Elsewhere I promised I'd do a "Review" of RTW II but it ended up being more of a list of things I'd noticed rather than a "review" per se. I leave it here for anybody that may want to read. All pictures are lossless in BMP format, so expect it to take a while to load, hence the spoilers. I don't expect people to agree, and quite frankly, you're welcome not to. If you do, good for you, if not, no skin off my nose, these are after all, just observations and my own opinions and nothing more. It's also a bit back and forth because I took notes as I went along, so bear with me if you please. It also goes to say this being an unpatched version, I hope (and expect!) a lot of the legitimate bugs to have gone within the next few weeks/months. Or so I hope. Anyway, let's get to it.
First impressions, is the intro video is quite badly rendered. Like strangely so. It looks like it should be pretty, but its pixelated and just “poor” in quality. I was underwhelmed compared to previous TW intro videos. Part of this was that there was A) no blood and B) the hair/facial animation just looked weird, like it was tacked on. These two problems persist throughout the game and make characters look really silly on the campaign map, but not on the battle map. The intro menu looks pretty snazzy, and the music is evocative and has a nice nostalgic undertone, but sadly this is about the only part of the game with memorable music – the rest of the music (battle and campaign) is pretty uninspiring, which is really surprising given there’s some really talented musicians working with modders. For free. Right here, on TWC.
Good graphics, weird shimmering:
Playing the prologue, my first impression was how laggy it was. I have a high-end system – Windows 7, 16GB DDR3 Corsair ram, AMD FX Bulldozer 8 Core 3.1Ghz, ATI HD 7970 3GB video card, a 23 inch 120 refresh rate 3D monitor, and a Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HD. Everything maxed out, and I got about 6-20 FPS in the game, though it mostly hovered around 12 fps. I’m guessing it’s badly optimised, especially so for ATI cards. Sometimes I wonder whether developers do this on purpose so people stop buying their competition’s video cards – I've noticed a slew of related issues elsewhere on the web since release, and I just can’t imagine they didn't test this enough to see there was going to be trouble. From a distance, the mountains looks blurred out, trees look like there’s far too much tessellation going on, among other “weird” effects. One particularly interesting one was missing textures on what I assumed was a bush.
Beautiful scenery though:
Strange tesselation, blurring, among other effects...
In the actual gameplay, everything is pretty much exaggerated. Banners are HUGE, occupying nearly half the screen up close, as are the unwieldy unit cards. Arrows, javelins and boulders all leave huge trails behind them, almost like tracer fire, which is distracting and just plain unnecessary. Thankfully, nearly all of these can be disabled via the ingame menus, which I would recommend most players who have a basic grasp of controlling their units do so immediately. There is no need for all that screen pollution going on.
Just in case you lose track of your units!
When my units finally got up close to the enemy, I was surprised to see more of a mosh pit free for all than any semblance of a line or organised fighting, it was mainly units walking into each other, or being so close to one another you can’t actually make out the animations of the weapons. Ironically, the two soldiers that fight each other on the campaign map when you engage an enemy actually looks better than the battle itself. The UI itself is just plain weird, bizarre and unappealing. The style is reminiscent of Red Vase/Black Vase Greek pottery, so maybe the game should have been called Homer Total War. There was just no need, it is virtually impossible to tell units apart, and they are just uninteresting and an eyesore.
Beautiful artwork however!
On the other hand, the actual game art, like between loading screens, building cards (more like building event cards, there are no building cards) and so on is of very good quality. As I've mentioned, unfortunately there are pretty much NO building cards, at all. They've all been replaced by extremely simplistic, almost Wicca-like symbols that are supposed to represent what you’re building. Most of the times though, they mean nothing and you end up with tech-tree looking diagrams that don’t help one bit in illuminating you on what you’re supposed to be building. The UI is just unintuitive and quite frankly unnecessarily confusing, hiding important information and just plain ignoring some of it – you can no longer tell the size of a population in a settlement, you no longer know how many people you kill/enslave on capturing one, and happiness/discontent is handled very strangely through what ironically to me seems like an over complicated system. Garrisons as usual are useless at keeping a recently conquered (and exterminated!) population in check, which is one of the things I find the most frustrating about taking a city. Looting it gives you money, but usually destroys so many buildings that fixing them simply eats up all those profits. Add to that the fact you get a huge population discontent bonus (like 70%) and it’s just not damn worth looting cities.
