work very successfully with it until after the first patch was released. Think back to the notorious 'non-responsive AI' bug. When the AI would not even move until you initiated action. An 'AI' that is non-responsive is broken so they did release a broken game.

That said, you are totally right that there are other companies that release games that are completely broken. I don't think that is really an excuse for CA though.

I don't rant against CA on their site because it's pointless. But I do post over there once in a while to let frustrated players know that there are mods out there that address most of the problems they have with the game. The funny thing about most people that rant against CA on their site is that they aren't even aware of or haven't tried a good mod.

[onlyCookie]

there are many companies that treat their customers far worse. The two examples that I can pull out of the hat are Ubisoft - terrible support for both Silent Hunter 3 and 4 with patches only being released when enough poeple had returned their copies to the store as a faulty product. SH4 was so bad that it really felt that we had paid £35 to be Beta testers!
Another example is THQ who have messed around with STALKER patches for so long that the community for that has all but died.
V

OMG! I couldn't agree with you more. After purchasing SH4 I think i've only played it a couple of times before putting it back on the shelf to collect dust. Absolutely ********y customer support from Ubi on that game. Super frustrating!

And Stalker... oh my days, i remember reading about it in the magazines and it getting hyped up as a major developement in gaming. but when i played it, it was lacking and really felt like a half finished project.
I'll never understand what makes publishers think its ok to release products that clearly don't do what they say on the tin... But then, i've never been the type of person driven by sales figures and having the moral compass of a serial killer. Still, as long as they keep profit margins up and the board members happy...

[TempestKhan]

When people download there games they make
the crappy customer service we see today is the results of people pirate games ect... just my 2 cent

[Valantine]

Very true! However MTW2 itself was quite stable with regards to not crashing, even though the AI was sometimes non-responsive and even being damn right dumb no the battlemap I felt the game was playable. Of course I felt it needed patching severely but I felt that it was possible to play a "normal" campaign and only experience some shoddy elements. Otehr games on the other hand, Il take the one I have most experience with: Silent Hunter 4 -
To start it had problems with the installer where you had to manually copy over a .pak file as the installer missed it out. Once you started the game it would crash on the menu when yo utried to start a new career. When it eventually stopped crashing on menu it would sporadically crash throughout the game. Graphicly there were white parts on certain subs because the textures weren't packaged properly, crewmen had eyes that bulged a foot out of their skulls because they hadn't scaled them down correctly with certain graphics drivers, and then and probably the most heinous bug for a subsim - not having hydraphones that work meaning as soon as you dive you are blind to everything around you - now that to me, was an unplayable game on release.
But, it's kind of off topic so I apologise for ranting so much but it backs up my point that CA arn't shafting us as much as other companies are. CA could do a lot better with patches but as they are right now they are not stamping out the community made mods and enhancements like other studios do.

Of course, it shouldn't be that modders have to create mods to simply clear up the issues CA have left unresolved but as it stands CA are moving onto the next product and letting those great modders such as Repman et al. to appease the community whilst they themselves work on the next installment in the Total War series.
Is it a good situation? Well, not really as only CA can amend certain things.
Is it working well? We have great mods out there so I'd like to think so!
Could it be worse? Oh yes! (in best Churchill the insurance dog accent)

But of course, these are just my opinions and i'm sure peopel will disagree with them, but to me they are valid.
V

[Xtiaan72]

It is cool that CA has let a great mod community develop and seems to even encourage it. But that is smart for them because such a good community has developed around the mods that loyally buy their games. I don't know why a company would stomp on modders seems like it would hurt future sales. And you notice that some of the most popular strategy games do have thriving mod communities that are encouraged by the developers ( Civ, Galactic Civilizations, ect. )

I'll give CA that, they have a good understanding that making their games moddable is a good idea.

Always nice chatting with you Valantine!

[GreyWindSage]

i cant believe no ones brought up EA yet

[MagyarMatt]

It is cool that CA has let a great mod community develop and seems to even encourage it. But that is smart for them because such a good community has developed around the mods that loyally buy their games. I don't know why a company would stomp on modders seems like it would hurt future sales. And you notice that some of the most popular strategy games do have thriving mod communities that are encouraged by the developers ( Civ, Galactic Civilizations, ect. )

I'll give CA that, they have a good understanding that making their games moddable is a good idea.

Always nice chatting with you Valantine!

It's in the interests of CA etc to encourage modding communities. It allows them to release unfinished products and save money by having modders turn it into a great game for free rather than CA having to pay programmers to do it, sound bit of business really.

[Xtiaan72]

It's in the interests of CA etc to encourage modding communities. It allows them to release unfinished products and save money by having modders turn it into a great game for free rather than CA having to pay programmers to do it, sound bit of business really.

That was my original point, That the modders finish the games. That may indeed be good business but they should at least provide the patches so the game can be finished!

[roy34543]

EA doesnt always have shoddy constumer service.
Ive seen times where its ok and the games have no bugs even if they suck and ive seen ones where theyre perfectly fine and ive seen those where the game is atrocious and they do nothing.
EAs actions can be very arbitrary

[Valantine]

Yep, EA is so vast and consuming that their products vary to such huge degrees. Some are absolutely brilliant games that play well and have no bugs, then you have your shite games that are bug free but lame, and then you have releases that are so bugged that you wonder what the hell the QA guys were smoking when this ran through their test rigs!

It's great that CA aren't stopping modding, I've sadly seen several of my old favourites die off because the developers put such stoppers in the way of any form of community development, Ubisoft are one of the worse for that in the past but recently its been CDV that has been killing off its communities with a completely lack of community support or appeasement.
CA has a decent balance here, at least they bothered to patch MTW2 to what it is now and haven't thrown anything in the way of modders except the hardcode. Of course we want more but CA is thinking of its pocket, its spent time and effort on MTW2 and Kingdoms getting it to how it is now, the sales are probably drying up as it's no longer a brand new release meaning it's hitting the £15 (Pound Sterling) mark in most retailers so they are instead working on something that when released will be selling for £35-40 (Pound Sterling) and they KNOW that it will sell as there are a huge amount of Total War franchise fans and the sheer growth of the gaming industry means that theres always new peopel to sell to.
V

[Zel]

Community and Customer support realy is something that is still not something that many companies have fully grasped. Either for the lack of capability or knowledge or because they think they can ignore that type of activity. Actually I just bought the gold pack for MTW2 just because I wanted to play some of the promising mods (having good memories of MTW1 mods).

There realy are some gems out there though when it comes to customer support. iE Paradox Entertainment with their Europa Universalis series of games. They provided patches for EU2 and Victoria like 4 or 5 years after the games were released solely for the purpose to add content and scripting possibilities for the modders and finetuning their very complex engine. Unfortunatly they alienated part of their community with bad design decissions afterwards with EU3.

[iceman0486]

Lol, true this Zel. I purchased Kingdoms for the sole purpose of playing mods - I used LTC, and then tried out DLV as well once I got a better computer that could run the big map.

[Xtiaan72]

Without Mods MTW2 would not have held my interest more than a week.