“Total War: Rome 2” was a game on my radar, but I was still quite skeptical because it was too awesome on the paper. Added to the fact that Creative Assembly completely lost all my trust when they promised one last big patch for Medieval 2. Sorry, I remember. This patch would have required the expansion tho, which caused a number of complaints from the user base since we were all asking improvements to the original campaign, not affected by new content. It’s not exactly a great policy to ask money for an expansion only because you’re interested about fixes for the original game. In the end the expansion was released but the promised patch never came out, expansion or not. They were already busy on the next game.

Now that Rome 2 is released it’s getting quite a negative backlash pretty much everywhere where I’m looking. People I’m following on Twitter and forums. Bad design choices, many technical problems, very bad performance and especially the tactical AI being very bad (which is is Total War signature, the bad AI that ruins potentially AWESOME games).

It’s not going well, but it could at least improve if CA acknowledged openly what is going on, and showed concrete signs of willingly to fix this mess aggressively. But their reply makes me even angrier at the Total Rhetoric they use and that they expect everyone swallows.

At Creative Assembly we are very pleased with the response to ROME II, with hundreds of thousands of players enjoying the game so far;

as with all large PC releases, the variety of hardware and general system specifications can cause issues for some people and we are urgently working to help get them the right experience.

Nope, not acknowledging any actual criticism.

As announced last month, we are also planning to tweak the balancing, AI routines and other features now that we’re getting real-time metric feedback from thousands of players.

See? They can only see AI problems now. The AI was always awesome in their tests and the engine ran silky smooth.

From my point of view, this lack of respect is worse than whatever problem the game may have.

I’ll keep my money.

Reacting briefly to some stuff I’m reading online:

1- Free To Play is still the place where MMORPGs go to die. It’s the place of decline and of slower death, where companies put their game so they can squeeze some more dollars out of it.

2- Free To Play is not currently proven as a successful model. I still need to see projects that make a real profit that includes the entire initial budget. Why? Because this is the model that is usually seen as “successful” for a MMO that started with normal subscriptions and then moved to F2P. Like SW:TOR. Free To Play is “successful” after a failure already happened.

3- I’d like to see numbers and statistics. How many players log in at least during a month, and then again next month. Then take these accounts that are active from month to month, and find the average of what they are spending in the span of 6 months. I want to see if they spend more, on average, than 14.99 * 6.

4- No one out there has even started to think about the only reasonable thing that the market is truly asking: LOWER monthly subscription fees. Because I do believe F2P is only competing with subs NOT BECAUSE OF THE MODEL, but because it’s cheaper. You, usually, really do get more. But I’d really like to see if F2P continues to be successful if monthly fees were lowered to be more acceptable.

5- I’ll repeat point 4 to clarify it: F2P is not demonstrating to be the better model. It is demonstrating that you are more successful with a bigger playerbase that pays less, than a smaller one that pays more. You get the exact same result by keeping monthly fees and reducing them.

6- Guild Wars 2 is very often mentioned by the media as Free To Play. It is not. You pay upfront. It’s a whole lot different.

7- MMORPGs like World of Warcraft don’t deserve monthly fees. Because they are producing EXTREMELY SLOW UPDATES from month to month. In the old days patches were frequent, weekly if not daily, and you could see that the game was making progress. It was an ever evolving thing unlike single player games. These days there’s zero progress (no work on systems, only on small amount of “content”). So no, you don’t deserve to be paid monthly.

8- In general, it’s not that the monthly fee is obsolete. It’s that the MMORPG genre has been killed and in a definite decline. We got glorified single-player. No one wants to play monthly for glorified single-player. Free To Play is on the rise because the quality of MMORPGs became lower and lower.

