In case anyone from CA still visits these boards

[5th Lieutenant]

Wanted to highlight DVK's post from the 'new starter' thread below:

One other thing that I feel makes RS2 a bit unique is that the Romans are presented in every detail possible for this game..both historically and as a people. I know that players have said they get kind of 'attached' to their Legions..even feeling bad when they are decimated or wiped out. Might sound silly, but it is, I suppose, the effect of personalizing the Legions and seeing the men who fought in them as people like us....not just historical 'information'.

That feeling of involvement with your empire and caring for your army is one thing that CA have never, IMO, managed to bring to a TW game. Indeed, it seems that they don't understand this, hence the 'attack of the clones' accusation levelled at Empire (did that or Napoleon ever get the unit 'painting' tool?). The DLC effort went some way towards remedying this, but it was also part of a move towards a mission-based, sandbox experience that is very sad because RTW and M2TW managed to generate a greater level of freedom and hence involvement. However, RS2 has taken that to a degree not seen in any other mod because the degree of historical representation for Rome with the legions, career paths and building means you really do feel a deep and gnawing sense of responsibility for your little kingdom.

If CA do want to undertake a R2TW then 'buying' RS2's ideas and converting them to a new engine would be the lowest risk and best way of taking the core potential of the TW series and evolving to a new engine. Of all TW mods, RS2 offers the most interesting and involving experience (especially for Rome) because it has the best balance of beauty, depth and enthrallment available.

[RafoutRoud]

I think CA's level of caring since MED2 had become lower and lower with each game.

They don't visit and they don't care, lol.

[AgentGB]

I remember Lusted dropping by the RS2 forums about a year ago, after a few people suggested that if a rome 2 was made it should be alot like this? if there keeping it in mind i really don't no? But i really hope the RS2 work give some inspiration to CA on what would make a good title, and if they should use any ideas or anything, alittle mention to the people who worked on this RS2 would be really nice of them, so they will have there little claim to fame from what i seen, i doubt the team would get any cash for it, even a free copy of a TW title, would be nice, but.... i don't think CA wud give out credit even if they did adopt ideas from RS2

althou its wishful thinking.... on our behalf

[menawati]

What makes a 'good' title is subjective.
The large majority of the people who will buy their games are not 'enthusiasts' like us.
I think of the video game buying public in three sections -
1/the kids who will buy anything licensed or supposedly cool no matter how crap it is
2/the more mature 'floating voters' type of market who are reasonably discerning normal people that read reviews, buy a video game and play it then buy a new one
3/the people like us.
We are the minority.
I'm sure they do strive to keep people like us happy but they would be mad not to mainly target section 2 type people as these are the vast majority of their potential sales.
The trick is to make a game that appeals a lot to type 2, has enough depth to keep type 3 happy and then slap a license on it so type 1's nag their parents to get it for them too.
Like I'm imagining an official licensed LOTR TW game with as much depth as RS but a killer arcade mode to appeal to casual players - which is well probably impossible within their budgets and time constraints.

Oh and tbh any large game studio who is not looking to get their titles onto consoles must be crazy - which usually leads to a dumbing down of the games.

[RafoutRoud]

What makes a 'good' title is subjective.
The large majority of the people who will buy their games are not 'enthusiasts' like us.
I think of the video game buying public in three sections -
1/the kids who will buy anything licensed or supposedly cool no matter how crap it is
2/the more mature 'floating voters' type of market who are reasonably discerning normal people that read reviews, buy a video game and play it then buy a new one
3/the people like us.
We are the minority.
I'm sure they do strive to keep people like us happy but they would be mad not to mainly target section 2 type people as these are the vast majority of their potential sales.
The trick is to make a game that appeals a lot to type 2, has enough depth to keep type 3 happy and then slap a license on it so type 1's nag their parents to get it for them too.
Like I'm imagining an official licensed LOTR TW game with as much depth as RS but a killer arcade mode to appeal to casual players - which is well probably impossible within their budgets and time constraints.

Oh and tbh any large game studio who is not looking to get their titles onto consoles must be crazy - which usually leads to a dumbing down of the games.

