Creative Assembly should fragment out of SEGA, for game quality

[ThePianist]

In March 2005, the Creative Assembly was acquired by Japanese giant Sega as a European subsidiary. Under Sega, further Total War titles were developed, and the Creative Assembly entered the console market with action-adventure games such as Spartan: Total Warrior and Viking: Battle for Asgard. The company's most recent products are Empire: Total War and the real-time strategy title, Stormrise.

Creative Assembly should fragment out of SEGA, for game quality.

It is obvious that the creative artists are in Creative Assembly, they are the ones who think about the gameplay.
And the merchants are in SEGA, they are the ones who think about money.

SEGA does not think about making enough money to pay the salary of the game-designers, to pay each them a good "bonus", and to have enough extra money to fund the next game.
That's what a small company would think of.

SEGA is thinking about how to use Creative Assembly as a cash cow, to squeeze out far more money than Creative Assembly needs, to squeeze out a lot of money for SEGA CEOs to buy yachts and mansions, to squeeze out a lot of money for SEGA to maintain their Corporation Empire, in which Creative Assembly is only a satrap.

Creative Assembly should, like Baktria, fragment out of SEGA, which is like the Seleucid Empire, huge, unwieldy, wild with ambition to take over and dominate more small businesses, rife with corruption, and mismanaged.

I am sure that E:TW was not so great, because Creative Assembly wants to make games for the love of designing a fun product, but the SEGA merchants stand behind them with whips, and threats of taking away their livelihood if they don't crank out a product by such and such date, so that SEGA's profit could rise for that quarter/year, so that some intermediate SEGA official could report to the arch-tyrant of SEGA Corporation that "profits are this much and this much, and this provides extra fund to screw up SONY and Atari and..."

It is better that Creative Assembly become a company on their own. There is a solid fanbase of Total War series, and SEGA is ruining the game design, by rushing it. SEGA merchants aren't even interested in having a good game, they merely want have something that brings in lots of extra money.

The development of E:TW was so totally rushed. I think it was cranked out in less than a year, or perhaps one year.
The engine was probably pre-developed, the development having begun after M2TW.
But the gaming content was probably rushed.

I highly don't enjoy the idea of gaming developers being driven by whips, by menacing rich gangsters from a large Corporation, so that they manufacture something for other people's profit.

A game should almost be a personal gift, made by the game design team, to share with the gamers. They put in their creativity, so the game is fun and well-crafted.
Plus, all the profit goes to them anyway, so they aren't worried about money. They also aren't rushed, they aren't producing to increase the wealth of other people.

This is why HALO 1 was so fun, and so well-made.
HALO 2 was quite terrible, because Microsoft took over, and it was made by Microsoft, rather than by a small company. It was made so that maximum profit would be made to Microsoft. So they also curried the favor of the US military, and added various recruiting things in it.
HALO 1's replay value was... over and over and over and over and over again.
HALO 2 ... upon the 3rd replay you already had enough, because everything was so linear and unoriginal. The mystery, the challenge, was all gone. (partly because they took away the health-bar and medpacks)


Rome Total War is the best of the series.
Rome Total War is also Creative Assembly's last game as a small company. (before SEGA hijacked them)
M2TW is too heavy on anger, and too dark in the mood. Too much emphasis was put on graphics, and not enough on the gameplay. The units had a delay of response that was annoying.

(in every instance that one company is bought by another, the bigger company would eliminate employees of the smaller company. So probably SEGA fired some of the staff of Creative Assembly, merely for more profits. SEGA has no lack of money, but large Corporations often fire people, so that the money goes to the CEO's pocket instead of going to pay some employee's salary.)

This large Corporation invasion definitely affected the quality of M2TW and subsequent games.

haven't really tried ETW, but the bit that I have seen lets me know that it was totally rushed by SEGA.

The soldiers in the ETW demo had faces that look like crumpled paper and erased painting.
Even the faces in RTW demo looked better. And the faces in M2TW demo were also fine.
It is therefore exceptional that Creative Assembly made a demo that missed out that detail.

Any team of game designers designing a game for love of a good game... would never have missed the face of the soldiers.
That happens when the game designers are hijacked/kidnapped by rich merchants, who try hard to whip them to a production deadline, so the merchants' overbloated pockets could get even more bloated.

Therefore, for the sake of game quality, it is better that the Creative Assembly fragments out of SEGA, and become their own small company.

