Empire’s new 1.3 patch is out, and will update via internet fairy dust when you relaunch Steam. The fairly chunky list of changes and fixes can be read here. The patch includes fourteen new units to replace generic unit types for specific factions in the game. There’s also DLC up on Steam, the details of which are here. The micro-expansion unlocks fourteen elite units, including US Marines and Russian Gardes à cheval, whom, it is noted, “were selected not for their soldiering ability but more for their relative attractiveness to Catherine the Great.”
They’re bringing sexy (horse)back.
Related Stories:
“In related news, there’s a cracking Empire: Total War game diary going on over here right now”
i also started one…its very short tho=
day 1: oh ffs
anyway, i’ll give it another go with the patch…i hope everything that pissed me off has been fixed, but i doubt it has.
must be the buggiest game of all time.
I might well get th DLC as the armies are all carbon copy DULL in standard battle mode, the only mode which i play as campagain is far too vast and get on my nerbes
So DLC. I think that, after DRM, it’s a really strong signifier that actually most developers or publishers don’t understand PC gamers – either don’t understand or don’t care.
For years we’ve had free updates to games. If it wasn’t a full-blown expansion then we got it for free. There was no need to charge us for it because both the developer/publisher and the gamer understood that the game did not have to be actively supported after release, and that if it gained anything new it was a goodwill gesture or an attempt to fix a problem that the game should never have been released with.
On consoles, though, you can’t do free stuff. The console companies don’t want it, because they slice a fee off the top of all purchases. And that’s ok. Gamers never expected free updates on console – they never expected any updates on console. You can charge for things when you first introduce them.
The difference is that now they’re trying to push that out to the PC, and we’ve had free updates. There’s no reason for them to be selling us horse armour or a handful of in-game units. Save those things up until they’re a large pack of items and sell us that and we’ll accept it. Spread them out and drop them in every now and again as free updates and we’ll be grateful. Concentrate your time on developing an expansion pack and you’ll make more money and make your customers happier.
And actually, it does real damage to the game itself. The Total War games have such a strong community. Think of Rome – that game is receiving content and balance changes YEARS after release, it’s getting fresh content and appealing to players with absolutely zero effort on the part of developers. Creative Assembly haven’t had to lift a finger in the creation of something like the Extended Greek Mod, but I’m damn sure that the Extended Greek Mod and the thousands of fan-made modifications have kept sales of Rome: Total War much higher than if the game had been difficult or impossible to modify significantly.
Empire is all locked up. It’s never going to get the following Rome or Medieval 2 has, because people will play it until the vanilla content has been exhausted and then close it and not return to the game. The sales won’t be inflated by the active fan communities because Creative Assembly and/or SEGA are obsessed about picking up an extra couple of quid right now.
Empire is a buggy game but it’s a good one. It’s a shame that it might end up becoming the first casualty of its own DLC, but perhaps it’s better for gaming in general that its success is tempered by the fiasco over DLC, pre-order exclusivities and the clampdown on modders.
One thing’s for sure, and if the past has taught us anything it’s that you don’t make successful products by mistreating your fans. With The Sims 3 EA have possibly demonstrated they’ve learned a lesson from Spore. Maybe Empire: Total War will be the game that teaches games companies a vital lesson about commercial DLC.
I read the rave reviews, found the DVD in the store on the weekend, then discovered that the same game was on sale half price online – doh!
Anyway, my 2+ yr old AMD XP-M PC is sooo underpowered for this – though it’s been fine for Civ IV. I bought my GEforce 8400 when the last game I wanted to get into dissed my old card.
Even though I installed from the DVD, it only loaded Steam, then made me sign up for a login then register and download the entire ETW – luckily I have the Extreme option on Rogers cable modem. Still quite a slog.
Now the mode is released the day after I got everything done. I told Steam to keep the product updated automatically. Most of this evening it was hogging my CPU to where the mouse stopped tracking – I *think* it has auto DLed the patch, but the dopey Steam interface has no place to report what version I have installed – YEEESH!
Maybe I have to launch the package, wait five minutes for it to load, then check the version inside the app.
I loved the graphics but with a single-digit framerate, I feel like I’m in some kind of brain-disorder simulator. I tried the tutorial but ow ow ow. I’ll have to see if dialing back the detail level helps. It would be nice it that option came up automatically when the frame rate falls too low…
Clearly I’m fated to buy a new multicore box – this has turned into quite an expensive impulse buy.
Maybe I should have (a) tried a demo, and (b) bought one of the earlier games in the TW series, which all sound pretty appealing.
The Total War community is so predictable; with every new game they loudly denounce it as the worst of the series, an abomination, a terror unleashed upon this world by cruel sadists bent on world domination. Every. Single. Time.
-Medieval: Total War? They hated it. No ’special units’ like they had in Shogun and no Geisha’s? Heresy.
-Rome: Total War? My god, I still remember the 30 page topics decrying the game as the death of the Total War franchise. Especially the campaign map, man, the community hated that touch for the longest time.
-Medieval 2? No one like it, everyone hated it, called it a cheap cash-in and the like… you know, the usual complaints.
And now Empire. It’s also worth mentioning that every one of those games supposedly, I kid you not, are all somehow a step down from the AI in Shogun if the community is to be believed. Medieval has worse AI, Rome even worse, Medieval 2 the worstest, and now Empire the ultimate worstest evar.
The point is I’m getting really damn sick of it. Seriously, the only other gaming community out there I can think of which bitches half as much is the NMA Fallout fans. No Empire isn’t the best game ever, but it’s an incredible game and easily despite its flaws the best of the Total War series to date. Just like every single Total War game to date it shipped with a fair deal of bugs, and just like every one to date after a few patches and an expansion will likely be viewed with glowing rose-tinted goggles the very *instant* another Total War game is announced, which will, no doubt, then be hailed as the worst to date.
Eug!
“Save those things up until they’re a large pack of items and sell us that and we’ll accept it.”
So if they “save” them up and sell them for more money its better than if they sell less for cheaper, okay.
@Jonathan: Well, if Valve ever get tired of the Left 4 Dead boycott groups at their gates, they can always look over to Creative Assembly’s fanbase and see that other people have it worse.
I wasn’t joking/exaggerating when I said that ‘CA Fan’ is an insult amongst Total War ‘enthusiasts’. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
I play with a mod or two for Empires, but they’re small and not very big changes.
I have a smoke mod that I’m proud of, it increases the smoke and for how long it stays around for. It really does make the battles look a lot better in my opinion, just like the old paintings.
Bought Empire at release and I love it. I wasn’t really aware it was anything other than spectacular. Empire is probably my favourite Total War next to Rome; largely because they removed a lot of the fiddly bits (particularly merchants and diplomats, which I’ve always despised).
Small DLCs, I’m no fan of, however. So I’ll pass.
Hm. Never had any bug problems with Empire, not saying they don’t exist though. Out of the box, I think Empire has better AI than Rome or Medieval 2 had. Which makes about as intelligent as a halfwit, but still.
My real problem with Empire is actually not CAs fault. The new campaign map is great, the way provinces work is great. But GODDAMN how boring 18th century battles are in comparison to medieval or antique ones.
As a whole though, Empire IS a great game. Does anyone know exactly what is encrypted? I have seen several smaller mods for Empire, but if larger mods are prevented, SEGA and CA have really shot themselves in the foot.
And DLC is the devil, but an unfortunate fad amongst publishers right now.
I enjoyed it, but ran into a gamebreaking bug 3 years before I was set to win the game, I was so pissed off a deleted all my saves and uninstalled it, I havent reinstalled it since…
The game as a whole was fine, but I think the game was too big for the engine to cope with, whenever I clicked on anything, it took about 5 seconds to load which really destroyed the fluidity of the game
@psyk “So if they “save” them up and sell them for more money its better than if they sell less for cheaper, okay.”
Hobbyist made horse armor for free. You don’t need a bunch of professionals from the original company that make the game to make a horse armor. Is a travesty.
