Idle Thumbs Savages Rome II

[Huberto]

Thorough and intelligent review!

September 12, 2013 Everything changes in this Very Special 2-hour Three Moves Ahead event. Rob, Rowan Kaiser, and Fraser Brown gather to talk about Rome and destroy a grave threat to the Total War series. But then the next morning they realize they've gone too far and they're all like, "What have we done?" But nothing will ever be the same again, they've been marked forever.

Idle Thumbs (three moves ahead) podcast plays Rome II and pronounces it as an epic fail in almost every way:

https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/

[RakeinWaiting]

A very good review!

I have to agree with almost everything they talked about, good and bad.

I hope someone from CA will sit down and listen to this.

[Huberto]

Listening to this Idle Thumbs makes it incontrovertibly clear. CA's failure in TWR2 design and execution is so pervasive that they've created a complete hack job. This implies that CA staff involved just goofed off and ignored their work product. So either:

(i) heads must roll -- James Russell (?) Jamie Ferguson (?) Dominique Starr (?) Julian McKinley (?) or...

(ii) CA's Total War series is over.

[2gutter67]

I'm about a third of the way through the review, and it's actually incredibly well done. I do not think I could find a much more thought out review.

P.S.: Best review I've ever experienced. I'm going to rep you for posting this because it fits my feelings exactly. The covered everything that could possibly need to be discussed.

[Huberto]

P.S.: Best review I've ever experienced. I'm going to rep you for posting this because it fits my feelings exactly. The covered everything that could possibly need to be discussed.

Yes and it took them two hours and they absolutely did not waste any time. It really does take two hours to cover everything wrong with Rome II. They actually had a debate about whether this game is as bad as EA's recent Sim City and all agreed it was a close call.

Revealingly, one topic is the enormous pressure they are put under as professional revewers to give games like this a high rating. The one guy (with the British accent) who gave Rome II a seven said the only reason he did so was out of fear he'd be hounded by the industry if he scored it any lower.

The truth, y'all. Have a listen.

https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/

[Flitcraft]

Hey everyone, Rob Zacny here, the host of Three Moves Ahead. Glad you're all enjoying the episode. It's confirmation I'm not going crazy.

I wanted to say something about what Fraser (the chap with the Scottish accent) said and the pressure to score things high, because I feel like that's getting a little twisted here.

Fraser scored Rome 2 as high as he did because he enjoyed the late game quite a lot and it made up for a lot of flaws for him. Whether he'd still score it as a good game if he reviewed it again a month from now, I don't know. Reviews, especially those done on a quick deadline, are difficult and scoring them can be tricky. You're talking to a guy who played the original Elemental from Stardock (a game so bad they had to basically refund everyone who bought it at launch) and gave it a "B". I'd had an okay time with it, didn't see what was so awful. Months later, after it had been patched, I went back and discovered that I'd been very wrong. I'd confused vaguely pleasant boredom, and excitement for what Stardock were TRYING to do, with it actually being a good game. So sometimes we just get things flat out wrong, or we are just in a more forgiving mood at one moment than we would be at another. No pressure involved.

As for what I did say on the show, my main point is that there is rarely any positive to giving a game a bad review. This goes for big ones and small ones. There's this image of critics being like that character in Ratatouille, Anton Ego, and just living for taking down someone else's work. But that's not really the case. It's more fun to play a good game and share it with other people via a good review. It's less fun to take a hammer to a bad one.

There are a few reasons for this. One of the biggest ones, in my experience, is that it's actually exhausting dealing with readers and fans who feel that a bad review is a grave injustice. My skin is pretty thick these days, but getting feedback on a really brutal review is a lot like drinking two-day old cold coffee out of a boot. It may not hurt you, but it'll leave you feeling a little unwell.

The other thing is that, for a lot of people who are in my shoes, you're not just a reviewer. Bad reviews can damage relationships that are useful. Part of it is, yeah, you know that every bad review is probably going to make for a difficult advertising sales meeting down the road. It's not my problem and I don't think most reviewers are concerned about this, but the awareness is still there on some level. But it's not a major factor, and there's a reason we didn't focus on it in our discussion around 1:20:00. We mentioned it, then focused on some of the real issues with reviews.

But for me, I find bad reviews a little more stressful because I love to write features about game development. I like to know who makes games and why the make decisions they do. I sure would like to know what the heck happened with Rome 2, for instance. So for me, when I write a really bad review, I'm also probably remembering perfectly lovely chats I've had with some of the people who made the game, and hope that sometime down the road they'll trust me enough to talk frankly about their work. Tearing their work down makes that harder. Perhaps I should focus on just being a critic, so I could do that job better and with fewer conflicts, but darn it, I like working on a bunch of different things. It's one reason I became a writer.

