Total War Update: Modders Triumphant, CA Giving Mixed Signals

Hey there, wargamers! Just a quick update today on the state of TW, and what you need to know. As we reach the end of January, we find ourselves growing ever closer to the release of Warhammer, and we see CA's interest in renovating Attila slowly dying off. They've had a good run this year with their product, which launched last February, and it has had its share of good and bad updates. Only a single final DLC or content pack is rumoured, and as is the tradition with most TW games, Attila will soon pass into the curatorship of the modding community. But it seems that there is both triumph and controversy brewing there also.

Recently, two Attila mods have drawn praise from the TW community. Firstly is the Rise of Mordor mod, and the other being Medieval Kindoms 1212. Those who have a history with TW might remember the glorious days of modding Medieval 2. Medieval 2 seems to be a high point for many TW veterans, myself included, and although my copy wasn't a steam version, thus denying me a play time count, I'm sure it was the game I spent more hours on than any in my gaming history. Many modern TW players have asked, "was M2 really that good?" and most old schoolers will argue for hours why it rocked so hard. My love for M2 mostly came from its extensive modding scene, and I remember discovering the Third Age, a Lord of The Rings themed mod, and practically falling in love with M2 as if I were seeing the game for the very first time.

Third Age completely rebuilt the world in M2 around the Tolkien mythos, with full rosters of Gondor, Rohan, Mordor, Sylvan Elves, Dwarves, lavishly recreating the aesthetic of the films, but also adding units from the books that never made it into the films, like Hobbits equipped for war, and The Knights of Dol Amroth. The badass team behind Third Age has risen from the darkness to build their successor mod using the Attila engine. Attila feels like a good place to remake this mod, since it verges on the early medieval era, has appropriate unit types to fill most of the Lord of The Rings aesthetic, and has sufficient modding tools to support these designs. The mod is only in its infancy, but it is already evoking the excellence of its predecessor. The only thing that seems to be a stumbling block for it so far is that CA hasn't provided nearly as many modding tools as they once did. The map of Attila is proving difficult to adjust in order to give the players a true Middle Earth campaign experience, and so far CA has refused to release their map editor. We'll touch on this subject again at the end of the article, but for now, know that this modding team has earned my thanks for their efforts, and they are in fact petitioning CA in order to release the tools they need to bring you a superior Middle Earth experience.

Give em the "Gondorian experience" ;)

The second mod making similar waves is the Medieval Kingdoms 1212 mod. This mod looks to capture the sprawling landscape of M2, complete with its multiple eras of the medieval age, from the late dark ages, to the introduction of gun powder. This mod is a simpler, but equally welcome change of pace than Rise of Mordor. It hopes to give the gamer the feeling of M2, but with the advent of the graphical quality of Attila. It feels great to see familiar M2 style units clashing on my screen again, and I recommend you all check it out, as many famous youtubers, such as Lionheart, Warrior of Sparta, and Heir of Carthage have already been taking a look at the early access builds of the mod.

This all leads me to my final thoughts about TW for the day. The most enduring legacy of games like Rome Total War, and Medieval 2 has not only been their inherent quality, but the dedicated communities that they earned, who tirelessly built amazing mods and game fixes, free of charge, long after they got their money's worth from the games. Modding has been near the heart of TW since its inception, and CA has even acknowledged this, holding their own little awards show, recognizing the efforts of community contributors. It is, therefore, rather disheartening to see that CA has offered little in the way of a full array of modding tools for the community. Don't get me wrong, I know this isn't CA so much as it is their publishers, clawing tools out of the public's hands, so that they have exclusive rights to the game's content. Sega probably foams at the mouth when they think that modders can simply unlock all factions in a TW game, thus reducing the value of DLC packs, but removing these tools will ultimately harm the longevity of their games, and even hurt potential sales. Famous mods can actually sell a game. There are many among the TW community that had no interest in Attila, since the time period did nothing for them, but having access to the high medieval era, or a faithful recreation of the Tolkien mythos can do a lot to spur sales, even so long after the game's release. Mods can do what DLC sometimes can't: renovate the game's commercial appeal, and draw in new customers. Limiting modders' tools may be a slow path to the death of TW's community if they are given no way to participate, other than eating whatever the publisher offers them. Which leads us to this:

Total War: Warhammer recently announced that they would not be supporting mods, or providing modding kits. This is pretty bad news. Credit to CA, they are clearly not happy about this, and probably wish they could give us full access to modding tools. It's likely that this state of affairs is due to the licensing of the Games Workshop units and aesthetic. It makes a certain amount of sense that the community would be given limited access to in game assets, when they represent intellectual property that simply doesn't belong to CA or Sega outside of narrow, licensed usage. However, I cannot express enough how disappointing this feels. Games like Dawn of War were very much open to modding, and they were licensed products, published and developed by THQ and Relic. CA has promised that modding tools will be available for future historic games, but I'm not yet convinced that we the community are slowly losing our stake in the game. CA is a company made up of game devs who are gamers themselves, but they are responsible to corporate overlords as sure as any developer. I hope that you enjoy what you see in the mods I've mentioned, and that you hold hope in your heart that TW will continue to support the community that supports it so lovingly.

Update: Warman from the Medieval Kingdoms 1212 team has informed me that the modding tools used on Medieval 2 were community developed, and not provided by CA, whereas the tools used on Attila were from CA. As they've demonstrated with their mod awards, CA really does care about the community, and I hope that the next historic game continues that trend, and that campaign map tools emerge.

Armored Warfare: The World of Tanks Challenger

For about two years now, World of Tanks has dominated the field of massive multi-player online armoured combat games. World of Tanks achieved a great deal of success by targeting a gap in the market between arcade shooters and historical combat/tank simulator games. It tickled the tank enthusiast's desire for a game that modeled cool armoured vehicles, and loosely simulated the intricacies of tank warfare, while still being easy enough to pick up and play that the casual gamer had no difficulty getting on board. While World of Tanks did a great job appealing to that niche, they also built a number of negative qualities into the game that have niggled at its success, and its customer's satisfaction since inception. This has led to a spree of competitors looking to dethrone, or at least challenge World of Tanks's monopoly. The first major competitor to challenge World of Tanks was War Thunder, which promised combined arms warfare and a more realistic simulation of warfare. While it has had some success, it has still failed to achieve the same level of appeal, perhaps due to its steep learning curve and lack of professional competitive play appeal. This leads us to Armored Warfare, perhaps the closest match to the World of Tanks formula that we've seen yet (other than the flat out knock-offs you'll find in the internet's backwater).

Some will tell you that Armored Warfare is among the World of Tanks knock-offs, with its near identical control scheme and overall gameplay. Much in the same way that I would not call League of Legends a ripoff of DOTA, but merely an emulation of a formula with its own flavour and specialty, so too is Armored Warfare an emulation of World of Tanks. World of Tanks specifically covers tanks from the 1920s, the era of inter-war experimentation, up until the 1960s. World of Tanks claims to cut its vehicles off around the point when smooth-bore guns came into fashion, and armoured combat began to shift its focus toward lighter armoured vehicles, computer and night vision developments, and of course, the shift to guided missiles. That's pretty much exactly where Armored Warfare picks up. It's almost amusing to see vehicles like the T-54, the M60, and other top tier World of Tanks vehicles hanging out at tier 2 and 3 in Armored Warfare. Armored Warfare differentiates itself from World of Tanks by focusing on modern warfare, adding new ideas such as missile systems, and high-tech armour that actively defends without simply relying on armour thickness and angling. It seems to offer virtually everything that World of Tanks does and more, save for World of Tanks' historical period.

Wargaming, the company that produces World of Tanks, has a lot to be concerned about, perhaps far more than they ever needed to with War Thunder. While World of Tanks will likely remain in its prime position, Armored Warfare’s greatest potential power is that it may force World of Tanks to start reassessing some of their less popular policies and features. Much like Guild Wars took on the role of challenging World of Warcraft's unpopular features, Armored Warfare attacks some of the longest standing gripes that World of Tanks players have. World of Tanks' players have long begrudged three major problems: pay to win consumable ammunition, frustrating artillery, and a lack of a PVE (player vs environment) mode.

Ammunition in WoT is highly simplistic. Most tanks in the game carries three ammo types, an armour piercing type, a high explosive type, and a form of premium ammo that costs gold (paid for with real world money) or extortionate amounts of standard currency. The higher the penetration on the shells, the better. While it is sometimes better to use high-explosives, this is typically a gimmick, and higher penetration variants of ammunition are almost always better. This not only rewards players for spending real money on a disposable assets, it also flies in the face of realism, as super high penetration ammunition is actually not that effective against lightly armoured targets in the real world. Armored Warfare addresses this by making the penetration mechanics more complex, having high penetration rounds over-penetrate light targets, causing minimal damage. World of Warships actually implements this same mechanic, leading to shell choice becoming a much more important factor of the game, and adding to the required skillset. War Thunder took this mechanic to the extreme, and based its entire damage system on critical hit locations. Armored Warfare comes closer to War Thunder by rewarding the targeting of critical modules, and penalizing overuse of high penetration ammo. Yet, Armored Warfare retains the hit points based system of World of Tanks, thus avoiding War Thunder's less fair and random feeling combat. Armored Warfare also adds missiles and reactive armours, which add their own unique challenges for players to learn.

Artillery was also a sticking point in World of Tanks. Artillery units were meant to discourage camping behaviour by putting a unit into the game that was great at targeting people that sat still in cover. However, due to a complicated series of issues, which we may discuss another time, arty in World of Tanks seems to do the opposite, being rewarded much more for targeting tanks on the front lines. This led to huge frustrations for most medium and heavy tank drivers, who found themselves leading the charge, only to be punked by arty. This problem was compounded by the arty damage models being super random, with the distinct possibility of blasting a front line heavy tank in one shot, or bouncing off a light tank without a scratch. This led to massive frustrations, since most players didn't even know that they were being targeted until the pain train slammed down from the sky. The slow firing and aim times, plus the relatively boring play style for arty meant that it wasn't even really all that fun for the arty drivers, leading to low class population. Again, this is where Armored Warfare came screaming in on their modern warfare eagle. Armored Warfare attacked the arty problem with gusto. Arty fires faster and more accurately than in World of Tanks, but mostly does consistent amounts of smaller damage. It still wrecks modules, and splashes multiple targets, plus the addition of special arty ammo that can reveal hidden enemies and conceal friendlies, making it feel more like a support class, a la a priest from WoW, who can throw debuffs and offer more than mere damage. All tanks in the game get a notification when they are being targeted by arty, giving them precious time to move before being blapped, thus making the game feel fairer, and death by arty feel less of a cheat. The game is made more fun for the arty player, too. Arty now play a fun mini game where they are notified of enemy arty positions when they fire, which allows them to counter battery their opponents. Their position is only given away if they choose to continue firing without moving, thus seeing to the issue of arty player just sitting on their arse for most of the game. Armored Warfare’s efforts to fix the arty issue have not gone unnoticed by Wargaming, who have already proposed similar changes to World of Tanks.

The final feature that sets apart Armored Warfare is the prominent PVE mode, which allows players to fight cooperatively against an AI opponent, rather than focusing the game entirely on monotonous PVP battles. Some players will see this as a waste of their time. After all, isn't it always better to play against human players? Well, even those players may find themselves reconsidering that position when they consider that World of Tanks style games all still have the same sticking point when it comes to PVP. These games almost always include a double experience boost for your first victory of the day. Many players end up tearing their eyebrows out in frustration when they play an absolute monster game, racking up massive damage, worthy of a humongous doubled reward, only to have their team suck a fat one, and throw that whole bonus away. By including a PVE mode, you can be assured that a first victory of the day will at least be a guarantee within a few games, rather than the randomness of team games. These co-op games also still feel like a competition with other players, since you'll be fighting to get the most damage done, and be the biggest contributor to your team's success. Furthermore, it helps the player to skip the horror of the "stock tank" syndrome. World of Tanks players will know full-well the pain of playing a tank without all of its upgrades, or without a fully developed crew. Having to say to your team, "sorry guys, I'm a stock tank," can generally be avoided by grinding out the modules in the lower stakes game of PVE, where failure doesn't carry such a stigma of failing your comrades.

I'd love to rant and rave for a lot longer about Armored Warfare and how it differs, and improves on the World of Tanks formula, but I don't want to sound too sycophantic, as the game is still imperfect. The game's graphics still feel like they have a little catching up to do, and the engine is still a tad buggy. Many tanks need balancing, and it will be a little while yet before the game reaches World of Tanks' level of polish. World of Tanks players should consider downloading the game, trying it out, and then going on forums and talking about ways that World of Tanks could be improved by studying Armored Warfare. As consumers, we all need to take advantage of opportunities to prevent big companies like Wargaming from getting too comfy with having a monopoly on a niche like tank combat. World of Tanks has sat on its hands too long about issues like arty, and premium ammo, and while Armored Warfare is far from threatening World of Tanks' dominance of the industry, it is certainly a solid enough challenger to shock Wargaming into action. Those World of Tanks fanboys that have no interest in playing Armored Warfare should still rejoice that a true challenger has arrived, as this can only mean innovation and improvement for you. Players looking for a new experience, with a familiar formula should get on Armored Warfare right now, and try out all the new features. I'm confident that Obsidian Entertainment's Armored Warfare will rattle some cages, and bring a whole new generation of heavy metal excellence to the armoured combat simulator genre. World of Tanks, get off your arse and show us that you rock just as hard, because this challenger has you in its sights.