An article about how problematic rome2 total war was at release has surfaced. This is interesting because most of this kind of news is usually based on rumour and secret sources.
This article was written by a former dev on some sort of blog page. It's straight from "a horses" mouth. I think this guy is the AI guy that did one of the marketing interviews in the rome2 leadup back in the day.
Enjoy for those still interested in the total war franchise. I will be taking it all in shortly.
https://medium.com/@julianmckinlay/total-war-rome-ii-and-creative-assembly-my-statement-ten-years-on-d964f65b0a8f
Great article but it caused a lot of bad flashbacks to the years I spent in medical product development. My experience is that Marketing is the root of all evil. Also, upper management rarely understands the financial cost of their seemingly simple decisions. Industrial designers also can produce marketing concepts that defy the laws of physics (and in this particular instance, the drawing was sent to the client before I got to review it!)
I used to work for a large (now more or less defunct) telecom company, and it used to drive me insane that we'd be asked to design and implement something that much bigger rivals would roll out after probably years of development, and be told it needs to be done in 6 weeks.
Or in my case as an engineer, "everybody else in the industry has looked at technology x, understands it a lot better than we do and determined that it would take a ton of development and be wildly unprofitable and a terrible idea. Looks like a blue ocean opportunity for us to be the first movers!"
I prefer the ideas where everybody on the management team hates the idea but the CEO (and the consultants that he/she hired to flesh out the concept). That way, everybody wants to look like they're supporting it but nobody wants to put any skin in the game to make it successful. And they all want to be standing as far away as possible if/when it fails.
In many senses, that actually sounds like a description of how the US political system handled the Korean War, but that's probably a topic for another thread... :Party: