Sega/CA shoot R:TW/M2:TW mods in the head

Sulla Felix

So, noticed a few Gb updates on Steam, went off the find out what that was about since there were no patch notes.
Turns out it's to cut out gamespy and let MP work again. Yay, I guess, never really liked MP, still play SP a lot though.
Except, they fscked all the mods. None of them seem to work now. Given a lot of the teams that made some of the better ones have moved on, fractured etc, I expect a lot of them won't be resurrected.
Maybe doesn't effect a lot of people, but I think it's kind of a shítty thing to do to a game that built such a massive mod community around itself.

McSasquatch II

Nice move by CA inevitably undermined by botched implementation. Could well be Steam's fault of course - I've read that a few people have had Kingdoms disappear from their account after MII was updated, which would of course render most of the MII mods as unplayable.

Overheal

Son, we are PC Gamers. We have full sized keyboards, and I have exactly no idea what all you just said with those acronyms.

Skerries

CA- Creative Assembly
R:TW- Rome: Total War
M2:TW - Medieval 2: Total War

dreamers75

CA patched the game to work without Gamespy, people complaining the mods dont work anymore. The modders should fix whatever issue is caused imo.

Kiith

CA don't patch out Gamespy - people complain.
CA patch out Gamespy - people complain.

As above, it's up to modders to make changes after a patch. It's always been that way. If the teams are no longer around, someone will come along and change the more popular mods, as they still have a fairly large following.

Shiminay

You know what though, it SHOULDN'T be up to a modding community to finish someone else's software especially when that someone else has charged people money for an unfinished and/or broken product. If it was an open source/freeware game, then that's cool, but it's a commercial software product and you should be able to expect that it works. If it doesn't, you have every right to complain and demand better fro mthe people who have taken your money for it.

Kiith

Shiminay wrote: »

You know what though, it SHOULDN'T be up to a modding community to finish someone else's software especially when that someone else has charged people money for an unfinished and/or broken product. If it was an open source/freeware game, then that's cool, but it's a commercial software product and you should be able to expect that it works. If it doesn't, you have every right to complain and demand better fro mthe people who have taken your money for it.

In this case, it's not about people fixing a broken game though, is it? I thought it was mods that changed the game (i.e LotR mods, additional factions etc...) that were broken with the latest patch. The game still works perfectly with no mods (well, as perfectly as any CA game works :pac:)

Modders do make games much better to be fair though. I don't think i could play an un-modded Skyrim or Fallout game now. There's just too much that they've added that i would consider essential.

I feel bad for console gamers, missing out on mods.

Shiminay

Ah, I misunderstood. It has often been said though that this particular series is broken as all hell until Modders fix it. That's pretty shoddy if it is the case (I've not played any of the series, but I did pick up Shogun II in the Steam Sale).

I wholeheartedly agree with your point about mods in general though, it's one of the reasons the PC is and will always be the best gaming platform out there. You'd be a numpty to play something like Skyrim without the essential mods listed in places like this.

nesf

Shiminay wrote: »

Ah, I misunderstood. It has often been said though that this particular series is broken as all hell until Modders fix it. That's pretty shoddy if it is the case (I've not played any of the series, but I did pick up Shogun II in the Steam Sale).

I wholeheartedly agree with your point about mods in general though, it's one of the reasons the PC is and will always be the best gaming platform out there. You'd be a numpty to play something like Skyrim without the essential mods listed in places like this.

The key difference between CA games and most others, is that the modders traditionally get deep enough access to do things like full scale balance patches for multiplayer or singleplayer. Something most publishers/developers would never let you near, all you'd get to play with is the cosmetics. Firaxis are also good for this kind of access too iirc.

This kind of access doesn't necessarily *fix* the game but you can definitely have mods that tune the game to suit different crowds, e.g. the combat realism mods for Medieval Total War II and similar. I remember one mod from ages back that heavily upped "on charge" cavalry damage but nerfed their melee damage quite a bit, totally changing the way you needed to use cavalry, along with AI changes so the AI wouldn't think they worked like the old cavalry did. You would never get to make changes like this in most games.