Strategy games

This article is a long read of the experience of one of the game developers at CA that worked on Rome 2.

It seems that the project was hit by many problems, from incompetent team leads going ahead (despite QA telling them of the issues) while marketing was of course making everything look perfect.

The game seems to have been hit by dubious features (I think we all know that one, such as ROC campaign or the realm moba style fights as examples ), higher priority to marketing efforts (don't we know it all and see it everywhere even in movies/tv shows those days) as well as lack of communication between teams (katarin and her sled missing as a perfect example in WH3 as well).

It seems that a lot of the issues which we guessed for a while come from leadership, this was quoted by the author:

''Total War’s leaders seemed to resent critical feedback and treated it as unwelcome. It was common for important decisions to be already treated as final by the time they were communicated to those of us in the trenches, if they were communicated to us at all. As there was no formal process for sharing feedback on creative or management decisions during development, most staff simply relayed their concerns to their peers and maybe their line managers, rather than risk confrontation with those in charge. This culture of design by authority rather than collaboration allowed the team to make serious mistakes that could have easily been caught early if the wider team had been able to express themselves.''

''Programming leads would usually think carefully about whether or not a change warranted the risk of unintended consequences close to release. But they weren’t in charge of the wider team; it was designers who called the shots on Total War.''

'' To make matters worse, designers often left a lot of the detail of the design work to programmers during implementation, so programmers often had the responsibility for a lot of the design details in practice, but weren’t really given the credit or autonomy that should have come with it.''

This quote makes a lot of sense, since realistically it made us left scratching our heads too on why they would think some features in WH3 would be acceptable or that they would keep the players entertained.

It also once again refers to leadership, since the leads of design were applying the same logic on their team apparetly.

'' But designers who were lower in the chain of command sometimes shared with me the treatment they received for raising concerns about their bosses’ decisions and that definitely helped me understand why criticism usually came from the programming and art departments rather than from the wider design team''.

''This didn’t surprise me because I’d experienced some of that myself, with design leads sometimes losing their temper with me or others and raising their voices or speaking harshly. I think it’s fair to say that the behaviour of some in leadership could create a toxic work environment that caused valuable feedback from the team to be suppressed.''

This makes sense why so many at CA quit and go work somewhere else, after all no one wants to work in a toxic workplace.

''Design leadership’s control over most aspects of development created a lot of problems that went far beyond game design. One significant problem was that the programming team wasn’t in charge of its own priorities, meaning they weren’t able to prioritize improvements to the engine, or to tools and infrastructure, or to address growing technical debt. Programmers were very aware of long standing technical issues with engine, gameplay and AI, but the design department tended not to recognize these issues as important, and it was difficult to properly address them when design leads were reluctant to assign any time towards doing so on the schedule.''

This part actually hits at home for many of us working with incompetent management where you tell specifically that X action will cause consequences and they ignore it until it hits them in the face and they realise that it is really as bad as you predicted but still act shocked.

''Creative leadership appeared to place a lot of importance on the number of new features added to Total War games, and the available time on each project tended to be filled up with new features and design changes, which almost always took priority over other work''

This quote seems to be a plague in the tech industry OVERALL not just CA or gaming, since I see the issue in the field I work despite being completely different from gaming (and management trying to churn new features asap so they can brag to the clients or to put their name on the new shiny project).

''Probably the most unpopular new feature was capture points in open land battles, which caused immediate controversy when they were first shown to the public at an event prior to launch.'' ''My understanding of the motivation behind the change was that it would prevent the “corner camping” tactic, in which the player uses the corner of the map to protect their army from flanking manoeuvres when defending. I suppose it would have been nice to find a way to discourage that, but sticking a victory point in the middle of every map is a cure far worse than the disease. During development I made my feelings about this known, and everyone on the team I spoke to outside of leadership knew it was a terrible idea. When the backlash came, there was little surprise. Some leaders who had hyped the feature as having a “transformative effect” on battles, later pretended they had always been opposed to them.''

Why am I not surprised that clueless leadership thought that capture the point was a brilliant ''feature'' players would ''love'' ?

''Bizarrely, the same leadership team that was pushing for improvements around human drama also decided to remove existing features that already served that goal. Pre-battle speeches, where the general issues a stirring speech to the army at the start of a battle, were removed in Rome II after only being reintroduced in Shogun 2. They had been a popular feature in Rome: Total War, Rome II’s predecessor, but hadn’t been included in Empire and Napoleon. I was the developer who designed and implemented the pre-battle speeches in Shogun 2, working with writers and cinematics staff, and had ideas for developing the feature further in Rome II. The reason given to me for their removal was the cost of voice acting, which seemed really unfortunate given the budget and expected profitability of the game, especially considering that “human face” was now a central design pillar.''

Clueless leadership thought that capture the flag points was a great idea but not pre-battle speeches somehow. WHY CA? WHY?

