Total War: Rome II Dev Details Post-Release Content

[Dularaki]

Do you remember the days of rome and medieval 2 when the playable Factions were just part of the damn game, not had to be paid for afterwards?

I have to say after Empire and Shogun my goodwill for these guys from rome and medieval 2 is shrinking and shrinking.

Why is it no one ever seems to worship the ground these guys walk on for the way they treat their fan base? I'd expect Jim to brown nose them at least once

Why should i worship them, for making me pay for content that should already be in the game?

Firstly, Medieval 2 and Rome 1 had many of the factions locked unless you edited a text file to play them. They would also be kinda broken without completed unit rosters, graphics, sounds, etc. Perfect example is the Golden Horde in the Teutonic campaign in the Kingdoms expansion.

Secondly, Rome 1 had 11 playable factions with three of those being copy and pasted Roman factions. With vanilla plus free content, we have 10 factions in Rome 2 that are WAY more fleshed out in terms of units, features, and mechanics. Also, the DLC culture packs flesh out the Ai factions into playable factions for our enjoyment while also adding units to the base game for a very reasonable price of $8. (Greek states is pre-order bonus also so its kinda free)

Thirdly, I am getting tired of people with terrible cases of nostalgia looking into the past with their rose tinted glasses and saying the Rome 1 or Medieval 2 were perfect, feature filled, super modifiable games. That engine had terrible hard limits. And they just left important factions out of the playable list because of time and budgeting. Rome 1 DID NOT have MACEDON playable and the Greek cities were grouped together and made no sense. Egypt looked like they were from 3000BC. Rome was three different factions with the Senate owning Rome like some strange confederation. Barbarians were not broke up into tribes and were huge empires.

Finally, Total War as come along way since Rome 1 and so has the company, CA. They are taking advantage of the new age of digital distribution to give us plenty of content for free or for us to buy. Frankly, CA today is way beyond CA of the past and I am excited for the future content and games they will create. So you and others can sit in the past, but I will be looking forward to Rome 2 and everything it has to offer.

 

[ron1n]

I'm still pretty filthy at CA for the way they handled Shogun 2.

Was a great game, granted. But the Co-Op Campaign was basically broken on release and stayed that way for well over a year until the community came up with some working fixes. That's an entire section of the game, just broken. They continually said they were fixing the desync issues and instead just kept popping out more half assed unit/faction dlc packs. The added units along with poor attention to patching also managed to ruin game balance in Multiplayer.

If they actually gave a genuine shit about the community, they'd work in tandem with the top modders and let them not only help fix problems, but work on total conversions. It's in their best interests to do so. Hell, people are still buying copies of Medieval 2 because of the awesome Lord of the Rings and Warhammer conversion mods.

 

[Quazimofo]

So, basically, they're taking core features from Rome and making them into DLC for Rome 2? Great...

See, I was thinking this at first, though then I decided to wait and see if they decide to use the extra development time to make the factions more robust than they did in Rome; Because honestly, you had 4 versions of Rome and then the rest of the factions were kinda half-assed. That, and since this game seems to be shaping up to be much larger overall than the last one, I don't think I'd even be terribly steamed at not having even more factions than are already included.

Well I wouldn't, if they weren't selling the seleucids separately.
WHO TOLD THEM I'D BUY THAT PACK EVEN IF THEY CHARGED HALF AGAIN THE PRICE OF THE GAME!?!?!
Oh wait, nevermind. It's free.

WOOOOOOOO

 

[Quazimofo]

That's fine. I'll wait until there is a gold edition on sale for $4.99, 5 or 6 years down the road. Great idea Creative Assembly!

Well it is still a great idea, because the lost sales from the patient consumers are probably made up by the DLC sales several times over.
And then you get a much expanded game at much reduced cost, albeit a while later than everyone else. Everyone wins!

 

[Amaror]

Do you remember the days of rome and medieval 2 when the playable Factions were just part of the damn game, not had to be paid for afterwards?

I have to say after Empire and Shogun my goodwill for these guys from rome and medieval 2 is shrinking and shrinking.

Why is it no one ever seems to worship the ground these guys walk on for the way they treat their fan base? I'd expect Jim to brown nose them at least once

Why should i worship them, for making me pay for content that should already be in the game?

Firstly, Medieval 2 and Rome 1 had many of the factions locked unless you edited a text file to play them. They would also be kinda broken without completed unit rosters, graphics, sounds, etc. Perfect example is the Golden Horde in the Teutonic campaign in the Kingdoms expansion.

