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!

Go back in time to the beginning of the Rome 2 lifecycle and simply proceed by iteration. Maintain playability throughout. This would’ve given them a much longer lead time on major issues with the gameplay.

It’s absolutely crazy to me that they would tear Shogun 2 down to its individual components and work on them all separately without maintaining a playable version of the game. A ton of it could be done with continuous integration, where they just have a couple of CI servers sitting in the office running the nightly build in an all-AI automated fashion. Heck you could even plug in a monitor to the server so that people can just walk over and watch the AI vs AI battles as a sanity check.

The other baffling part of the whole thing is how little communication was going on. I mean it’s baffling in terms of good design and development practices but it’s understandable from a dysfunctional management perspective.

Tearing up any part of the game engine (which dates to the late 90s) is sure to have big breaking consequences for other teams and any half decent project manager or mid level manager should be aware that this cannot be done in parallel with other activities without first really carefully communicating and engineering interfaces.

Any sort of navmesh rewrite or fix in the engine would ideally be done BEFORE non artistic assets are laid out. Ideally, they should have set out to automate the mesh generation and built artist tools for mesh editing as a major goal.

Rome II with all its faults had working cities with plazas and walls. Shogun 2 had maybe 6-8 actually distinct fortresses, where folks just line up on some walls most the time and do tower defense. The AI was always jank.

The "tower defense" gameplay in Shogun 2 was way more enjoyable than in Rome 2 though. Having a small fortress you can tightly defend against overwhelming odds is more fun than having a sprawling city where you're running foot soldiers around plugging gaps along a 20 km long wall.

The other part is the crazy requirement that soldiers be able to fight each other on boats which are very often moving around. Quite honestly naval hand to hand combat is pretty boring, but tacking that requirement on by featuring it in a trailer is an insane decision. Sounds like the marketing team wanted to do Saving Private Ryan in 200 BC. The number of times I actually used this mechanic in a 30 hour campaign was like 3-4 times, and it sucked every time. Typically the soldiers would slowly disembark (quite often literally teleporting to land) and then immediately get run down by enemy cavalry since the AI would get stuck in the "disembark" state and soldiers would stand still barely defending themselves.

Shogun 2 had many of its core problems plastered over with solid game design.

Also CI in gamedev is not nearly as common as in webdev, mainly because the state space for a videogame is far larger than for a web app. These issues are caught at playtesting and QA time, and every stakeholder involved in that process should be well aware that they are shipping a broken game.

Yes, I’m aware of that, but it’s not an excuse. Poor development methodology is rife in the game industry, leading to missed deadlines, crunch time, and shipping broken games. For some reason game development managers are absolutely allergic to good housekeeping practices.

I think the state space issue is valid if you’re developing one-off games mostly from scratch. That is not the case at Creative Assembly. They have been working on a single game series since 2000 when Shogun: Total War shipped. Fans of the series have been complaining about major issues with the AI and gameplay for literal decades. There is absolutely no technical reason they couldn’t have kept the game in a CI-driven nightly build, mostly or completely playable state for that entire time.

The reasons are entirely cultural. Compare with an open source game like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup [1]. This game has been hosted on GitHub [2] for years with continuous integration and nightly builds automatically published to test servers to play on. The game is always in a playable state and the community is constantly providing feedback to the developers as features are added, tested, tweaked, tested again, and finalized. Many of the systems in the game are tested automatically by scripts and battle simulation arenas. The developers are able to see almost instantly, for example, how a small tweak to a weapon’s stats will affect the overall balance of the game. This level of tight iteration has led to a much-beloved, highly polished game experience.

Sure, not all of this can apply to a commercial closed-source game studio but a heck of a lot of it can. For a series as long-running as Total War, there’s no reason they couldn’t have gradually built and maintained suites of automated tests for battles between AI opponents on different maps and with different unit compositions. All of this could allow the testing of different AI strategies, different unit statistics for balance purposes, and different map layouts for pathing tests and tactical situations.

The problem, I believe, is that the management at the studio views all of this polish and software quality as unnecessary and wasteful. Any development time spent on any tool or feature used only internally would’ve been viewed as a waste. They’d much rather proceed in a toxic and short-sighted fashion, looking forward only to the next game release for an influx of cash. On some level the game studio is really operating like a drug addict. It’s totally dysfunctional. It’s also not how every commercial game developer has behaved.

Blizzard in the past (1990s through 2010 or so) was very committed to software polish and high quality development tools. We know their map creation and scripting tools were polished because they decided to release them to the community for modding purposes!

[1] https://crawl.develz.org/

[2] https://github.com/crawl/crawl

Which route did you go for?

Endgame campaign.

Really shows that in gamedev, game design trumps everything.

Shogun 2 under the hood was janky as fuck, but boy did they plaster over that shit with some solid game design and playtesting.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Now consider a culture that wasn’t, as reported, particularly healthy and…

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.

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.

You can’t boot your whole game every time to do AI iteration. Whether or not the menu loads is completely irrelevant to your work. You don’t really want to integrate your broken shit with the currently working rest of the game either.

At least, that’s how I’d think about it.

If you don’t want to check in broken AI code then don’t; that’s what branches are for. But the fact that they weren’t maintaining a working master is inexcusable.

Some games seem to be made playable way earlier then in the case of Rome 2. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 and soon for Path of Exile 2 - all the content is not there yet but the main "game loop" and features are there, this seems like a great way to get feedback, and have time to adjust if necessary. In the case of Rome 2 I guess the management imposed deadlines that did not allow this to begin with. The author does speak of a demo for E3 but it seems like a small piece that was artificially setup to look good.

