My oppinions/demo review.
*NOTE TO ANYONE INTERESTED*:
There are two kinds of extremes that I will try to stay away from during this post. If you should at any time feel that I'm straying too far into one or the other, feel free to enthusiastically kick me in the nads:
1) "God; I hate CA. I hate them so much it pains me to even utter their name. My hatred for these scum of the earth only heightens to new, unexplored grounds when I see some of the staggering ahistorical atrocities they commit at every turn. Like just now, when I played the battle of Otumba; I clearly saw that the gloves of the Spanish Musketeers should be a little more green. I cried.
I am currently contemplating taking CA to court for "Suckyness". And if that fails, I will seek out their studios, and violently, brutally rape and murder the whole crew with my 1337 powers of historical correctness, before proceding to pleasure myself in their blood."
...Is the overly hateful kind of critique. It exaggerates every little mini-error they've committed, and inflates it into something perverse. But worse still, is the other kind of extreme:
2) "OMGOMFG!!!1 Medieval 2 is gonna be, like, the best game ever! CA are saints. All of them. I mean; it's not like they want to make money out of their work at all. They just make a medieval game because they like us so much. I bet they'd just give it away if it wasn't for their evil publishers. I mean, we should thank them! They're doing it solely to make us happy, and we should have no right to complain or give critique for that reason. It'd probably hurt their feelings.
Of course, even if the whole of CA collectively defecated into a game cover, simply called it "Cannon Mounted Elephants: Total War", and shipped it even without the actual game included; saying that "It'd all be fixed in the next version", I would not only believe every word; hell, I'd buy fifty copies of it!"
...Is self-explanatory. I'll try not to go there.
Phew. With that little brain-fart out of the way; let me get down to it:
I will have taken it for granted that most of you have played both the demo/beta as well as the new gold-edition demo. I will at times compare the new one to the old one:
1) Graphics: I'll not go into detail, here. It's a waste of time. We've all seen the screenshots, watched the trailers, and played the game. We all know it's out of this world. The units have so high level of detail that at times it's bordering on "Ridiculous". I mean: they've given them separate fingers! Even on the medium settings, the game still looks way better than RTW ever did. The landscapes are also crazy. Flowers; trees, even the grass is lovingly crafted. The soldiers in Gold have oodles of new limbs, gear and weapons to randomly choose from than in the beta/demo. And most of all; I'm surprised at how well it actually runs!
1.5) Animations: The motion-capture really shows. In the beta/demo, the killing-animations sometimes were out of sync, and there weren't a whole lot of them. As far as duelling went, it looked miles away from RTW. They blocked, parried, feigned and dodged, perfectly synchronised with the various slashes, cuts, swipes and stabs that would be strung together in combos, and seamlessly blended together with one another. However, the soldiers armed with long, club-ish thingies and bills would perform an outrageously stupid pirhouette at every other animation. Ugh.
In Gold, they've given some and taken some, it seems. Now the soldiers have more death and killing-animations, and they all appear to be synchronised perfectly. No more pirhouettes, and all the slashes and shield-bashes are more fluent. On the minus-side though, it seems some of the units have very few combat animations. Like the Sword and Buckler -guys, for example. They seem to have rather few - not to mension sometimes weird - moves, that are sometimes repeated en masse.
Also, the combat-animations' pace, (That is; how fast they attack each other.), has been greatly reduced, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Before, they would slash, dodge, parry and attack again with brutality and rapidness. Now the soldiers kinda stand about for some time, maybe moving a bit from side to side, slashing or performing a combo, wait some more, shift the weight from the right to the left leg a couple of times, and then slash again. Exactly what made the RTW mêlèes so boring. Although these ones aren't quite as slow as those in vanilla RTW, they are still just too slow. Some people have theorised that it might be to keep the battle-pace slow. I disagree with that, something I'll discuss further in:
2) Battle pace: The battles in RTW were so fast that it was downright offensive. It was almost physically painful. For M2TW, 98% of the fanbase on the forums wanted battle pace slowed down, and I'd wholeheartedly agree. In the beta/demo, the battle-pace was stil pretty fast. Not as fast as in RTW, but still pretty fast. A reason for this were the killspeeds. It was almost humorous how a foot-knight in full plate could be taken down by one half-arsed swing from a bill. Apparently, the bill would shatter his armour spectacularely on impact, and the knight had apparently not even tried to avoid the swing.