The time of these professionals is better espent in something hobbyist guys can’t do. Like a expansion pack.
But these days expansion packs are sell as full blow games… :-/
Man, gamming these days is getting rip in pieces :-(
Agree, but there is no difference in saving them up and selling them than selling them in small parts apart from your paying more money for more rather than less money for less.
I’ll have another go if the performance is meant to be better, although load times were the killer for me before.
I actually enjoy the setting of E:TW, I don’t see how it could work anywhere near the same if there were rifled barrels or automatic weapons (WWI or II).
There’s a lot of smoke and shooting, not much in the way of actually hitting, and I like that. When you lure the enemy into your carefully prepared killing box and see their neat lines of troops lose 2/3rds of their numbers in one volley … it’s neat.
Encrypting a lot of content to make modding impossible or nearly so in order to ship more DLC or create more interest in expansions is a pretty silly and dickish move, however. Part of the reason I’ve bought up EVERY expansion for things like Neverwinter Nights, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and so on is the potential that new content will be used by modders.
If people could have added in new jobs and shops and the like in, say, that Sims 2 Business expansion, or new types of locations and activities in Sims 2 Vacation, I’d have been tempted to buy those expansions. For 20-30$, a sparse collection of new content that’s going to take maybe 30 minutes to blow through is a really, REALLY bad deal.
New functionality that modders can take advantage of, however, is a gift that keeps on giving. It makes expansions truly worthwhile for the customer. Developers know that few of their original customers will actually pick up expansions, so expansions tend to have very meager budgets.
Cranking out content for a niche audience is something the fanbase is best at. Bits of rather polished content that fits into the original game, and changes to the core code to enhance moddability is something only developers have the know-how and resources to do.
No way I’m spending three-fifty on a bunch of units.
YOU HEAR THAT CA?! THE HULKSTER AIN’T NO RUBE, BROTHER!!!
Just a point, following the patch before this one I have definately being navally invaded by the artifical intelligence. Was quite a shock as I had packed my land army off to the Americas only to have a sizeable French stack appear on the Kent coast!
@Jonathan Strange: Word
DLC: Generally don’t like it, but 2.49€ for 14 new units, is not that much to bitch about.
Mods:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=243912
It’s probably encrypted to hell, but it already got more mods than most games get in 10 years, if ever.
@Serondal
Don’t mess with the nation that invented dynamite. And smorgasbord.
Amen, brother.
All the people (in this comment thread, no less) complaining that paid downloadable content means the death of free addons from developers are off their heads. The very same day that Empire gets DLC, it also gets 14 new units added to it for free with a patch! That’s fourteen times more free stuff than was ever added to the previous Total War games at any point (and I’m being generous and counting that Peleponnesian Spartan reskin for Rome, that worked for all of one patch, as an ‘add-on’).
I’d amend this to my previous post but edit’s broken as we know, and I’ve had a little more time to think. I’m sorry in advance for my long-windedness.
Trouble with developers adding new units, jobs, whatever to a game is that developers are often no better at balancing units than the community, and the customer has to accept the changes regardless. If modded units are actually overpowered, people won’t use them, overpowered or ruin the overall balance just aren’t fun. If people think the new DLC units are broken, too bad, those units can still be used against them by anyone who’s purchased them.
It’s a bit like the expansions for WH40K: Dawn of War. Imperials were gods, then Tau and Necron, while the original sides were gimped again and again. Especially (at least it seemed to me, as I loved the greenskins so) Orks, and not so much Space Marines which were always a joy to play and hard to screw up. If you wanted to play multiplayer you had to have the latest patches which meant downloading all the textures and such for the new sides.
The only match I ever really won online involved me and my teammate as Imperial Guard, vs an Ork and Space Marine player. We slowly took over the whole map and pushed them back to their bases with just tier-1 guardsmen, then mopped up with artillery. It was a cakewalk.
