No, not THAT sort of map.
A post on the Total War: Rome 2 forum has provided an update from creative director Mike Simpson, with regards to the current state of the game and where it’s going now. You’ll be happy to hear that they don’t feel even remotely done with the game, yet.
“Over the next few weeks there’s going to be a shift from dealing with stability and config to working on gameplay and features, while performance and AI remain high priorities,” wrote Simpson, before adding that – while this means the rate of patches might slow, as gameplay and deep AI changes will take a fair bit of in-depth testing to tune – it’ll still be a case of “weeks rather than months.” He also points out that because of the way the patch development works, any particular problems you’re complaining about on the forums might not be fixed for awhile – although patch 5 is due out tomorrow, they’re already working on patch 7.
“Our long-term plan from here is to get as fast as possible to a point where everyone is broadly happy with the state of the gameplay and AI,” noted Simpson. “After that we’ll shift modes again to long-term support. […] Our games already have a long lifetime, but by releasing occasional DLC packs and free content updates we keep working on them for much longer. This means upgrades in a number of areas which help the game evolve, and stop it becoming obsolete.”
Is that all? Not even remotely. Simpson continued by noting that the forums and the feedback are providing a good amount of help by telling them which problems to prioritise, and which features missing from this particular Total War title are sorely missed. He did, however, note that missing features weren’t necessarily “cut.”
“A lot of the game is designed from the ground up,” explained Simpson. “We aim to create a different experience every time, and that’s very important to us. New features are added, and certain features from previous games are therefore not included as they must naturally make way for different features.” Does that mean that these “missing” features are gone forever? Not necessarily. “We take your views seriously, and we’ll take them with us in the future,” he continued.
So that’s the general roadmap. As for the near future: “We’re about to roll out our largest patch yet, which contains a number of key fixes and changes. The next update will also bring you new, free game content which we’ve been talking about for a while… we hope you like it. Alongside this, you’ll see our next major step towards mod support for ROME II.”
Not the most specific of updates, but surprisingly candid nonetheless. Is this enough for Creative Assembly to win back the trust of the gamers, though? Will things be forgiven if the broken Rome 2 is patched into an acceptable state? Hmm.
Published: Oct 17, 2013 06:05 pm