In Gold, it's better, but kinda weird. For some reason, it seemed at times like the units had too much morale; like in the battle of Agincourt where my Longbowmen got charged from the rear by mounted knights, and didn't panic even when they had some 7 guys left. I mean... what?!At the same time, sometimes they seemed to have too little. The Aztec peasants in Otumba would rout at first chance, sometimes even before they got into combat. They would charge a few metres, then turn and rout. If the peasants were so afraid of me, then why'd they agree to charge those few metres in the first place?
It's generally speaking better, though. Some people claim that the beforemensioned unit-to-unit duelling had been slowed down to that degree for that particular reason. To make the combat last longer. IMO, that's bullcrap and they know it. The numerous mods for RTW showed that you could easily make combat last longer without decreasing the attack-frequency of the soldiers at all. Hell, most of the mods would in fact increase the soldier attack frequency and decrease the battle pace at the same time. I did it myself for the Blue Lotus mod. Go figure. Also, the lines seemed to converge less. The first guys would fight, and the rest would just stand there. I mean to recall that at least the first three lines or so would be fighting at once in the beta/demo. But don't take my word for it.
3) The demo itself: I enjoyed all the demo's three battles. I liked Agincourt, because it had an almost obligatory "Classical" setting. A pitched battle; both sides had units that functioned pretty much the same, and a nice, open field to fight in. It gave a good example of the different unit-types and their balance. (Pikemen kills cavalry, who kills archers, who kills...).
Pavia was nice, because it was anything but your typical battle. You'd have a hard time re-creating that one in Custom Battle whereas battles like Agincourt could rather easily be made that way. Also, it gave you a need to think "outside the box", so to speak. You couldn't very well win that one simply by doing the old flanking, feigning and wheeling -stuff you'd do elsewhere. You had to fight on thwo fronts in the beginning as well. Firstly you'd deal with a little detachment sent your way from the left flank as well as killing off some annoying crossbowmen to your front. After your allied general got PWNZORED by the enemy artillery, you'd have to take that out as well.
Otumba was an interesting battle in its own right, but I feel that the main reason that the battle was included, was for CA to show off one of the more unique civillizations in M2TW. It made perfect sense to include them in the demo, although I personally dislike the Aztecs a bit. They look, quite frankly, hillarious. I had a few friends over when I played it, and once we saw them, laughter abounded. Not a happy little laugh, but a harsh, mocking one. It was something fascinationg about watching an army looking like grown men dressing up like multicoloured, fluffy animals for some costume party. The generals looked pretty cool, though. If they could just ditch some of the feathers; being the towering, topless, muscular black dudes with appropriate battlegear that they were, not men in pastel pajamas like the rest, as if each and every one of them was a perverted mix of a dragqueen, a showgirl and Barney. *Fear*
Interestingly, I actually think the peasants looked best, as at least they didn't have me involuntarely humming "Her name was Lola; she was a showgirl; with yellow feathers in her hair; dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, daaaaah...", and had pretty cool, bump-mapped shields like all the other Aztecs.
The battle itself was cool. It was tough, (It's really a point of honour to the Aztecs that they look so lame, yet kick so ungodly much arse.), and reinforcements kept rippling in. I really had to hang in there, and Cortez got bludgeoned to death by those coyote wannabees more than once. Also, I got to check out the Pavise Arbalesters. *Drool*
Anyways; that's pretty much it. Thanks for staying with me so far!
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(And yes, they're a change from the Europeans, all right.)
Originally Posted by Markas
Thanks! I'm glad it didn't come to you as all negative!