I’m sure it would’ve been a different story if I’d tried online again as IG, up against the new Tau and Necron. But at that point I kept to skirmishes and the new campaign, which I cruised through with ease as the Tau and their amazingly versatile Kroot allies. They were shooty as hell AND had the best melee units, bar-none, in the game. I actually like the Tau a lot but that’s fucked up Relic. :( So I didn’t buy the last expansion at all.
It was still superior to what CA/Sega seem to be doing with E:TW now, however, because at least the new sides kept feeding the mod community. Simple changes like the Half Scale mod that effectively made the battlefields several times larger by reducing speed, range, and size of units while boosting unit and building cap created a whole new, more strategic and epic game out of it. New sides, some of which were silly overpowered as well, made good foils for the new guys in skirmishes.
Similarly game-changing community modifications for Company of Heroes make me mostly forgive them for the invincible slit trenches / easily available flamer units / super-tough Brit tanks / epic German anti-tank stuff dichotomy that meant the only balancing factor vs the new Brit and Panzer sides was eachother.
Modding makes up for a lot and is a massive boost to the value the customer receives. It’s something I take for granted for any major PC release. Unfortunately, making modding impossible seems to be increasingly common. Far Cry 2, from what I’ve heard, is impossible to mod. It would only take a few tweaks to make that whole big world they’ve created an entirely new experience that I could enjoy all over again, and it’s never going to happen. Glad I got it for only 20$. If I’d known E:TW was unmoddable, I wouldn’t have been so foolish as to buy it full-price a few weeks after it came out.
I am not contradicting you, just a genuine question, as I haven’t looked into it. What’s with all these mods? Does the encryption only affect the units, while the rest is moddable? Glancing at the descriptions, though, it looks like unit stats etc. were already changed in a lot of them?
To not buy a game because you can’t mod it seems odd to me, but then I have never modded ANY game ever (yet) and still play majority of them – never felt the need to at all, yes true I may be missing out on things. Counter point being, that when I finally get round to playing stalker I will mod it given there has been so many comments regarding the graphical and little quirk fixes that enhance the game to be where it should have been. Do you not think you will enjoy the game if it can’t be modded or some sort of presumption you’ll play the vanilla so fast or it will be boring and so therefore not worth the money?
I’d like to know why on god’s green f*cking earth is it not available in Japan? WTF!?
jeremy, email the developers and see if they will send you a copy, or proxy server it through steam
The optimization is a lie. The optimization is a lie. But seriously now, I’m torn between buying a new computer to play this game (a solution in search of a problem) or just letting this thing gather dust.
I suppose one thing about the community is that players get better at battles, so every game they already know how to trick the AI or where bugs are likely to be. Rome was particularly bad at the “stand there while arrows pierce your skull” thing. Equally, Rome was just as buggy as, if not more than, Empire on release (including the enemy-will-never-attack-across-water).
Empire is still a staggering achievement, but yeah, the true hardcore are probably better served by Take Command or Hearts of Iron or the like. Empire is probably about as complicated as it can be while still dipping its toe into the mainstream (and the sales that come with it).
As for the DLC, I’m torn. I might get it later when I will use more than one of the units (currently about 20% of the way into a British campaign), but in general they seem to have worked out that anything less than the price of a pint is a reasonable candidate for a throw-away purchase.
@psyk: “So if they “save” them up and sell them for more money its better than if they sell less for cheaper, okay.”
Absolutely. A massive pack of items/units is fine. Price it cheaply and there’s no real issue. But when you’re paying £2 for a few units, or worse quite a bit of money for just a couple of exclusive units, there’s a big problem.
Yes, the optimisation is a lie. I bought it Friday, downloaded it Saturday and waited for the Monday patch because the performance was awful in any slightly-large battle. The patch seems to have changed nothing and I didn’t even know ETW wasn’t supporting multi-core until the patch notes came out.
It’s still not using my multi-core functionality now and I’ve seen no improvement.
Noticed better performace on the campaign map, a lot less little pauses every time you select units etc
FYI temp warning on the DLC – the Steam client update today (tues) breaks the DLC and makes it vanish from the game (and also any older special forces units you have). Hopefully fixed soon.