A positive point is that the battle maps themselves, especially those near cities, are stunningly beautiful and amazingly rendered. Everything from aqueducts, to quarries, to beaches and ports and walls and towers and squares, is beautifully, beautifully rendered. It really makes for some very cinematic battles and even though certain cities look the same, they do look pretty spectacular. Some of my favourite battles are sea battles, because they lag at lot less and the ships and the water itself is just amazing to look at.
Sadly, ship combat is clunky. Ships immediately disintegrate on being rammed by a ship of a slightly larger class, and most of the time, you get your ships to ram/board the enemy’s, and they simply sit there doing nothing, until they eventually get rammed themselves, and sink. You can lose an auto-resolve battle that says you have a 90% chance of winning this way. Also, for some reason, sometimes my marines board a ship, start massacring its crew, and then mysteriously decide to retreat back to my ship for no specific purpose. Unfortunately, sea battles are a beautiful if not entirely unpredictable and messy affair, and not for the right reasons.
Should we help our comrades on that ship? Probably not.
If we return back to land, the capture point system is indeed as screwed up as many, many posters and modders rightfully suggested it would be. I played a siege defense during the prologue, massacred the enemy army, but about 20 or so men of one of his units which had at some point routed, decide to regroup and make for the city behind my back. I was so busy pursuing the rest of the enemy with my pristine army, that I didn't see them and VOILA! They take the point, stay there for one minute and BAM – I lost the battle. That was just ridiculous. I had about 100 times more men than they did at the end, and I still lost because of the stupid CP. Other problems involve enemy units simply running through your own in order to get to it (ignoring the fighting that should be taking place in the meantime) and actually preventing you from capturing it just by their sheer presence, which again can be as little as 3 or 4 men. During sieges, I even noticed the enemy didn't even bother to garrison walls, just placing its troops along streets that led to the CP’s, which makes sense in one way, but then you have to ask – what’s the point of walls, then? Maybe they know it’s because my siege engines will get stuck and clip though one of them, so there’s no need to bother.
Solid walls are no match for Roman path-finding!
Besides that, gameplay is generally underwhelming in the battles – units are supposed to be “HUGE” but aren't, combat is arcade and over very quickly, and a unit of cavalrymen can defeat a unit of spearmen head on, which is silly. This is on normal difficulty, because I have no intention of giving enemy mobs and peasants +10 morale, attack and defense which is all that toggle does. Unfortunately, the difficulty toggle doesn't even bother to say what it does specifically, which is a shame. As I mentioned before, I didn't get a chance to see some good combat anims, because the camera doesn't pan that far down, and when you get a close in view, it’s basically units so close together and moshing and walking into one another you don’t actually see much. Not that there’s any need, most melees are over after 20-40 seconds.
On the campaign map, there are a number of other strange features. The portraits for generals, family members (mostly generals, there’s no such thing as FM’s anymore) are uninspired, weird looking and all look exactly the same. It’s impressive that, with talented people showcasing their abilities on an almost daily basis here on TWC (Like Joar, among others) with older technology that they manage to make LOOK BETTER, that crap like this still gets released. The models look strange, there’s no two ways about it, and facial hair and hair of any kind just looks bizarre. For some reason, my AA doesn't seem to work on the campaign map, which makes it look doubly weird and jagged at the edges. Agents are a good example, for the Romans they’re supposed to be women, but they all look identical, and just plain boring. Again, given the level of professionalism and dedication that unpaid modders here at TWC have shown with traits and ancillaries in mods such as RTR, EB, RS and IB, this level of laziness by a multimillion dollar games developer is simply inexcusable. I particularly loved (sarcasm!) the part where they re-used old RTW quotes, like “Slap that poultice on!” for a witch. I mean… c’mon guys, you get PAID for this, you know?
