nightfish said:
TheMadDoctorsCat said:
Major disagreement here with two of the above posters.
I played "Rome: Total War" and hated it. The control system is crap, the sound is generic, the graphics are rubbish
Its not a new game and the control system / graphics was the same as Medieval and Shogun.
OK valid point when you say units were identical but when it was released it was already causing problems with most systems due to requirements. Could you imagine what would happen if every model was given its own personality?
Oh and I will add for future reference - graphics do not make a game.
I agree, if they did Bioshock would be the best FPS ever released. The graphics and sound weren't my major problems with "Rome" (although I don't think they did it any favors - there was nothing particularly wrong with the sound, I just found it generic to the point of boredom, and I think there's lots they could have done to improve the graphics without putting extra strain on graphics cards.) I found the camera / unit controls especially irritating. Again, that's my opinion.
But in the end, I think my major problem with this was the presentation. I just can't understand why a game patiently explains the controls one button at a time, at some length, using a bubble in the corner of the screen. That's utterly unique as far as I know, and with good reason. Haven't the designers ever played a videogame before? Haven't they seen how this kind of thing is done? Alt-tab doesn't work when the game itself uses the "tab" key; there's probably a way of getting it to work in window mode but I haven't found it. And the .pdf manual isn't much better than the help system (although it does at least show you multiple controls on a single page).
I've never played a "Total War" game before. (In case you haven't guessed, I also have no plans to play another.) I don't want to spend half an hour flicking through the idiotic help system to work out the controls, when the same information is given in one or two full-size screens on every single game I've ever played otherwise, without any exceptions that I can think of, and including "Oblivion", "Bioshock", various other RTS games, and many more which are completely modern and which come with paper manuals (this one didn't). I don't want to spend hours trying to work out kinks in the control system. Nor do I want to spend that time working out if I'm doing something wrong or if the camera is supposed to stop in midair, etc. I don't want to play for an hour or so in a practice session and have no way to save the game so that I can go onto the next part. Nor do I like feeling like a total idiot because the manual is telling me to do something which is completely impossible because the button to do it with is greyed out. I don't know, or particularly care any more, if I was doing anything wrong. I probably was, but if it takes four hours to work out what you're doing wrong in a game then it really isn't likely to be you, it's a badly designed game!
What's particularly irritating is that given the praise heaped on it here, there's probably ways to fix pretty much everything I've found wrong with this game. It sounds like an awesome game! But having spent literally hours trying to do so and failing miserably on my own, I simply can't be bothered to try any more.
Bottom line is: 1) include a paper manual with games like this, and 2) if there's such an obvious elephant-in-the-room type feature as a save button that won't work at a particular time - explain when, why, and what the heck the player can do to make it work!