@Legionary – so, would you pay £10 for a pack of 70 new unit types? Serious question, because if anyone would be okay with that, but isn’t okay with £2 for 14 (again, on top of the 14 the patch adds for free), then I don’t know what to say.
I am surprised that people have performance problems – it’s the first Total War game I can play pretty much maxed out, with AA and whatnot, although I am not owning a better PC than I did (relatively speaking) when M2 or Rome were out, which only ever ran really well a PC-generation later, in my experience.
How is this any diffferent than the DLC of sins of a solar empire? People seem to love the idea when they did it but the same idea from CA and people go ape crazy?
Get it through your heads that the game belongs to them, not you. They can do whatever they want with it. The entire point of making a company to make games is to make money, so it only makes sense that they will do things to make more money for their company O.o !
A few units for a few bucks makes perfect sense. you’re only paying for what you’re getting. If it was a few units for 15 bucks or 30 bucks I could see your rage but for such a tiny price there is really no point in going wacko.
To say that the community can create units for the game better than the devs is just brash. These are the people that created the entire game from scratch, each and every unit and ship ect in it are theirs. how could anyone be better at creating the units than they are?
People in the community might make units with a slightly different art style or units that are higher detailed but the devs can make new units that fit in with existing ones the most and do the least to upset the balance of the game, which they made!
All this rage over something so silly s just insane to me as is all the rage of L4D to and so on and so forth. Angry internet man is getting stronger by the day and getting angry over less and less as he does so.
OMFG THEY CHANGED THE RGB VALUES OF THE OCAEN IN THIS LATEST PATCH, DOWN WITH CA THOSE C@#$@#$@# SHEEP @#$@# KID MO@#$@#$ BAS@#$@# ARGH!?!??!
@serondal I agree wholeheartedly with your wise words on this topic.
Hurrah!
I bought the DLC. Mostly because I got the game at half price, thank you steam sales! >_>
The boost in performance is ridiculous. I’m running the game at higher settings than I did before the update, and getting way smoother framerates for everything. I have no idea why it wasn’t this optomized out of the box, but man. Ridiculous. It runs at roughly the same speed M2 does for me, now. (Though I don’t max out the settings on Empire. >_>)
A couple crashes here and there, nothing big.
DLC is pretty fun. But I don’t know if I’d recommend it to anyone who bought the game for full price. (Or worse, the special forces edition. >_>) Basically, it’s 14 more units, bringing it up to a nice 28 total new units. The game still doesn’t have the variety of M2, from what I’ve seen, but it is certainly way better than it was.
Angry Internet Man seeks condescending other.
£2 is nothing, but there’s no way I’ll play enough games to use those units spread amongst everybody. I’d have preferred a country pack for each (with a few more units). But they’d probably market them as something like “A Patriot Pack”, support your country now!
I personally like fighting against varied armies as well as using them myself. For that reason, the spread of units really appeals to me. I probably won’t use all of them myself, but I’ll see them in battle and it’ll add to the game that way.
@Serondal: “Get it through your heads that the game belongs to them, not you. They can do whatever they want with it.”
This sort of attitude annoys me and I don’t think it demonstrates much of an understanding of the way things work. They own the game, but we are their customers. Giving your customers what they want is the key principle of business, and if you don’t do it you won’t retain them, and if you don’t retain them you won’t be a business for long.
There’s no reason that gamers should put up with poor quality service or bad products. They’re the designers and they own the copyrights, but we’re the consumers and we own the finances.
For sods sake, it’s two sodding pounds that no one is forcing you to spend. Sure I’d like a Kingdoms mini campaign as a DLC but I don’t expect to get it for £2 and within a five months of release.
Reply to Serondal
Conceited is a swear word?
C @ # $ @ # $ @ #
C o n c e i t e d
@MonkeyMonster: “Do you not think you will enjoy the game if it can’t be modded or some sort of presumption you’ll play the vanilla so fast or it will be boring and so therefore not worth the money?”
