the lack of 'emotion' ...

[SenseiJT92]

Firstly, this is not a rant thread - more of a speculation as to why there are no 'facial animations' in this game. Of course, we were promised amazing things with regards to emotion in the faces of the soldiers, however this was one of the many features that was seemingly not implemented into the game.

Now in Shogun 2; there are many, many facial animations. There is so much emotion (if you're sad like me and care to watch close enough), but it's frustrating as to why this game has the feature, but a 'improved' game on the same engine does not?

I thought about this anyway; one of the most notable differences between Shogun 2 and Rome 2 is the 'skeletons' of the units. In Shogun 2, if you go close enough to the units, layers will start to peel back revealing the skull, eyes and jaw/mouth. All of these seem to have their own separate animations (play the game in slow motion and you'll see how they work independent of one another).

Rome 2 doesn't show this. I won't mention how poor the textures look in quality to Shogun (dammit), however zooming in on the units does not show these 'other layers'. Would it be fair to say that the lack of these objects is why we don't get what was promised in the game? Could it be that CA originally had them in, but had to cut them due to the wide variation of units (as opposed to Shogun)?

If I'm way off the mark here please do tell me, it's just something that I noticed different after playing Shogun 2 today. So much polish.

[RedGuard]

asking why CA cut a feature for Rome 2 is like asking why Pepsi decided to take real sugar out of their recipe.

So those that want real sugar can now buy the new Throwback . That is, if Throwback cost 14.99 and the 'normal' pepsi cost 60.00 and should of had sugar in it to begin with

[TheCenturion24]

I agree, Shogun II was extremely polished in comparison to Rome II. Graphically, the game was obviously planned and executed extremely well and even on lower settings the game looks great. Rome II... doesn't look 'bad'. It looks murky on anything under Very High texture settings and even then, but it certainly wasn't well built. I'm curious whether the team was made up of a group of amateur modellers/texturers...?

And on the facial animations; it's just another feature they obviously didn't include for one reason or another. What irritates me is that, as you say, Shogun II had far better animations, while Rome II has taken a massive step backwards. I like to see it in one of two ways:

- Time was against them. They were forced to release the game unfinished because they bit off more than they could chew/spent to much time on certain elements of the game rather than balancing it.
- Performance issues. They have to have known it wasn't going to run well when the released it. For a team that big to not run into those problems at all during development is verging on impossible. I have a funny feeling they hastily took out a lot of features late on to attempt to improve the game, while in the process slowly ruining it. Again, we're back to the engine here; obviously it wasn't up to the task.