''But there’s one aspect of the design direction that’s especially relevant to this discussion. I think the way most people look at the AI in Total War games is to say well, the AI has always had problems and it’s never really gotten much better, I guess Creative Assembly’s programmers just aren’t very good and don’t know how to do AI. I don’t think many people have considered that the AI is to some extent the way it is, on purpose. I can attest that at least some of the AI’s deficiencies at the time I worked there were by design, which is to say that designers instructed us not to improve it in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that.''

The AI seems to be dumbed down on PURPOSE. This particular point really irks me, because in WH3 they basically make the AI cheat in 1000x ways instead of having a natural AI difficulty. I prefer personally a smarter AI that can do things I cannot expect over the AI that can cheat and churn 2 stacks when they have one settlement or an AI you ally that suddenly becomes braindead and loses their cheats and proceeds to lose most armies because it is badly designed.

''There were also many cases where features were added to the game that would give players advantages over the AI, but we were instructed not to add AI awareness for them, or were told that there was enough time on the schedule for the feature itself but not for the AI work associated with it, meaning that these features just became more tools for the player to use to defeat the inadequate AI.''

This one sounds about right and goes into the leadership's belief that the players are stupid and cannot possibly fathom dealing with the same time of tactics they use be used against them by the AI.

''If it hadn’t been for the negative reception of these capture points prior to launch we would have had an even worse time than we did. Total War is marketed as a strategy game and there have been statements and promises over the years about AI being a priority, but the reality when I worked there was that new features were always prioritized over AI improvements even if they directly made the AI worse.''

This unfortunately we see it too well in most of CA's recent games.

''It soon became clear however that the state of Rome II at that point was considered good enough by leadership, and that the patching process would be wound down, the game rebranded as Emperor Edition, and myself and others moved onto new projects. This decision went against my wishes, as I would have happily continued to work on Rome II into the future, and believed that it should continue to be a priority for the studio. Rome II was selling well, and there was an extensive plan for further DLC development, so it seemed reasonable to me that we should continue to support and improve the core game itself.

The cost of keeping a small team of developers on the project would have been easy to justify, but there were now multiple new Total War projects in development simultaneously, and they needed AI programmers as well. Not only that, but it was explained to me that leadership was concerned that Attila would be perceived as being too similar to Rome II, and therefore improved AI would be a way to differentiate it and make it more appealing to consumers.''

This point actually is important because we hear often CA say that they have multiple teams, however this shows the reality and the fact that people get pulled from a specific game for another game for various reasons.

''After all of the post mortem feedback was given and discussed, it was collated by a central leadership figure who then sent out a team wide report stating their official conclusions. It was a whitewash. Production and design failures by management were minimized and largely absent, and an alternative narrative was presented that Rome II’s problems were caused by the new developers who had joined the team since the older games had been made. The more senior staff, the statement explained, had failed to impart to the wider development team knowledge of the “secret sauce” necessary to the making of a successful Total War game. The argument went that because the leadership had made games like Rome: Total War in the past, Rome II’s problems simply couldn’t have been their fault. Rome II, it was now being claimed, was really just a remake of its predecessor which was a success and so its problems must have been caused by those new to the team.''

This one is really annoying, because it basically tells on how incompetent management was excused and the blame went on CA developers and effectively other departments for failing to create ''the vision'' even though the way the project was management it was doomed to fail.

''Much of the work I did on Attila was a continuation of work I was doing on Rome II, improvements to siege and battle AI, but after moving to the project it didn’t take long before I started to see the same old problems emerging on this project as well. The first issue was that once again we were not being included in design discussions, and features that impacted AI development were going into the game without anyone informing us. Since we had been given assurances that this situation would improve, I made sure to speak up about it each time I became aware of it, and that led to conflict with Attila’s leadership team, who didn’t feel they owed us any such communication. Not being informed of design changes meant I had no chance to develop AI for them, but leadership simply did not care.''

This is after Rome 2 and discussion about Attila and the same pattern occurring once again.

''I stopped getting invited to meetings to discuss features that impacted AI, and when I complained about that, I was told that they were very selective about who they brought into meetings so that it was easier to make decisions. I pointed out that of course it’s easier to make decisions if you exclude people who know of reasons why a particular choice might be the wrong one, but it greatly increases the chance of making the wrong choice. The design lead told me the only thing that mattered was that they made decisions as quickly as possible.''

This part we know it too well, we all remember what happen when fans revolted for SOC and CA came out swinging trying to get people to back off and made things even worse with their dlc ending in overwhelmingly negative rating.

The dev also talks about issues he had with the management that was doing the same thing all over again, multiple issues with the teams and also his unfortunate reputation tarnished since he was associated as one of the main people to talk confidently about Rome 2 (he was involved specifically with AI) as well as CA being more than happy for him to be the scapegoat.

It is unfortunate to read this, because it reminds me a lot of Warhammer 3 and it also makes me think that pretty much every project CA will put out will face the same fate over and over again.

I recommend to read the article on your own, it is rather heavy and lengthy but it talks quite in depth about CA as well as production issues and decisions.