In the past, my play time on Total War games has been something like 5% vanilla 95% mods. TW games are a little too fluffy and ahistorical in their base version, but they make a great base for genuinely historical, detailed mods. If it weren’t for Rome Total Realism I’d barely have played Rome: Total War, if it weren’t for Europa Barborum I’d have stopped playing R: TW long, long ago. If it were for Stainless Steel I’d literally never have BOUGHT Medieval 2. I bought Empire when it was released, anticipating some spectacular mods and wanting to support a developer that had been so good to the modding community. For my faith and good will I got a broken game that can’t be modded. Lesson learned.
Rome Total Realism was ironically not much more realistic than Rome: Total War itself. Just a hell of a lot more po-faced.
@Andrew
No flaming pigs, that’s a pretty big realism step up all by itself. :)
Legionary why do you think a large amount of dlc is going to be cheaper in any way the more they put in the dlc the more there going to charge.
@legionary – You assume you’re the customer , but you’re actually not. You’re in the fringe, the hardcore gamer that complains ect. They don’t care about you, they care about the mass of gamers that are going to buy their games, play them quietly and when the DLC comes out, buy it without question.
Yes they should catter to their customers demands but not to their fringe customers demands. They’re obviouly making money as the sales from this game were better than both of their other games by far ! So they must be doing something right with the mass of people in order to improve their sales after the poor support they offered on M:TW 2 as they never patched that game enough IMO.
As far as mods go I had no ideas there were mods for TW games until I did some voice acting for a Lord of the Rings mod for Rome : Total war (Then didn’t finish it which probably pissed the mod makers off but oh well)
You can’t buy a game for the mods. You buy a game for the game, and if there are mods that come out that’s great! If you purchase a game then get angry at it because there aren’t enough MODS you’re getting angry at the wrong group. you should be angry at the modders who are getting lazy these days.
When I was a young gamer modders didn’t need tools released from the devs. They just did what they could with what they had and produced some awesome mods.
@ Serondal: “You can’t buy a game for the mods. You buy a game for the game, and if there are mods that come out that’s great! If you purchase a game then get angry at it because there aren’t enough MODS you’re getting angry at the wrong group. you should be angry at the modders who are getting lazy these days.”
Yeah! Damn modders, failing to crack proprietary encrypted files!
Can somoene tell me, does the files being encrypted factor into the really irritatingly long load times?
Serondal:To say that the community can create units for the game better than the devs is just brash. These are the people that created the entire game from scratch, each and every unit and ship ect in it are theirs. how could anyone be better at creating the units than they are?
It is obvious you never played a single mod for a total war game. So it is you that is brash in talking about what modders can or can’t do. Here a few recommendations:
Blue Lotus, Europa Barbarorum, Rome Total Realism, Fourth Age Total War, Third Age Total War, Napoleonic Total War, Roma Surectum, Broken Crescent, the upcoming Europa Barbarorum 2.
Each and everyone of them have better units that the original game by CA, something you would know if you ever tried them, though obviously you have more fun posting your uninformed opinion.
Also, not making the game modable would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that CA had been promising that they would make “the most modable total war game yet”. So it’s a matter of CA consciously deceiving, lying to the public in order to increase their sales.
So no, not wise words from Serondal, and its a shame an indie developer thinks of them as such.
@legionary
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VocalMinority
Just about every fanbase has this. These are the *last* groups the film/tv producers/game developers should ever listen to.
Why?
*They’ll just complain more*
Anyhow, to add to my previous comment (ignoring the extremely vocal minority: there’s one for every game ever released), I do get a pretty big crash. Once turn 4 passes in RtI episode 2, the game crashes if I attempt to select general Washington. Which is kind of bad. Yeah.
I’ve restarted, reloaded, and tried various things, but this seems to be the most major bug I’ve encountered thusfar. Doesn’t take away from the Grand Campaign, though.
@Scundoo
That’s a superb list of mods you’ve got there. Those I’ve played are great, those I haven’t I’m making a note to play as soon as I get a gaming rig up and running again (blasted corrupt hard drives…).