Keeping in mind, these sort of games seldom work with consoles. They have been sold...but you'll find there aren't that many about. Among other reasons....adapting it to console controllers just isn't worth the effort...and is in some cases, is impossible.

[Disco]

It's just the difference between a company trying to make money in a tough market, and a group of passionate, giving people who do it for the love.

[Anthropoid]

It is really fascinating how much 'better' this mod is than vanilla; saying that with the recognition that it _is_ subjective as Menawati pointed out and also that issue of the market segmentation.

There ARE games out there where amazing mods led (eventually) to the publisher/developer redesigning subsequent revisions of the game to reflect the insights of the modders. They do seem to be the 'Grog' oriented type games. Ones I can think of: Magna Mundi (based on a mod for Europa Universalis, though not yet released I think). War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition (largely designed by the modding community for the WiTP original). Seems like some other Paradox games also have followed that path. I vaguely recall that Bethesda took into account some of the features in mods for Oblivion and Fallout3 when they designed Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas . . . but there it was at the expense of going Steam exclusive.

But then there are lots of games that seem to go in the exact opposite direction that we Grogs would want . . . Civ 5 being a prime example.

[atheniandp]

I agree with OP.

[dvk901]

I really wouldn't expect or even ask for CA\Sega to put out a RomeTW2 that was necessarily like any mod. The problem with that is there are so many good mods, and so many different concepts and focuses. You really can't expect that all of them would show up in one place, and I think it might even be detrimental if they did. Part of the fun of having a game you can mod is seeing what other people can do and come up with.

The problem, as I see it anyway, is the growing tenancy to move away from easily modding a game...at least in the TW series, by taking away areas that were previously moddable, or making it dang near impossible to change something unless you're a guru of code or something. This excludes a very large number of people from involving themselves with modding, simply because it's just too hard. But, if you had a very stable and more modern TW platform on which to build Roman Era mods...wow, I could see things going really crazy on this site.

Is it just a coincidence that the top two areas of interest in the TW series are STILL RTW and M2TW....the most moddable games of the series? I don't think so. Right this moment, there are more people viewing RTW Hosted Mods than all sections of TW games except M2TW. Why? IMHO, it's just because there is a much 'richer' environment for ideas and discussion and innovation if there is an opportunity to put all of that into some form in the game. If there's little you can do to improve or change...who cares? You're just stuck with what you got.

[menawati]

The problem, as I see it anyway, is the growing tenancy to move away from easily modding a game...

Yes that's my main fear too.
It sounds silly but I'd rather R2TW be an average game on a totally open moddable platform than a really good game on a closed platform.

I guess it comes down to how much time and resources they have to work on the actual framework.
I haven't worked in the games industry but I've done around 15 years of dev work on various projects and there is often a real power struggle between 'framework' and 'content' (well, most people use pluggable frameworks like Spring these days but for games it's far more bespoke).

As a dev you want to make an open platform not just for 'modders' but simply because it makes it easier to bug fix, maintain and develop further (and it's cooler).
However there are all sorts of things which hinder that vision - time and budget, performance considerations, legal issues and the fact that most project managers want to see content and don't consider framework stuff as a real deliverable.........so inevitably much of it gets done as hard-coded and closed quick and dirty stuff. After all, if you deliver a pukka framework with no content you going to go bust.

Jeez just re-read that and it's pretty boring stuff, I think I need a career change, something like lion-taming maybe.

[Ybbon]

Yes that's my main fear too.
It sounds silly but I'd rather R2TW be an average game on a totally open moddable platform than a really good game on a closed platform.

I guess it comes down to how much time and resources they have to work on the actual framework.
I haven't worked in the games industry but I've done around 15 years of dev work on various projects and there is often a real power struggle between 'framework' and 'content' (well, most people use pluggable frameworks like Spring these days but for games it's far more bespoke).

As a dev you want to make an open platform not just for 'modders' but simply because it makes it easier to bug fix, maintain and develop further (and it's cooler).
However there are all sorts of things which hinder that vision - time and budget, performance considerations, legal issues and the fact that most project managers want to see content and don't consider framework stuff as a real deliverable.........so inevitably much of it gets done as hard-coded and closed quick and dirty stuff. After all, if you deliver a pukka framework with no content you going to go bust.