Valve did this a couple times by just buying out teams who made mods or interesting games - Narbacular Drop becoming Portal, that goo thing becoming the goo thing in Portal 2, Counterstrike becoming Counterstrike, then a CS mod becoming Left 4 Dead.

"Every big program that works evolved from a small program that worked" is even true for games

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.

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.

Marketing, HR, Sales and the aforementioned finance are all things that a frequently trivialised on hn, but none of them would be an easy transition for your average engineer.

I am not in gaming but I run finance at an organisation that has a lot of engineers.

1) I spend a lot of time explaining what our organisation does to our finance team. This is rare in my experience. 2) giving up on engineering focus to want to become commercially focused is a big step, and not one everyone is going to want to take. Imagine suddenly being dragged into a meeting with your holding company to explain why your project is losing money?

Overall I can't believe that they develop games like this. If you have a game about battling in Japan, and you want to make a game about battling in Rome...why does that need any programming at all? New maps, new units etc.... then maybe use it as a chance to launch the latest version of your game engine

Well the new version of the engine is what makes the programming required :p

Each new Total War game introduces some new mechanics, so obviously it needs a rewrite sometimes. As the author said, they had 2 systems that now had to be merged together, and the engine wasn't built to handle the situation properly.

Even between the Warhammer games, they massively changed things around between 1, 2 and 3, with lots of new mechanics and tweaked old ones.

> 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.

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.

At least my game jam teams have always focused on what the core game loop is first, built that, then iterated, and my AAA teams have always tried more of an assembly-line approach where there's no game at all until everyone's already feeling the pressure. Because supposedly it's more efficient to pre-plan everything and just trust that it all comes together perfectly (art, level design, system design, engineering, sound, etc) first try rather than leaving time to iterate.

Which kind of makes sense when much of generic management takes its cues from automotive manufacturing (assembly lines, Kanban, etc).

Is that actually true? Have you worked on AAA games or got this information from credible sources?

As far as I've seen the process, MVPs and play testing is a concrete phase even in AAA development, usually for each major gameplay feature, where they're tested with minimal graphics (sometimes just blocks/boxes) but still in isolation from everything else.

But, this is just gathered from the few times I've seen the process from the outside, I haven't personally worked on any AAA games.

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

Outside of the navel stuff, Rome II's combat wasn't wildly different from Rome I, Shogun, Medieval, etc. This made it kinda jarring what a step backwards it ended up being.

The original Rome Total War was probably the most fun and Medieval Total War was enjoyable.

After that it just went downhill, adding pointless features while worsening the battlefield gameplay. The first Warhammer Total War was where I tapped out - the limited size of battlefields meant it basically became a tower defence game, fought in three columns.

Reading this, seems like they became a victim of their own success.

---

Good times...

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 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.

Yeah, coming off of normal RTS games with only a few units to squads in a realistic setting was great (even though the sprites looked pretty terrible up close).

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.

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.

However, there are single scenarios and more targeted campaigns like you suggest in some of the games, I think.

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.

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

I’d been meaning to play the “new” Rome game one of these days. Thought it came out a year or two ago. Jesus, time gets weird as you age. Enjoy the first third of your life, folks, it’s 80% of your life apparently.

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.

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

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.

When you encounter an internal failure you can be certain it was because management failed in creating or actively maintaining that culture.

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

For Medium, replace medium.com with scribe.rip at any Medium URL.

The Medium is the mess.

But so are the rest.

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.

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

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

Death threats over a game? jeezuss.

Now, Doom fans are not like Disney fans. If Doom fans don't like what you've done, they burn your house down. © Mick Gordon @ GDC 2017

Also, I found the battle simulations tiresome, so I stayed on the strategic side and auto-resolved the battles.

The one big bug which puzzled me is that there is a probability indicator before you auto-resolve, yet, no battle that it predicts you will win EVER is lost. So the probabilities are meaningless. I liked that bug, though. I don't want randomness.

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.

Ignore existing and generate new technical debt? Yeah, this will cause problems years from now...

Drive death marches, promise them things you won't deliver, shit on employees. Sure, they will burn-out after the completion of the project, by that time my bonus check has arrived.

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.

People expect a DLC provide them 100s of hours of new/fresh gameplay that will allow them to play the same game for 3-6 months until the next DLC release. Comparatively you could look at the same amount of content and play 50ish hours of game play then set it down and play something else until the next DLC. Even though my play style is closer to the former, I think the expectations of the latter are more healthy. This mismatch of expectations and the pricing of any DLC (which adds in macro factors outside of the Dev's control) has lead to such toxicity on the subreddit at times.

It's also interesting how much that toxicity has subsided in recent months with positive releases, better/consistent developer correspondence. Which maybe points to my expectations opinion being a bit wrong.

Like you said, when people have literally thousands of hours spent on something, they can get passionate about it to a bit of an unhealthy degree.

I just bought WH3 the other day, and at least as a fresh player it's a crazy good game. I'm sure there's lots to be desired in terms of balance and all that, but that's the kind of thing you start worrying once you're 1000 hours into the game. For now my sole focus is "Holy shit a giant boat skeleton colossus that shoots a giant cannonball?!", repeated for every single new enemy type I see.

The game has so much content it's almost overwhelming, to be honest, so I can see myself spending the next 800 hours being amazed by everything until I start seeing cracks.

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 ?