Now having read most of the article, and having done quite a bit of game development myself... it sounds like a large amount of the problems with Rome II and the engine they were building was the navmesh.

The navmesh is a sort of 3d mesh where the center of every triangle defines a node on a graph which can be used for pathfinding using algorithms like Astar.

It sounds like they needed people to manually create and optimize these for various maps rather than using an algorithm to generate it automatically.

Additionally there's this big issue with sea battles where each little boat has a little moving navmesh which little soldiers can move around on, including when the ships actually land and have to make the boat navmesh connect with the land navmesh at runtime.

Altering navmeshes at runtime (which are generally static stack allocated) is sure to lead to a bunch of stale references if the code wasn't architected to be flexible to begin with

This sort of detail is probably lost on non-technical folks and needs to be clearly communicated early on.

At the end of the day, I have much fonder memories of capturing the Black Ship in Shogun 2 (which used the old two navmesh system separating boats and land), and virtually no memories of landing troops in sea land battles in Rome 2. The feature was not important to gameplay, but requires refactoring the whole damn navmesh system!

> Let me give you a concrete example that demonstrates the relationship between the programmers and design leadership, and led to problems that contributed to the bad launch state of the game. One of the main new features included in Rome II was combined land and naval battles. Since Empire we’d had naval battles, but they were completely separate from land battles, and the codebase had been developed without any expectation that they might one day be unified. What that meant was that you had one part of the codebase that handled land units and land-based combat, and another part of the codebase that handled ships and naval combat, and neither half had been designed with the other in mind. The battle programming team was asked to deliver combined land and naval battles as a core feature in Rome II, and our lead warned that combining those parts of the codebase would require a lot of the code to be changed, and that it would create a lot of bugs that we would spend most of the project dealing with, and we couldn’t guarantee that it would be stable by the end of the project.

> Leadership said to do it anyway.

I don't really see the leadership problem here to be honest, because of feature is difficult to do (because ambitious) does not mean it does not deserve to be done. I guess the problem was more that the time to execute was too short. An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

The developper sounds like he may have been a bit difficult to work with at times.

However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late, how could this allow any meaningful testing and feedback before going live?

This is a fun one:

> As far as I know, the only significant example of a “human face” gameplay feature that made it into battles was the cinematic mode that allowed players to control an individual unit from a close third person perspective. This was similar to the unit camera that existed in previous Total War games, but arguably worse because it forced the camera very close to the unit, reducing players’ tactical awareness.

> During testing it became clear that no-one was using this feature, and design leads were unhappy that a feature they had spent a lot of time on was being ignored by players. They then announced that a combat bonus would be given to units while in this camera mode in order to encourage its use, which prompted controversy with programmers arguing that the camera mode should not influence the outcome of the battle.

> Eventually design leadership settled on the following compromise: The user interface would tell players that it gave a combat bonus, but the combat bonus wouldn’t actually be applied. They wanted to explicitly lie to players in order to trick them into using an unpopular feature so that they could save face. I honestly don’t know whether a combat bonus was applied in the end, it’s possible that the button is still lying to this day.

> This is an approach that is sometimes taken when planning game projects, that you design your production plan so that as many parts of the game as possible are made in parallel, and then it all gets put together near the end of the development timeline, hopefully with enough time to fix bugs, balance gameplay, and add polish.

I feel like all AAA games are developed this way: Not playable till very late. Thats why they generally suck.

While a normal board meeting style development, i feel completely bamboozled by this approach. Indie games in contrast usually start with an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, to test the basic concept. Then make the basic game loop fun. Then do the rest of the game like maps, sound, graphics, to support the central idea.

AAA do all the graphics and maps and sound and AI first, somehow merge it together and just hope that it will be a "good" game, that it will be fun. Even if there is internal QA or playtesting, feedback gets consequently ignored.

And people still preorder.

I can't believe it's been 10 years since this game came out.

Rome I still has a special place in my heart. Probably spent more hours playing that game than any other. Even inspired me to read some Plutarch to learn about the lives of famous generals.

Rome II was somehow a worse game. Especially weird because it came right after Shogun 2 and its amazing expansion pack which are the best games in the series bar none.

Quite honestly none of those games have particularly good AI

I love the Total War games. I missed out on Shogun 1, but after that I've played almost all of them from Medieval onwards. I still figure Rome 1 and Medieval 2 as the best overall versions of the game.

Rome 1: Playing the Romans was amazing, all the way to the corner where you could try expanding with the Egyptians and running into the Roman might.