I Mean… What’s this? A loading screen?
Another inexplicable feature is the tendency for rebels to attack towns with garrisons far superior to their own force, on occasion I had to fight 3-4 different rebels, all of which I defeated with 80-90% chances on auto-resolve. I mean… why, where is the AI here? What’s the deal with that? If we add to this the fact you’re told explicitly when your settlement is going to revolt, it’s just another layer taken off a level of management that was otherwise unobtrusive and added a certain element of randomness to the game. And then there’s the fact we no longer get seasons, that each year is just one turn… and you have to ask, why? Why CA, why did you do that? There’s streamlining, and there’s “we can’t be asked to make winter textures”. “Or we ran out of time.” Whatever the case was, it was one of those features I hardly heard people complaining about – if it ain't broke, don’t fix it. One thing that was, has, and apparently always will be broke though, is the AI – I can’t even begin to list the number of times I’ve encountered factions that are “neutral” to me, and ALL steadfastly refused my trade agreements. I mean, it doesn't get much more “mutually beneficial” than this, and yet they (still!) make these odd choices.
And then there’s just those little niggly things that you can’t wrap your head around, like menus on the campaign map that can’t be closed unless you open (and close) another menu, something a simple x close button would fix. Or the fact I have an agent that has a 95% chance of getting another agent to join me, but fails six turns in a row. Or the fact every city, even the ones you don’t know about, have a city icon on the map so you know where they are, virtually eliminating any sense of exploration from the map, which is truly huge and awe-inspiring. On top of that, there’s a lot of forests, mountains and other impassable terrains, meaning the options to get from A to B are pretty limited, further limiting gameplay on a grand scale. I have a feeling I’ll be fighting battles on the same fields and manning the same passes quite frequently, which is unfortunate for replayability. And while I like the many, many different factions, something needs to be done about loading times – start of the game, and it takes 30-60 secs to get through them, and I hear this gets worse as the game progresses.
All in all, this is a game that has a lot of potential, but has suffered from a number of telling issues. Firstly, it was obviously not properly stress-tested and optimised. The fact there was already a “Day 1 Patch” before the game even ships out says it all. I mean, if they knew it was broken, why couldn't they wait a day and give us a fixed, or in the very least, a slightly less bugged game?
Secondly, it suffered from being “streamlined” (read, watered down) where it didn't need to be, in some cases making certain elements of gameplay – such as city management, actually stranger and less intuitive than the traditional building tree with unit cards and so on would have been. Another example is the maximum number of armies (and generals!) you can have, and the fact you can’t move units between armies, which is extremely annoying, and just uncalled for. Why make changes to gameplay elements that nobody wanted to see “fixed”? Surely there are better ways to discourage stack-spamming by the AI than handcuffing the player?
In conclusion, I’d give it a 5/10. I wanted to say 6/10, but that would be being generous. Right now, that's rightly what it deserves. Come a few fixes, that rating could arguably be raised, and I would have no compunctions about doing so. But this is part of the problem. What annoys me most about the game isn't that it has issues, or has taken a direction I disagree with, it’s that we were sold (and in some cases pre-sold) a product they knew was, in many ways, broken (mostly graphically) and which they should have spent a lot longer making compatible with people’s rigs. The entire point of having a machine that surpasses the recommended requirements of the game is being able to enjoy it – that’s why we pay through the nose for it. In itself, there's a certain element of moral, if not financial, dishonesty going on here, which is why I rate it as it is. The least you can do is try and deliver a product that lives up to your own system specs, before you even try and tackle the actual gameplay bugs. So please, with the next title, if not for the customers then please - at the very least, think of the AI.
RTW II - Observations, Reflections And Merlot - Day II
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Originally Posted by Jean=A=Luc