And then there's a real simple fact that with a game like Rome 2, nobody expects it to be like this. I was confident, and I'm sure Fraser was confident, that after Shogun 2, Creative Assembly had a handle on their series. Confirmation bias can be a challenge to get past.

Add these things up, and I think that explains why games like Rome 2 (and a lot of others) get the benefit of the doubt. Look at how rarely games, from indies to AAA, really get awful reviews. Most of the game they get middling scores to mildly positive scores. That's not really down to publisher pressure. It's just a lot of forces pushing upward on reviews scores. More importantly, they're not the kind of thing you think, "Hey, I'd better score this game higher than it really deserves." Instead, it's the kind of thing that makes you think, "Eh, I guess it's all riiiight. It was sorta fun."

So it's not really about a fear of "being hounded by the industry". It's just an acknowledgment that for a lot of us who work in this area, there are a lot of things we've internalized that lead us to giving more games the benefit of the doubt than perhaps deserve them. It's something a lot of us are aware of and try to correct. Sometimes we're more successful than others.

[Huberto]

So it's not really about a fear of "being hounded by the industry". It's just an acknowledgment that for a lot of us who work in this area, there are a lot of things we've internalized that lead us to giving more games the benefit of the doubt than perhaps deserve them. It's something a lot of us are aware of and try to correct. Sometimes we're more successful than others.

Hey Rob -- thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts here.

You are quite right -- none of you said you feared being hounded by industry. That was my characterization and it wasn't correct. You said exactly what you what you wrote: that there are negative repercussions from writing a negative review, some from fans, some from developers you may have relationships with, and that there's always a vague awareness that advertisers may get crabby about it.

But...

When you are honest in trashing a game that deserves to be trashed you do us all a great service -- that is you help make games better. Developers, fans and advertisers may not like hearing it, and it may be a bummer being negative, but we desperately need critics fighting for better games and especially games we all love like the Total War series.

[2gutter67]

Thanks for clearing things up there Flitcroft. Thinking it was all some gigantic corporate pressure scheme was starting to scare me a little.

However I still think you guys sitting down having a chat about the game was by far the most accurate reviewing I've seen or heard for Rome II thus far.

By the way, I absolutely loved the way you guys called it a therapy session and I have to agree that after you guys got everything out, I felt better. It sounded like I had personally just sat down somewhere and ranted at the world for two hours and got out all the things about the game that I felt.

[Modestus]

Thorough and intelligent review!



Idle Thumbs (three moves ahead) podcast plays Rome II and pronounces it as an epic fail in almost every way:

https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/

I posted this already and not a single response, I guess I should add more drama to my titles.

Very well done have to agree.

[daelin4]

The feeling I get from this game is one of a failure in project management. For example, whoever wrote the encyclopedia seems to have no idea what the game is about and just put in base stats and some historical info. Most of the information either don't really translate to functions in the game nor explain many of the mechanics. It felt like the guys that wrote the encyclopedia didn't really communicate with the guys that made up the details, who in turn don't communicate with the people that do the coding and AI and so forth. So it doesn't feel like a product made by a team, it feels like a product made by a group of people working separate parts that don't weave together to form a coherent fabric. If certain things feel somewhat right, they will feel awkward when placed alongside other parts of the game. As for trashing a game, I think that's more the responsibility of the developer in making a game that suits the consumer. If I wanted a game to be like this and communicated quite often about how I think it should be like this, is it a fault in my part that the developers thus make a completely different product that I would naturally dislike?

[Elmar]

Hello Mr Zacny, big fan of the podcast here and this one was certainly much anticipated and much enjoyed. Nods of recognition and approval throughout!
I hope you re-visit the game, however briefly, when you have Tom Chick on the 3MA podcast in future. And not merely because he not only emptied his clip and saw a need to reload the gun!
But I think it would also be a most interesting opportunity to delve deeper in how games in a shape like this can get the review scores it does. It was touched upon briefly but it could stand to be fully explored. And I am confident that Tom Chick has some opinions he is willing to share on that.
My particular point of interest is not so much the "what happens if you give a game a poor review" angle but what happens to reviewers that give this a poor game a positive one. Does it hurt the reviewers credibility and is a magazine/site's reputation in this area even particularly valued in a business sense?

PS
In your justified annoyance over flaming arrows, did you perhaps overlook the inclusion of flaming javelins?

[craziii]

I disagree with alot of their opinions.

I don't really care if a review is positive or negative, but it must make sense. the reasons they gave on their dislike of the province system was........... well, they don't make any sense. it sounded like mindless bandwagon. from the very start, that puts a huge negative light on their entire podcast.

[daelin4]

I enjoyed it, sometimes it feels good to know someone actually dislikes the game as much or for similar reasons as you do and at least explain why.

I kind of want them to do a second session.