They basically perfected the simple gameplay loop in this title. Later on they would make changes to make managing cities less onerous (good), but would introduce the concept of Generals to rally armies with (terrible). In later games you would need to move your General back to a city (and even later just in the province) to recruit, then you could set out again to fight. In Rome you you'd usually want your General on the frontlines in enemy territory to fight and you would create units in your cities back home and then send them out to join up to the army in small groups.

What this caused is that often you would have random small numbers of units fighting other enemy groups, so you'd have to finely decide if you could win a 3v4 battle, or if you needed to delay to get a few more units there. This added a randomness to both fights and how the maps played out. Today all of the TW's play exactly the same. They give you an initial fight you're meant to win, then you have to build more units until you can go and capture the next city, rinse and repeat. Eventually you have enough support and you create a second army. While you're expanding, because there are a lot more opponents now, you will get stabbed in the back and have to move your single army back. With Rome 1 you could decide to have a percentage of your units in front busy conquering, while roaming non-General group(s) could be back at home to defend.

Medieval 2: The generic starting European factions were less fun for me, so I switched to the Egyptians (with whom I had also conquered the world with in Rome). Playing them wasn't too hard until the Mongols showed up. Due to unit compositions it would take about 2 of your full armies to beat 1 of theirs without suffering too many losses, and they would show up with at least 3 armies who would roam and burn everything. It took some serious strategy to out-maneuver and beat them. Overall strategy wise this is still the best Total War game.

I'm going to be honest: I was playing Rome II as this article came up. I didn't play Rome II right at launch, but bought it a couple years on. I play it with mods (DEI). I previously played Shogun 2 (and associated expansions) and Rome: Total War

Overall, I quite like Rome II. And for all of the (valid) criticisms which can be levied at the incomplete state, I am glad many features such as first person command of naval and emplaced artillery ultimately made it in. Due to a modding community, such features become more complete, adding dimensions to amphibious battles which were initially missing. While I do acknowledge these are in many ways labors of love by game devs (or hobbyists) I do hope that ambitiousness in features isn't ultimately abandoned in game development.

I wish there was a "refund point" way of purchasing games: purchase a partially complete game, upon successful delivery of a feature (amphibious landing, nav succes, etc.) it becomes non-refundable. I feel like this may smooth over these issues, but I ultimately know very little about the domain. At least looking 10 years back, I can say I'm happy with Rome II with mods.

Total War games confuse me a good bit. I have played a couple mostly blind. The combat seems interesting but the game loops seem really, really bad for campaigns. Like, the game inevitably snowballs as you grow in power and after a very brief period you have little incentive not to to just auto battle everything because whatever mechanical advantage you might get from being better than auto battle; you’re going to lose less time irl just tanking the loss and spending a bit more game time to regroup (which rarely had a consequence). And it becomes a huge grind because you need to be constantly clicking on cities to boost income that you don’t really care about.

I’m curious what fans have to say. It seems to be that the experience would be vastly improved if the campaigns focused on small scenario sections with little to no kingdom management and just a series of planned battles that you must get through with predefined set of resources.

The problem that everything is good because it's profitable is quite insidious.

Usually, these early warning signs don't come into effect until much much later. And by then it's almost too late. See total war nkw with the latest Pharaoh release. The debt collector has come to get their due, with interest.

Rome: Total War was probably one of my top three favorite games growing up as a kid. The House of Brutii was probably my favorite faction, even after trying a couple mods like Extended Greek Mod which tried to round out the non-Roman factions with greater strategic depth. The sheer sense of scale and the "just one more turn" mechanic with macro-scale strategy zooming into tactical micromanagement in the battle layer was such a compelling formula, and I even listen to the OST every now and then all these years later. Absolute masterwork of a title.

In contrast, to this day I have yet to play Rome II: Total War after the backlash from its "disastrous launch."

> I’m a developer who takes pride in the quality of his work, and Creative Assembly turned out to be a bad fit for me having had that mindset.

That is probably the best summary of the whole article. From playing the modern TW games myself, it does ring incredibly true. There is no commitment to quality in CA's process.

For those who like to read these sorts of posts through a case study lens, it's likely of interest to take a look at Mick Gordon's statement[0] on Doom Eternal.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33532078

Reading accounts like this has lead me to the conclusion that for any non-trivial sized project, the overall project management and effective cooperation between people (or often teams) is probably the hardest thing to get right.

And I’m not saying that it’s the “project manager(s)” who are the most important role, because most roles are actually equally important, if one role gets it wrong, the whole project has the potential to fail.

Let’s look at Hollywood movies quickly, your average person looks at headline names in movies like actors, directors and sometimes composers, but these roles while being essential contributors to a successful movie are by no means the most important roles within a movie project.