Secondly, Rome 1 had 11 playable factions with three of those being copy and pasted Roman factions. With vanilla plus free content, we have 10 factions in Rome 2 that are WAY more fleshed out in terms of units, features, and mechanics. Also, the DLC culture packs flesh out the Ai factions into playable factions for our enjoyment while also adding units to the base game for a very reasonable price of $8. (Greek states is pre-order bonus also so its kinda free)

Thirdly, I am getting tired of people with terrible cases of nostalgia looking into the past with their rose tinted glasses and saying the Rome 1 or Medieval 2 were perfect, feature filled, super modifiable games. That engine had terrible hard limits. And they just left important factions out of the playable list because of time and budgeting. Rome 1 DID NOT have MACEDON playable and the Greek cities were grouped together and made no sense. Egypt looked like they were from 3000BC. Rome was three different factions with the Senate owning Rome like some strange confederation. Barbarians were not broke up into tribes and were huge empires.

Finally, Total War as come along way since Rome 1 and so has the company, CA. They are taking advantage of the new age of digital distribution to give us plenty of content for free or for us to buy. Frankly, CA today is way beyond CA of the past and I am excited for the future content and games they will create. So you and others can sit in the past, but I will be looking forward to Rome 2 and everything it has to offer.

That will be great if it will be like you said but i am not so sure.
After Empire, were you had Factions with different unit trees, but technology made only the line infantry better, so there was no point for any faction to use anything else but them. And Shogun were there only was ONE Faction. Before the release of Shogun they also said how every Faction will have special units, which turned out to be that every Faction had the same units, but some were stronger for one faction or the other.

Just to make this clear here:
I am not hating on CA. I think they are a great company and i love them for still making strategy games. I just was really pissed of at the dlc practices of Empire. Shogun was a little bit better (Just a little bit), but the start of Rome 2 looks a lot like they will return to the shitty practices of Empire. I hope i am wrong.

 

[Death_Korps_Kommissar]

Total War: Rome II Dev Details Post-Release Content


Russel also talked about plans to support the modding community. "Shogun 2 is our most moddable Total War to date with over 500 user-made mods on Steam Workshop alone. We hope to support ROME 2 in a similar fashion."



Permalink

Don't try treat your customers like idiots. We all played Shogun 2 and saw the "mods" that were available. Some rebalancing and new textures do not stand in the same league as the entirely new games you could get for Rome and Medieval 2.
You gimped the modder's abilities so they couldn't just unlock your paywalled content that should have been available anyway.

I really do love the look of the game itself, but shit like this makes it difficult to justify giving these eejits my money.

Actually Shogun 2 is their most moddable game, and is you talk to anyone on the TW forums or the totalwar subreddit they'll explain a lot better than I am going to attempt.

Shogun 2 is the most moddable due to the amount of modding tools available and how less stuff is hard codded into the game than Medieval and Rome.

I mean someones has slowly, but surely, been able to mod new provinces onto the original campaign.

Thing is for massive overhaul mods like Third Age: Total war, they take years to create and develop. The problem with S2 is that there are no shield animations so people have no interest in having to create their own animations.

 

[Strazdas]

Why is it no one ever seems to worship the ground these guys walk on for the way they treat their fan base? I'd expect Jim to brown nose them at least once

What is so good about selling corea features as extra DLC and alter selling Mods as DLC?

We are going to get those DLCs from modders soon after arent we?

 

[Dango]

Why is it no one ever seems to worship the ground these guys walk on for the way they treat their fan base? I'd expect Jim to brown nose them at least once

What is so good about selling corea features as extra DLC and alter selling Mods as DLC?

We are going to get those DLCs from modders soon after arent we?

Considering two of the dlc factions are free, and you get tons and tons and tons of content with the base game (as explained by other posters all factions and aspects of the games are completely fleshed out, especially compared to past Total War games) I don't really see anything to complain too much about.

OT: I'm eager to see what they can do with optimization, considering Shogun 2 had tons-o-stuttering, even on high-end pcs. I'm also glad to see that there's gonna be a lot more faction diversi-

The fuck is that

 

[BoTTeNBReKeR]

Really excited for this, but that quote about Shogun 2 being their most moddable game to date is a total crock of shit. 500 skin retextures and rebalance mods does not mean it is very moddable. Until I see something like Call of Warhammer, Third Age Total War, Roma Surrectum 2, Europa Barbarorum, Stainless Steel, or Broken Crescent like mods being made for Shogun 2, Rome and Medieval 2 will be their most modified games.

Shogun 2 is by far the easiest game in the Total War franchise to mod for. The reason why you have a ton of retextures and rebalance mods compared to the big overhaul projects like Call of Warhammer or Third Age is simply due to the limit of the game itself.
There are no shields in the game nor crossbows and all the melee weapons being used use animations that are based around Samurai fighting styles. Thus, there's a severe limit as to what you can accomplish by modding the base game.
Sure, you CAN make gigantic overhaul mods for Shogun 2, but it would require you to create tons of new animations (you would have to basically remake every single animation in the game and add a bunch of your own if you want to incorporate shields for example), which would be an extremely slow, painful and expensive process for a modding team, and nearly impossible if you would want to have the same animation standards as the base game.