An anonymous developer has come on board the Total War forums to criticize Creative Assembly and Sega for rushing out Total War: Rome 2, which has received praise from critics but has been panned by players.
A cursory look at Metacritic reveals the source of the problems, as many aspects of the final product shipped to customers are faulty, broken, or simply unfinished. Among the commonly cited complaints are the frequent crashes, load times, UI, and graphical errors.
The anonymous dev breaks down a list of the most common issues, and explains what Creative Assembly should have done to address them:
In terms of the community using different PC systems and configurations, this will lead to multiple bugs, system glitches, and crashes. This is expected out of PC games. Anondev blames Creative Assembly here for not having taken the one to three months necessary to work all these kinks out.
In terms of game testing, problems connected with actual gameplay, enemy AI, and so forth constitute a separate issue, and should have been dealt with by the developers themselves. In this case, they should have gone through a comprehensive testing cycle, which would have constituted in-house testing, outside independent playtesting by professionals, a semi-public testing, and finally, a demo, would have taken care of these issues.
Finally, Anondev says Creative Assembly made some outright questionable choices that have ruined the franchise they built up. These include having capture the flag on open battles, restrictions on buildings, historical inaccuracies, and so forth.
Anondev also scores Sega for how they helped bring this about for Creative Assembly and Total War. Sega’s mindset of making a certain number of games at a set time and budget are to the detriment to the game development process, and that he decided his own company would not do business with them.
Of course, anonymous is as anonymous does, but does it sound like what this developer is claiming could be actually true? Could Sega or Creative Assembly cop to having messed up Total War: Rome 2 in the fashion this developer has described it? We hope the game’s makers would explain themselves soon.
Source: Total War forums