Jeez just re-read that and it's pretty boring stuff, I think I need a career change, something like lion-taming maybe.

I just read it and with 20+ years of tech support completely see your point.

If you're lucky, you become Apple, convince the fan boys and girls that everything you do is cool and end with $90bn profit. If you're most other companies you need to have some detail to go with the cool.

I think I may try cat herding!

[dvk901]

Yes that's my main fear too.
It sounds silly but I'd rather R2TW be an average game on a totally open moddable platform than a really good game on a closed platform.

I guess it comes down to how much time and resources they have to work on the actual framework.
I haven't worked in the games industry but I've done around 15 years of dev work on various projects and there is often a real power struggle between 'framework' and 'content' (well, most people use pluggable frameworks like Spring these days but for games it's far more bespoke).

As a dev you want to make an open platform not just for 'modders' but simply because it makes it easier to bug fix, maintain and develop further (and it's cooler).
However there are all sorts of things which hinder that vision - time and budget, performance considerations, legal issues and the fact that most project managers want to see content and don't consider framework stuff as a real deliverable.........so inevitably much of it gets done as hard-coded and closed quick and dirty stuff. After all, if you deliver a pukka framework with no content you going to go bust.

Jeez just re-read that and it's pretty boring stuff, I think I need a career change, something like lion-taming maybe.

No, not boring at all. I found it very interesting. And it kinda goes with my experiences. A few years back, during the development of RS2, I was asked to join a group of 'academics', game industry people, and so on for the purpose of discussing the needs and directions of the gaming industry for the future. It was very frustrating. A lot of people wanted to discuss the modding and the 'StarCraft' way of doing things, and why the gaming industry was turning its nose up to all of that....it was like we had a disease or something. Nobody would respond or discuss the issue. Kinda made me wonder, "Why did you ask me to join this if you don't want to listen?" Afterall, my background was 'modding a game' for craps sake!

And yes, I fully understand the whole 'bottom line' argument. People gotta make money to keep businesses IN business....but where I diverge from the trend nowadays is in the whole marketing concept and that, as you say, 'content' is all that counts. Content, in a game that really works well, is great. A bunch of content in a game that frustrates and pisses off it's players is worthless. Just consider the TW series. Go into a Best Buy or a store that sells boxed games.....you find RTW Gold (or the three releases) and M2TW. Empire is gone. You might find NTW if you're lucky. What that says to me is that the older games still sell after years on the market, the newer ones seem to just vanish. I was going to buy Empire, but I couldn't even FIND it! So in the end, stores sell what sells, and they will keep selling it as long as it sells. It should be screaming something at the guys who made those games. Why are they so popular? Why are they STILL so popular? What can we do to take advantage of this popularity and sell more games and newer ones? What was it, and is it, that people liked so much about these older games?

[menawati]

A lot of people wanted to discuss the modding and the 'StarCraft' way of doing things, and why the gaming industry was turning its nose up to all of that....it was like we had a disease or something. ............

What was it, and is it, that people liked so much about these older games?

There are two conflicting camps in the 'open software' debate (and when I say 'open' I don't necessarily mean 'free').

The establishment camp believe that when you write any piece of 'shrink-wrapped' software that you want to sell either to the public or to corporations you are in some ways shooting yourself in the foot if you make it on an open platform. If your customer can tailor it and further develop easily using their own cheap devs they can sever their connection with you. In the corporate world this means you are missing out on lucrative support fees, extra contracts to enhance the app and discouraging them from buying version 2.
Also it's more expensive to make an open product and takes longer.
..and if you want to make money as a company you can see their point.

Then some gifted individuals started writing free and open software that in some cases was actually better than the commercial stuff. An example is the Spring framework. They provided a free, open-source distributed programming framework that over time pretty much undermined a lot of the behemoths charging you 100k a year to use their product then 2k a day for some kid fresh out of university to sit in your office and pretend to be an expert.
The establishment fear these people.

