nwg

Hi Folks,

Had a bit of a quiet thought and moment of clarity this afternoon.... looking for folks to tell me I'm wrong:

Although still 6 months away, NTW seems to clearly be an evolution of ETW without major under the hood changes. Aside from texture/model and unit statistic differences is anyone believing their will be more fundamental change?

The reason I ask this, and in the modding forum here is: should we perhaps be ignoring NTW altogether? Sounds funny eh? Particularly funny because we're primarily a Napoleonic organisation, but I have a suspicion that casual TW gamers will probably, by and large, not buy two musket era games back to back as is being presented to us. If we were to assume that the majority of TW musket games for the next 12-24 months have already been purchased then those are ETW not NTW ... unless NTW surpasses ETW in sales volume this is almost certain to be the case (and I think this is unlikely).

The thinking here is not dissimilar to the reasoning behind NTW2 using standard Rome Total War (RTW) instead of Barbarian Invasion (BI). The fact is that everyone had RTW but only a much smaller number of players had BI. Though there were some useful and usable extra additions in the BI expansion they were not compelling enough to warrant the requirement that players go and buy the expansion pack.

Maybe we'd be better off continuing to use ETW and base not only our existing but our future mods on it and giving NTW a miss entirely?

There will be a single player Napoleonic campaign system of course but for many folks this is not compelling or even interesting. If MP is were your interest lies then there will be little to recommend in NTW aside from textures and models...Napoleonic textures at least can be modded, and somehow we'll get around to the models, if not by CA releasing their much anticipated modding tools then certainly by some enterprising community member working out the right 3DSMax filter.

What do we think? Could we risk turning a small community into an even smaller one by presuming that everyone will get NTW? Theres almost no doubt whatsoever that even NTW will need modding, CA just doesn't create the sorts of games that play well for history buffs, they only provide the foundation engine.

Moopere.

Hmmm, I'd not thought of it like that, I'll not be able to stop myself buying it, and IF it were any good you might have a stable non mod game to play right out of the box, rather than have to rely on a mod - with a very small group playing it.

What I mean is, say Empire WAS NapTW, and it WORKED as it should have done, now, you would be able to log in and play without all the "mod" problems along with hundreads of others, instead of about 20 !..

Oh sure, I'll do the same because I'm always hungry for Napoloenic content and I'll probably play the SP campaign too, so for me it might make sense - however, in scanning the TWC postings and generally about the net it seems that casual gamers who are not particularly tied to historically realistic gaming or certainly not to musket era gaming are already making noises that they are not interested in two games so similar to each other following end on end. Whatever CA is pretending to call NTW to this group of gamers its just an expansion to ETW and not interesting to them, or so they say.

These gamers would probably have preferred and ACW game (and probably there is an ACW:TW coming, I'd not be surprised).




Yes, I dream of such a thing, but it seems so very unlikely. My expectation, based entirely on the ETW experience is that NTW will also play too quickly, will have strange not historical battlefield artefacts like light infantry stakes, bad, or at least unhistorical, unit balancing and costing, etc, etc. These troubles have been embedded in _all_ TW games and are a symptom of the authors perception of their majority audience, a perception thats really not too far off to be honest. Us historical gamers are only a tiny subset of the overall TW community I think.




Can't argue with that, but I just know we won't be able to resist the temptation to add realism and reduce silliness in any game that is released. Are we going to do the wrong thing, by ourselves, in focusing on NTW? If ETW sales are > NTW sales and a mod of NTW is going to be used by powers of magnitude less people than vanilla NTW perhaps the right thing, in the cold hard light of day, is to continue to build a Napoleonic mod based upon ETW.... in this way, when the casual ETW gamer finds us, as used to happen in the NTW2 days, all they need do is download the mod.

Probably us hard-core Nappy guys will buy NTW, almost certain that most will and thats fine, but to the question of whether modding effort for a napoleonic TW game ... I'm not sure.... What could happen is that modders all essentially stop work about now and drift in the uncertainty of it all.

The Early and Late era choice in the ETW game is an interesting thing. I'm sure there would be a way to create a seven years war mod which lives in the _early_ era and a Napoleonic mod which lives in the _late_ era. If so then again the most logical place to build such a mod, the mod to rule them all (hehe) would be ETW.

Regards, Moo.

Some people are suggesting the Lordz wait for NapTW for ntw3......I expect the Lordz will confirm, or deny this, soon.

I wonder if it's worth a lot of work, doing more with Empire than Moon has already done.....I'll be surprised if the Nap Community refused to buy NapTW, very surprised indeed.

So would I, but this is only 30-50 or so guys we know about. I'm thinking more of the wandering players who we found turned up in NTW2 from Rome beginnings... I'm sure the same will happen with ETW players. If we build our mod on NTW then we only benefit from the company of players who own NTW and surely this will only be a relatively small subset of the ETW population??? Perhaps I'm wrong, or even if I'm right perhaps it won't matter in the end - we only need a couple of hundred active players to make a very vibrant community indeed.

M

I will for sure buy NapTW. It could be so scary I could miss something exceptional!

I strongly regret CA and/or SEGA ignore the PBEM. I am certain they miss some (or many) customers. How a pity they prevail quick play and doing so scorn the thinking side of a game.

I hope to see you when/if LG jumps out of his box.

Ahhh GP, I've not seen you around for a while, rest assured, THIS TIME, LG really is on the way.......we will have that first PBEM game up and running soon, I'm convinced of it.

The pre-order should be open soon, so you can get a copy with the big 250 page manual !.

Wouldn't it be great if we could start a Napoleonic pertission for everyone in these forums like CaW, the Lordz and NWG plus the clans to get their signutures (just their name) and write a letter to CA and e-mail it to them saying everything we want in a patch after its release, only if they game is no good!

What do you think!