I was reading this quote from an Activision exec:

It’s up to them to win the value argument. If you do a focus group of a gazillion people and you show them two prices for two competitive products, 100 percent always prefer the lower price. I think from a first impression standpoint the win goes to Sony, at least as it relates to pricing. Microsoft is going to have to win the hearts and minds and convince people that the higher price point is worth it, and that it provides really meaningful capabilities that will be meaningful to consumers. And it’s a long game, so I am sure that’s what they intend on trying to do.

While it’s not coming from Microsoft, you can imagine that it’s the mantra everyone repeats over there: we must convince people that our product is better!

That’s the epitome of what’s wrong in business management. All their efforts go into CONVINCING PEOPLES.

If they actually were building a console that they wanted to sell, “convincing people” would be a secondary objective. It’s very obvious for one who still has contact with reality, that the best way for Xbox to win back customers without changing that price is about delivering a BETTER product.

They’d do their best to have a smooth and fast interface, hassle free, with the customer in mind. They’d have an online infrastructure that is rock solid and never gets in the way. If they handle all this better than Sony, and if they are able to offer a BETTER SERVICE, then “convincing peoples” comes naturally.

People buy your product, are pleased by what they find, spread their opinion.

But nope. Being a businessman means seeing the world ass-backwards. They’ll try to persuade you the Xbox is a better product through marketing.

What happened with the Xbox in the last couple of weeks is instead the actual PROOF that you can’t convince people. These last weeks have demonstrated that this strategy IS A FAILURE. They tried as hard as possible to convince us how NEXT GEN the Xbox was, and how all its limits were indispensable to go INTO THE FUTURE.

Did it work?

Did they learn?

What’s the new strategy? Convincing people.

This annoys me quite a bit. When random people jump up to defend the corporation pretending to clarify matters, when instead they are bent on deception. And maybe are even on Microsoft’s payroll.

See this guy on Reddit.

It starts with:

I’m sick of seeing all the misinformation going around the gaming subreddits. It’s really frustrating to see people furiously hating the X1 without having all, if any, of the details. I’ll try and break this down for you guys so here we go.

Only that it’s filled with bullshit. A shameless attempt to justify what Microsoft is doing while relying on the technical incompetence of the average guy.

So let’s tear it all apart.

One of the X1’s main feature is the ability to install the disc directly to the hard drive and play it without a disk. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a feature many asked for when the feature was added to 360, but it was only to allow the game to run better.

Straw man argument. No one on the WHOLE internet has complained about the possibility to install games on the hard disk. This is not part of the discussion and it isn’t IN ANY WAY justifying the other aspects.

The trick being used here is already starting with wrong premises, so that the rest of the discussion is already derailed to serve the convenient purpose.

If you bought a disc based game, you can sell and trade it to any participating retailer. It means that game publishers will work out deals with retailers in order for the developers and publishers to take a cut of used games sales. Microsoft will not receive any money from these transactions.

This is uncertain due to the way Microsoft reconsidered their official position. They repeated more than once that a game changing hands would have to be “repurchased”. It could be that Microsoft doesn’t directly put a fee on the *transation*, but if there’s money that goes into paying the “license” for the game, that money goes to Microsoft.

So it’s just a way for Microsoft to take your money while hiding the fact behind smart use of words. “Microsoft does not charge a platform fee” but it can still (and probably will) charge the game fee.

It’s as if they draw the attention on one hand, while the steal from you with the other.

It’s instead funny that no one comments on the REAL issue: if the physical disc copy is always equivalent to a virtual/digital one, what’s the difference between an “used” and a “new” game? Bits aren’t consumed. A movie you torrent on the internet doesn’t get all scratchy the more copies you make. So what’s the point of buying an “used” game? Why should we care.

DRM–WHY?

As we saw above, you will be able install your games to your hard-drive and have your entire library available to play without putting the disc in the disc tray.

This is why the 24-hour check is required. Without this, many copies of the same game could be installed into multiple X1’s and it would be absolutely crumble game sales.

The drawback to this is not being able to game offline.