[roy34543]

Well the people who made the game themselves can do it of course, but as an actual company they cant, the whole point of an acquisition or merger, is that they are effectively a part of the company. SEGA is CA , CA is SEGA. Telling them to fragment is basically not possible unless SEGA spins them off to someone else (unlikely , and wont help much more chances are)
and supposing the human creators did leave and formed a new company? well they would start out with no capital, they would have to go hunting for investors, and they would lose their salary and pension benefits and any other perks they might have gotten out of their jobs, and despite all this, SEGA could CONTINUE to create "total war" games with the same name , and as far as most people would know, it would be the same thing.

(btw, i didnt see any problem with the faces in ETW? most of them look pretty good, if bland. are you sure you didnt run into a glitch?)

[G-Megas-Doux]

I think that you can tell where things lack the detail. The guys at creative assembly are still creative you can see that in what they make but when BI came out you could tell that a lot of detail had gone and that the quality checking was rushed. Never mind ETW, MIITW was clearly rushed, example look at the ai there are lables for default which controls the orthadox, islamic, mongols, timurids and american natives factions. Then Catholic which controls all the rest appart from papacy and slaves. I am currently looking closly at this as I think I can write a realy powerful ai that will use diplomacy as a nasty maneuvering tool in the campaign and not use the random betrayal of allies option, also I think I can make it more aggressive all arround. Back to point they missed out on a lot of scope and even when they addressed it the ai is still technicly broken but mods make it better.

I wonder after napoleon total war how many people will continue to buy if the quality remains the same. At least before BI you could see the effort to fix issues properly.

However what I would like to point out is that for what they have done they have filled a market in the game industry which is still not done any better by anyone else and have been generous to provide the moding tools for us to change it if we dont like it. So they have provided people with two hobbys, playing games and editing them.

Also if the people fragmented they probably would have to do something almost completly different because the systems used in RTW, MIITW, ETW and NTW are probably locked down tight by SEGA so it would make it pointless. I am resigned to enjoying what I have and looking forward to mods, unless they drop back into a genera that I want to see.

I would like to say I am not slamming SEGA, they do make a lot of good games and will continue to do so. I am only slamming larger corperate mentality that can sometimes affect end product by accident rather than intention. Sometimes smaller companies can take the time out to go back and redo. This can help with later products as there is a good learning curve just from the fixing of minor issues and can improve overall work. In a bussier work enviornment that exists in a corperate company there is not always the time to do that and workers can fall by the way side to. Corperations can also be good because they can provide more titles ect to the market which gives options.

[Spartan198]

Okay, having read all of post #2, I can't help but notice it's less a "go CA" post than it is a "screw large corporations" rant. And unless you're actually employed by Sega, I don't particularly think you're any kind of authority on what the internal happenings of said company are.

If successful, small companies eventually become large corporations. Sega started out small, but they were successful and became what they are now. It's a process that can't be interrupted or prevented. If CA were to "fragment" from Sega (the legal barriers preventing that from happening were already pointed out by roy34543, so I'll skip over that), they might very well become a successful company on their own. But that success would eventually put them at the same level that Sega currently is. And ultimately CA would be the "evil big corporation" that you're claiming Sega is.

[G-Megas-Doux]

Okay, having read all of post #2, I can't help but notice it's less a "go CA" post than it is a "screw large corporations" rant. And unless you're actually employed by Sega, I don't particularly think you're any kind of authority on what the internal happenings of said company are.

If successful, small companies eventually become large corporations. Sega started out small, but they were successful and became what they are now. It's a process that can't be interrupted or prevented. If CA were to "fragment" from Sega (the legal barriers preventing that from happening were already pointed out by roy34543, so I'll skip over that), they might very well become a successful company on their own. But that success would eventually put them at the same level that Sega currently is. And ultimately CA would be the "evil big corporation" that you're claiming Sega is.

fair enough, I dont work for sega just trying to be balanced.

[Rilsaur]

Completely forgot CA made Viking. I loved that game.

[|Sith| Max]

Viking was good but lacked the options of Spartan total warrior to replay chapters, which caused it to get boring. it was however ownage the first 3 times i played the campaign on the highest diff and the reason i bought an xbox 360...
the large world is lovely but it would've been ownage if i could replay huge battles. Also an arena mode would've been in place. honestly deep inside we all knew the TW genre was dying. slowly. and in pain. i still say gunpowder era was a very bad move.