Maybe it's not CA's fault after all?..

[Ygraine]

Hello everyone.

I created this thread to attempt a discussion about whether or not its actually CA's fault that the game is in the state it is in - as I'm almost certain the publisher, in this case SEGA has a lot of involvement in it.

As some of you might know, nowadays gaming is big bucks and it's mostly run by big corporate publishers whom are making most decisions, based on profits. Many of these publishers, or "suits" have barely played a game in their own life and if they had any gaming-interest, it has been a moderate one mostly. From this one can derive that they don't understand and alienate the player-base, and in a combination with the warrant for profits they simply don't care about how a game is, as long as it generates a lot of revenue.

In the case of SEGA, I'd like to turn your attention to another game which as Rome II received massive criticism - namely Aliens: Colonial Marines.

For those of you who have played it or read about it, you'd know how most of the fans were quite disappointed how they turned it into a "Call of Duty-experience" and had very minor scare-factor features as most would actually want from an Aliens-game.
I read a lot of articles back then, and several times I stumbled upon fragments where the developers of the game (Gearbox, Timegate Studios) admitted that they wanted a different game made - but SEGA had its final say and decided that it should be less Aliens and more Call of Duty (my guess to this is that when they look at the market and plan how to make profits, they look at successful games - Call of Duty-franchise being one of them). They basically took a (excuse my french) large DUMP on the whole community and all the fans of the Alien IP - totally ignoring what people wanted, just for the sake of possible profits.

Another example of this is how THQ, being the publisher (before bankruptcy) decided to put Ranger-difficulty as a separate DLC for Metro: Last Light - once again the developers stated that they didn't want to - but THQ had the last say. As all publishers do - including SEGA.

Now if we go back to Rome II, especially with the speculations about a "consolization" of the Total War Series appearing recently - I get the same dreaded feeling I got with Aliens. They are prepared to casualize it, make it more arcade and simplify/dumb it down so it appeals more to the casual mass, whom pockets they are after.

I honestly doubt the great minds at CA would willingly on their own accord do this to the sequel to one of their most acclaimed games made. This smells publisher involvement a long way. Once again suits with no clue and dollar-bills on their minds are destroying a game that could possibly be awesome. I still think Rome II isn't that bad - but as several users already mentioned on these and other forums - some patches and new content won't be enough. There are such major game-mechanics that are awful - and I'm not entirely sure they can be changed or will be changed by CA themselves or the modding-community.

When will publishers learn not to get involved when they have no clue? Why not leave the game development to the companies instead - like CA that actually know what they're doing which has mostly shown over the Total War Series. Seems for instance that Blizzard learned their mistake with World of Warcraft Cataclysm when they made it more appealing to casuals and dumbed it down extremely - making them lose over 1 million subscribers. They showed a slightly different direction with the following expansion involving cute cuddly pandas, which in turn had a better score from the users - they basically adapted and learned from their mistakes. So far SEGA has not shown that they are learning anything.

In any case - what are your thoughts on the subject?

[Hazelnut]

You're right. CA should do China:total war, with added pandas.

[monsterfurby]

I agree. It's interesting how perceptions of whether a publisher or developer is carrying a game's development, and in this case I suppose a lot of the ire directed at CA should go to Sega instead. Sega took over the series from Activision somewhere in mid-development of M2TW, so it's fair to say that Empire was the first title developed under Sega. Yeaah, look at the series since then compared to before and tell me if you notice anything.

[random_samurai]

We do however also have another customer who we make the game for, and in one particular way they are the most important of all. It’s our publisher, who is driven by the grim necessity of commercial reality. Those necessities tend to be short term compared with the dev time of a game or the lifetime of a series. They are also necessities that we cannot ignore – if we do it’s Game Over. Empire: Total War happened the only way it could – it had to be in a box in Feb 09. Damned stressful for all concerned, but it’s so much a fact of life it’s almost not worth talking about.

We had the same attempts to shift blame from CA onto the publisher after ETW happened (both are at fault). The above are from Mike Simpson's blog posts (I laughed at the one about how fans were totally uncool for rating ETW poorly on Metacritic because it meant that other people wouldn't want to play Total War when he admitted that he couldn't give the game to his friends out of shame).

This was back in 2009; if CA had such pressure from SEGA, they've been dealing with it for half a decade across multiple games and are willing to continue to do so. The cons don't seem to outweigh the pros of their relationship in CA's mind, so you can't really remove or downplay their accountability.