So, how does that relate to the games industry ?
Well, imagine the sort of people who wrote the Spring framework saying - we are going to write a free, open framework on which people can write games with real time battles on a map where they handle their economy and logistics. The AI, the character models, the map, the UI...everything will be open and pluggable where possible.
Well, CA would go bust wouldn't they. People like yourself would jump on it and before long we'd have free, original titles coming out that blow the commercial offerings out of the water and don't require you to own any base game that you had to pay for.
Yes, I know it isn't as simple as that. You ain't gonna get an open source platform that lets Joe Public write Crysis as it requires a whole team of designers, artists and extremely performant low-level coding. But for games like TW which don't rely so much on graphics and performance it's possible.
That's probably why people like you are feared within the games industry, they see you as a potential undermining of their profits.

Games companies write their own engines and frameworks to develop their games on and sometimes license them out (iD software for instance) but it is totally against their interests to make these frameworks available to the public.

There is an argument which says their attitude is short-sighted.
RTW and MTW still sell mainly because of the mods. The people aren't buying RTW they are buying a platform to run mods on. The mods generate more interest in the TW games in general. A whole community springs up and grows.

Sometimes I wonder.... imagine if CA decided not to write any more TW games with actual content but released an open platform like the one I described above, called it 'Total War Unlimited - TWU' and charged £20 for it. The core exe would be small with as much as possible exposed on the outside as pluggable interfaces. Sales would obviously be slow at first but after a few years of the modders working their magic it would start generating a good income. After a while everyone who ever wants to play a TW mod would be handing over their £20 to CA.
It would then be in their interests to generate more awareness of the mods people write, they'd support the modders more openly. Hell, they'd even have a TWU portal like the Android Market which hosts mods which are 'plug and play compliant' and could openly endorse the best mods that have no licensing issues and let people charge a few dollars for them and take a commission. And they could still release their own 'official' titles on the platform with a bundled base framework to appeal to the people who just want to buy 'shinies'.
5 years later ...well, the next version of the platform comes out that takes advantage of advances in technology and we get a whole new generation of new mods and updated originals...."special offer - buy TWU2 and get the original TWU with the top mods of the past 5 years free - Roma Surrectum 6, Broken Crescent 9 and Stainless Steel 34 !!!........also see our preview of TWU micro-edition compliant with Android and iPhone 16 and an exclusive interview with the Roma Surrectum team and their plans for bringing in depth sword-and-sandal warfare to your mobile device".
Ah well, maybe in an alternate universe eh

[GRANTO]

yep well said ... i fear rome tw2 will be the most locked tw game of the lot as far as modding it goes, i also feel it will be story driven and not have much scope for the player deviating from the main storyline ....we wait and see.....the greatest thing would be if the rtw/mtw2 engine was free to mod that would open up a new door completely to us all... but alas ......mabey one day....

[Anthropoid]

Awesome thread. Considing I'm looking at a potential career change out of academia/reseach in the next year or so, I love hearing you guys talk about the gaming industry.

What should a Ph.D. social scientist do to break into game development world?

[Hamilicar]

Awesome thread. Considing I'm looking at a potential career change out of academia/reseach in the next year or so, I love hearing you guys talk about the gaming industry.

What should a Ph.D. social scientist do to break into game development world?

Really another Social Scientist That is what I am going to school for now... im working on my bachelor's and then going to grad school.

[Ferdiad]

Start programming.

[Anthropoid]

Start programming.

Yeah I bought a C++ book a few months back that the free compiler (MS Visual C++ Express) seems rather limited and got distracted by other stuff. Suppose investing in a good compiler and diving in wouldn't be a bad idea this summer.

[menawati]

One way to start might be to learn some Java and get hold of the J2ME which will let you write apps for mobile devices (it's all free).
It's a bit of an easier way to learn OO programming than jumping straight into C++ and you can create stuff faster.

[Anthropoid]

The thing I keep in mind is that information technology, and all the myriad markets and products that have sprung out of that field, is still in its infancy. It is causing all kinds of stress on 'the system' as the technology and markets evolve faster than the business models and the legalities of it.