Official CA comment - Total War: The modding situation

[Steph]

Why would they help modders? They selling us stuff we used to unlock/mod (extra factions extra units etc) for free, they don't want us to keep hanging onto their games like RTW and M2tW and play mods based on them: they want us to consume and move on to the new stuff they release. Its a sound strategy.

Because some consumers could have a look at existing mods, and decide to buy the game because they see it proposes mods they want.
For instance, someone who has a passion for the lord of the rings may buy medieval if he sees a full conversion with orcs, and won't buy STW2 because there's none.

The real question for CA is : do the extra sales from people buying the game because mods are available or can be made for it outweight the extra cost of making it moddable, and the possible loss of DLC sales if modder make the same for free.

Making DLC with just units for NTW makes little sense : just have a look at the mod in my signature, and then you'll never want to pay for a unit pack. But then, since we cannot mod the map, making a DLC/expansion with new maps is worth it.

[Spiderbong]

By the time the good mods come out the game is in bargain bin its not worth it for them.

[Dynamo11]

By the time the good mods come out the game is in bargain bin its not worth it for them.

Tell that to the people I know specifically bought Medieval 2 and Kingdoms 3 years after the initial release date JUST for "The Third World Total War" mod.
And I recently bought Armed Assault simply to use old mods that were never transferred to ArmA2

[kronpas]

Why would they help modders? They selling us stuff we used to unlock/mod (extra factions extra units etc) for free, they don't want us to keep hanging onto their games like RTW and M2tW and play mods based on them: they want us to consume and move on to the new stuff they release. Its a sound strategy.

It might be purely business decision from SEGA, not what CA can do on their own. CA releases games pretty fast considering their big tittles and nature of the genre (strategy). Other companies like Blizz and Firaxis keep their games around much longer with constant updates, DLCs and expansions, mods help lengthen it. Coincidentally, those are the ones with excellent modding support.

[betto]

if they really wanted to help modding why not release m2tw source with license that only allo modding and redistribution for who own the game ,they said that the old engine model(m2tw kingdoms) is crap for they work . fine ,give that crap to us.

[last_name_left]

Don't differentiate CA from SEGA. They're a wholly owned studio - they are SEGA. Just like Choccie Biccies are McVities. If only the big bad mr McVitie would let us put more Choccie on.....whatever...it matters not. If SEGA chose to close it down, it would close.

My previous post was made with the following in mind:

games.on.net: There's been some concern amongst members of the modding community that CA has deliberately made modding of Shogun 2 harder than in past Total War games - what's your reply to these concerns?

Mike: We don’t deliberately make modding harder, but it would be a fair criticism to say we don’t deliberately make it easy either.

We’ve always wanted to have a coherent strategy on modding, and we’re working on that now.

Well, WHAT IS IT???? What is this coherent strategy? A piecemeal ramshackle thread answering questions about XML? It just doesn't cut the mustard, does it?

So when are we going to get this coherent strategy?

games.on.net: Is there any word on whether CA will be releasing a unit editor or any other modding tools to the community, and if so when those can be expected?

Mike: We’ve not yet planned out how we’ll support modding for Shogun 2, and there are still unfulfilled promises for the past products. We’ll be discussing this with the community to get some idea of what their priorities are, and then figuring out how much we can do to satisfy them.

Well, where is this discussion? Has it happened already and I missed it? Was the result of this 'discussion' "NO MOD TOOLS"?

Or is the discussion and coherent strategy still to come? There's no sign of it. Just like there was no sign of the mod tools other than sweet promises.......promises which we were finally informed had been abandoned with the terse "NO MOD TOOLS".

Personally I'd like some indication of this "coherent strategy" (or not) because I'll simply abandon the entire thing if "NO MOD TOOLS" and increasing lock-out to binaries is to continue. One suspects that is the exact reason why there is no discussion, and no coherent strategy - at least not any made public.

And yes, I am grumpy about it - the way it's happened. Fool me once.......