Movie projects are the work of hundreds of people and any successful movie is a somewhat monumental achievement of everyone doing their part at the right time so as to not delay parts for others and cause cost overruns. Think of shooting a scene, you have at least dozens or hundreds of people on a set and if someone comes unprepared on the day, they’re burning the salary and equipment rental costs for everyone and everything there.

Software development can be the same, rockstar or even smart developers aren’t the “most important” due to their coding skills on large projects. Of course competent technical skills are essential, but success is largely a factor of how effective communication is between all members of a project, this is from developers/QA/artists etc at the lowest level all the way up to the executives.

Everyone needs to be on the same page as to what’s most important right now, what the road ahead looks like, and spotting potential issues so they can be addressed.

According to this blog post, a large amount of the problems with Rome II were that everyone was working in silos and the risks and challenges of trying to integrate everyone’s work at the final hour was largely ignored by management.

Certainly project management here was largely responsible for the problems at launch.

For the love of all that is good and wholesome, DO NOT USE MEDIUM.

Here is what Medium looks like to someone who was considering spending their time to read your content:

https://imgur.com/a/do-not-use-medium-WhK3omB

EDIT: Apparently imgur is thoroughly enshittified as well. I didn't notice, I'm using Firefox with adblocker. Try this url instead:

https://i.imgur.com/AIrZmUp.png

I love the Total War series, but clearly some games in the series are very derivative and were just created to fill a certain historical time slot.

The first games seemed pretty unique (Shogun/Medieval/Rome) as they coincided with significant graphic and gameplay improvements.

Most games after TW:Shogun 2 in 2010 seem pretty derivative, with the possible exception of Three Kingdoms, and the game loop is still essentially the same (get early advantage - build up provinces to advanced units - steamroll everything).

Having spent hundreds of hours in that gameplay loop earlier, I just can't bring myself to play it again, despite better visuals.

>>> many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint

I don’t think that is a believable stance anymore.

Social media does not make people say or do stupid, offensive or unlawful things. People do them and social media makes it easier to find what they say.

I think a major cost to the police in future decades will be finding people who just threatened to kill stranger and caution them. It’s all Part of “this is the society we want to live in” cost

Reading this is bizarre, because I played a lot of Rome II and enjoyed it. I experienced very few problems with it (except the technology tree is tiresome and just feels like paperwork to navigate… I want an auto mode for that).

Some people just play things and enjoy things and have no idea that there is controversy.

Death threats over a game? jeezuss.

Honestly I remember playing Rome 2 and not thinking that it was that bad. I played it for a while and thought it was really entertaining. I don't remember it being particularly buggy at launch, but being 14 I probably wasn't all that discerning.

But in any case it and Attila didn't quite grab my imagination like Rome 1 and Barbarian Invasion did, and I'm not sure why - the later two were better graphically, more realistic, had more features, but even when I've been working on my own game I still feel indebted to Rome 1. It definitely wasn't childhood nostalgia because I only played Rome 1 the year before Rome 2 came out.

Maybe it's that the lower-fidelity graphics give you more room to imagine, or every settlement being able to be upgraded to the maximum, or the lack of a region system making the world feel bigger.

FWIW Rome 2 is the only Total War game I return to frequently. It's a good game now - better than its successors anyway and up with Shogun 2 (which hasn't aged that well in the graphics department as Rome 2 though).

What is the solution of this management problem? I imagine someone may say "agile" but does that make the experience of developers and users better or worse?

I remember those times, I loved the total war series dearly, and was burned by empire total war, which was a total mess at launch and never got quite to the point where it was an engaging game, due to the constant ai mishaps, bugs, wonky unit balance and a naval layer that was just tacked on hastily.

I agree that the backslash was unfair to te single dev, as the entirety of RTWII was a mess, for example with the new building system which was adding complexity without gameplay, or the larger map being too porous for the way a total war game played with unit stacks, and there was frankly too little time for a single dev to make a dent into years of layered systems

the thing I remember tho is that Sony was largely blamed for the downfall, not CA, and not single developer, at least in the more "sane" part of internet. Without taking away from this person personal experience, which sucks, I don't think the reputation damage really extends further than the few nut cases that obsessed over him

that said, I enjoyed reading the retrospective, and I look forward to KSP2 NDA expirations as well.

The fall of CA has been sad to watch, many studios wrestle against a similar fate once the money and grifters roll in.

> All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint, i. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety).

While I understand how, from the public perspective, you can be despised by the work and influence of powerful individual that can shape collective narrative and "destroy the things you love", I'm always a bit confused about death threats. I get this come from a vocale minority, not the majority of the mob, and maybe linked to a Flanderization of view on a public yet anonymous space that most often than not have no real will to be executed, but still, how you end up being that kind of a person ?