No, this is you being a fucking idiot. You are stating that the 24-hour check is REQUIRED so that one can install the game to the hard disk. Otherwise one could freely copy and play the game on infinite number of consoles.

You are stating this is the reason why the 24-hour check is required, and it is TOTAL BULLSHIT.

Why so? Because a very slight change of policy would retain the full possibility of installing every game, while making sure that (1) no piracy happens, (2) not require any constant online check.

How? By simply making sure that the new copy on a different console is ONLY activated AFTER the previous one is deactivated on the previous console. This simply means that before you can do this transition, you have to reconnect the first box to the internet and deactivate the game. This guarantees that only ONE copy is ever active AND that you can play offline indefinitely without online checks.

It’s like activating CD-keys on the internet. If the Xbox network knows your CD-key is active on some offline device, it will tell you that it’s “in use” and so can’t be activated on a new box. If you want to trade you’d have to deactivate the game on your system, and then trade the game. So that your CD-key is “freed”.

This requires an online check ONCE. When you activate or deactivate the game. After that you can play as long as you want. And the 24-hour online check IS NOT required.

As I’ve stated before, you will have the control to everything that the Kinect has to offer. If you don’t want it to hear you? You can do that. If you don’t want it to see you, you can do that. Don’t want it to listen for the “Xbox On” while it’s off, you can also do that.

If you want to learn more about the Kinect’s privacy settings, you can click this link

Yes, and you fail to understand (or pretend not to) people’s concerns.

1) No one TRUSTS Microsoft. That’s why whatever they write on their policy isn’t felt as a guarantee.
2) It’s written in policies that they can be changed at any time. And no one reads policies.

With that information given to you, what I believe is happening is simple. Microsoft is shipping a Kinect with every console because like this, if you own an Xbox One–you will aso own a Kinect. With this, I’m thinking Microsoft is ensuring the developers that the market is out there! In this move, Microsoft want the developers to explore the possibilities of the Kinect. They want newer innovations as they believe they’ve made a product with enormous potential. Why do you believe they were shoving the Kinect down everyone’s throat last E3? They wanted to expand their market.

I don’t know how much Kinetic costs. Say it costs $50. That means that Xbox ONE could launch at $450 instead of $500. I can assure you that they’d sell a lot more that way.

Most customers don’t care about Kinetic and Microsoft’s choice is to impose a standard that no one wants. It’s the same they did with Windows 8, imposing a style of interface that no one wanted.

Moreover, games based on Kinetic won’t magically sell, because people who don’t like Kinetic won’t magically start loving it. Bundles of shit you don’t want NEVER worked in any market, regardless of what market it is. When it’s about hardware it’s even worse. People want stuff that does one thing the best way possible. They don’t want “packages” put together through dumb marketing surveys that tell you what you’re going to like.

Same mistake being repeated = what happens when bureaucrats end up at the top positions. That’s what happens in a corporate-driven industry. The guarantee that incompetents end up at the top, imposing dumb choices on everyone.

P.S.

Just think of everything that can be developed for the Kinect. For example, Dead Rising 3 will have a feature where it will listen outside of the game through the Kinect. If you make a loud sound while playing, the zombies will hear you and they will come after you. This is the kind of thing Microsoft is looking for with the Kinect, innovation.

Most games out there that rely on “stealth” have HORRID game design. Like Metro: Last Light. Or Dishonored. They rely on the fact you can do all sort of unrealistic noise before they notice you. It would be great if a stealth game for the first time would actually make NPC reacts the way a player would. And put them and the player on equal footing (or at least try to).

Kinetic isn’t required for good game design, nor will help it. It’s only required for “sensational” sounding bullshit like the one you described. It’s a fucking game. I want it to behave coherently with the actual game, not react to my own noise.

P.P.S.
Unrelated to this specific discussion but relevant. On the argument Xbox vs Steam: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?72831-The-XBOX-One&p=3397199&viewfull=1#post3397199