Mike Simpson again, from elsewhere:

We are intending to come up with a more comprehensive long term strategy on encouraging and facilitating mods, and will talk more about this soon,

When? IS a thread saying "NO MOD TOOLS" a "comprehensive long term strategy"? Seriously?

[Spiderbong]

that amount will not be bigger than the DLC profits from current games fan base or CA wouldn't be doing this

[crzyrndm]

that amount will not be bigger than the DLC profits from current games fan base or CA wouldn't be doing this

A) Selling DLC is the current state of the market (dosen't mean I like those little piddly ones)
B) They changed the engine to increase performance, not to sabotage the efforts of modders. It was a side effect of everything being shifted from text to binary along with a few other complications. Granted, they could have released the data tables a little earlier, but the intention dosen't appear to have been to lock modders out (I'm sure they could have done this very effectively if that was the intention)

[alhoon]

Well, we can have 25-40 units armies in ETW and NTW, especially in NTW with the mod that solves the UI card problems.

[Steph]

Not in custom battle, and it requires editing a save game. Not a perfect solution

[AngryTitusPullo]

Now all minor clans are playable...

[leeho730]

Now all minor clans are playable...

In a very limited way.

Anyway I really hope CA will release S2 raw DB when they release RotS campaign and the new patch.
What's the point of holding them anyway?

[taducanh]

Sorry i mean a year after game release.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

[Jace11]

It's all about the cash. CA see broad scope in depth mods for rome and m2tw like europa barbareium, stainless steel, broken crescent and are scared we'll never buy another game from them. With tools, modders could make a sengoku jidai dlc pack in a few weeks.

They can't say they are deliberately impeding mod development as that would alienate them from most of the community so they say they are trying their best *cough* and make their excuses. It's a shame we will never see anything like Rome and medieval again from them.

[Okuto]

Can't blame them..they are under Sega's umbrella after all...

Though this is very helpful, time to get out the pack file opener again and off to modding empire TW again

[Crazyeyesreaper]

all i cant think is streamline load times??? really are you me Shogun 2 with DX11 has the longest loading times ive ever seen for any game, and tis all shader issues, pop it on a raid 0 SSD setup it still loads slow as hell lol CA just fails there hardcoding excuse is just that an excuse,

if hardcoding is so much better why is that modding games like GTA IV with high res texture packs increases performance and shortens load times? Warscape engine is just crap the coding for it needs to be done from scratch but that wont happen seems there gonna use this engine for another 3-4 years since its DX11 updated. oh well mod support we are getting is better then nothing, i just hope that Neocore games can step up to the plate with there games and bring something new to the table, as i will say King Arthur the role playing war game has better RPG elements then Shogun 2, and Sengoku by paradox gives far better general / vassal interaction All we can do is wait and see but i do hope a developer at some point wakes up and knocks CA off the pedestal they have occupied for so long so they actually have a reason to win us back. right now there the only game in town and there lazy because of it.

[Primergy]

all i cant think is streamline load times??? really are you me Shogun 2 with DX11 has the longest loading times ive ever seen for any game, and tis all shader issues, pop it on a raid 0 SSD setup it still loads slow as hell lol CA just fails there hardcoding excuse is just that an excuse,

Well...propably the load times would be even longer when everything would be unpacked? Just imagine the fun to load an unpacked 8 GB texture of the campaign map instead of the 120 MB packed....

[Magz Empire]

I bought Rome Total War 3 months ago just to play the Lord of the rings mod. You guys should re think your marketing strategy.

[Steph]

Am I the only one finding that the latest weeks silence from CA in that thread starts to be a little deafening?

It doesn't support much there new strategy toward modders.

[alhoon]

Am I the only one finding that the latest weeks silence from CA in that thread starts to be a little deafening?

It doesn't support much there new strategy toward modders.

I think it's mostly because all the questions they could answer (and that were revelant with XSD and XML) were answered.