> An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

And what if the leadership/culture just responds 'screw you do it anyway, you're really elite right? You can do anything right?'. So the employees in the trench just goes on a death march because hey, passion and whatever.

And then at the postmortem leadership just plays the blame game for the broken product. Which is fine if you don't care about politicking, but now someone upside is convinced you suck and the layoffs come for you. In the author's case there seems to be even some sort of reputational harm. THIS is how the worker gets incredibly jaded.

> An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z"

Yes, and from the article it seems that the author also agrees. However from my reading the leadership was so top-down and closed minded that if you said this the best case is that you’d be told you’re wrong and it was completely achievable because they felt that it should be.

What you're missing is the notes from the prior meeting where someone told the lead of the programming team "the delivery date is ABC, there will be no delays". The time to finish development was already bounded by that, so saying "please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z" is like showing a cow a card trick.

> However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late, how could this allow any meaningful testing and feedback before going live?

This is a leadership and management problem, it doesn't actually have to be this way and is also why it can be hard to push back on requests that don't make sense because it's hard to tangibly demonstrate the issues when the game just doesn't function. And worse because games are a creative project watching something you've worked on for ages suddenly come together is a really compelling feeling and can be successful so the issue perpetuates until the grenade goes off in your hand.

I also think you're reading too much into the phrasing ten years on. In particular when he's speaking on behalf of his lead at the time rather than anything he directly said.

> we couldn’t guarantee that it would be stable by the end of the project.

He said that the time was not enough. Also, we don't know the exact way he communicated the problem.

As somebody who's worked in game dev, I can relate to the author.

You could totally argue that the incompatibility and non-modularity of the land + naval AI systems is bad design, but that does not put the blame on the author: they may not have had anything to do with it!

In my opinion, it is very much leadership who is at fault in this example. When the programming team says "this can't be done in time for release", and then leadership says "that's rough buddy, do it anyways", that's 100% leadership's fault.

> An healthier way to respond would have been...

True in theory, but a lot of the time leadership doesn't care and wants it made NOW, with no care or consideration being given to bugs, because the execs don't play games and don't know (or rather, care) how much buginess can ruin the experience.

For them it's a battle between pushing the broken version ASAP, versus taking an unbounded amount of time to properly do it. To be an exec you have to be short sighted since the only thing that matters is the current and potentially the next quarter, so you get shit like this all the time, since they're incentivized to do it the idiotic way to earn money ASAP and leave for greener pastures right after the money settles.

> However I was shocked to learn that the game was not playable until very late

That seems rather common for many projects? If you have so many pieces developed in isolation, putting them together only really starts to happen when you get higher time pressure.

Speaking as a manager, I’d much rather my team(s) tell me the plan is pure fantasy and a total joke than blow smoke up my arse. At least I have information to take to the other teams.

Generally, I’ve learned to accept that non-managers won’t communicate as well as managers because that’s the manager’s job: I’ll put the effort in to figure out what’s being said.

The only time I’d see someone as being difficult is, after bringing concerns, making a decision they don’t agree with, they continue to spout off instead of making an honest effort to get things done.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I think they did the right thing: raised concerns, tried to make it work anyway, and were let down by the leadership team. I’m willing to believe this is what happened because I’ve played TW games and noticed how they just seem to get worse. I’ve also watched experienced TW streamers rip into the faults at a mechanical level and how they’ve persisted for years while CA progressively seems to put out games nobody wants.

> "An healthier way to respond would have been "Sure, but because of X and Y difficulties please consider the time to finish development will be increased by Z""

In practice this never goes as smoothly as you think.

It's a constant antagonistic battle between management and the people on the ground doing the work. Let's face it, the devs also want to have a chill time and develop at their own pace (because it allows them to not stress, slack off, but also because they can focus on quality and the art of it, etc). Management knows about this, they just suffer from a lack of ability to tell the difference between which one the dev is doing when when he asks for "more time".

Either way, you need engineering leadership that has clear goals and priorities. Having management with non-technical people that don't trust the technical people, along with conflicting and opposing constraints, will give you Boeing and this game disaster.

We need to bring back meritocracy.

These companies somehow always at the brink of bankruptcy and have to ship shit

> I missed out on Shogun 1

I remember when I was a kid and shogun 1 was announced. I spent many hours in excitement, reading over and over gaming magazines reviewing the game announced features.

The game concept was simply mindblowing at the time. I was used to RTS like AoE and the likes, and always felt like I wanted more realism. Shogun 1 felt like a dream come true.

Such good memories.