CM Red Thunder page is up

[Elvis]

Review is up at wargamer.com:

http://www.wargamer.com/article/3563/pc-game-preview-combat-mission-red-thunder

Of all the subjective opinions in this there is one that sticks out as something that I hope never happens......ever.

But – and I've maintained this way of thinking since 2007 when the first game of the new engine came out – as a consumer, I don't want to pay for research and design, or to be a beta-tester. I want to pay for a complete product. I'll give BFC top marks for a Combat Mission game when I get the sense that there is no more yet to come, or that what I have has been thoroughly and rigorously tested and documented. I get the sense there are many more improvements and developments in the CM story. I know this because BFC keeps telling us this. Great. I'm looking forward to them. When the day comes that Future CM arrives in its ultimate form and water runs down hills, the map editor lets me cut and paste, roads run 30 degrees to the vertical, my troops can scale cliffs, fix bayonets, and land by assault boat, triggers branch exponentially, and (insert wish list here) – I will consider giving CM a perfect score.

I hope that day never arrives. And I don't believe it will, as long as BFC still makes CM games. In my opinion, one of the biggest strengths (maybe the biggest) of the CMx2 engine is it ability to evolve. To grow and change. To add features. I have been around the CM community for close to 15 years and can never imagine a day when its fanbase will not want something else. A new feature. A more efficient way of doing something. Better performance. Better graphics. You name it. The day they stop doing that is the day that they have a dead product. I would love to see the day when there is a 30.0 engine. There can not be, nor should there, an "ultimate form". I have no interest in a scenario where they ever say "ok, folks. This is it. There is nothing else that can be done."

And as an aside (just because it is part of the quoted bits), it is a complete game right now. Does it have everything on everyones wish list (including their own)? No. But Charles, Steve, Phil, Chris and the whole gang could go down in a plane crash today, on their way to celebrate the release in Vegas with hookers and blow, and they will have left behind a finished product (well, maybe the stray small bug or 2...but that isn't what we're talking about, is it?).

(I did like that I got personal positive shout out in it though. :) )

[Bletchley_Geek]

Regarding the "dwindling demographics" thing. Indeed, it's true what you say in the review. But I disagree with the Gotterdammerung vibe. There are things that can be done to widen that demographic without "dumbing out" things. Battlefront is doing helpful efforts to that effect. CM Touch is one, and the efforts Chris - and others - do by generating content on Twitch.tv and YouTube is another. 

Honestly, I didn't mean to suggest "dwindling", rather, "hardcore tactical" has always been a small demographic. Whether it is getting bigger or smaller isn't addressed in my comments. So I think the 'dwindling' aspect is what you brought to the article rather than me? Personally, I don't see it that way, at least as far as CM goes.

And you're right, I misread the bit "Games/simulations set at this scale and in this period tend to appeal to a narrowly defined demographic" as "Games/simulations set at this scale and in this period tend to appeal to a narrowing demographic". My bad  ::)

Battlefront business model predates Early Access releases, and it's not a far cry from what you get in wargames that strive for extreme fidelity. Uncommon Valour can be understood as the crowd funding for WITP, and in turn WITP crowd-funded WITP AE. Command Ops and WITE have followed as well similar life cycles, with different pricing structures. There's always something missing in the current implementation as you go down the rabbit hole.

Good points. However, there is probably less excuse for not documenting the stuff that is actually IN the game, which is what my real point of contention was. Or proofreading the rules manual to an acceptable (not perfect) standard After publishing a few periodical issues and books on my own, I tend to be a lot more forgiving about things like typos and I have a better understanding of how achievable "perfection" is for anyone that does not have access to paid beta-testers/proofreaders. Even proofreaders who are compensated for their work (I have found out from experience) will not produce "perfect" work as there can be no such thing. If we can't expect it of the space program, I think it is unfair to demand it of a video game company.

The difference between the Space Program and a Video Game company is that the latter can issue a patch to fix the issue. When a rocket goes BOOM, well, it's gone for good.

There have been many complaints regarding Battlefront.com patching policy - which is not as 'agile' as that of others. While I personally think that a 'release early, release often' strategy with respect to patches is a good thing, it's also true that it is easy to 'get trapped' into a very quick game of ping pong - I liked it better in beta patch 3, This is retarded I want to rollback all the way to the release version, etc. - with the users, and not every user out there is mature enough to handle discussion in a civil and polite manner, and understand that 'alive software' can become 'unstable software'. Not to mention that you can get steered away from what one wants to achieve in a similar way as suggested by a recent RPS article criticizing the application of the 'wisdom of the crowds' to video game development.

So while I think that small increments in patching have been good for Command Ops, for instance, it's also true that it has been an exhausting and to some extent, jarring experience. It also took quite a few man hours to separate code and data, and then, the increased complexity in the release procedures introduced some 'deployment bugs' that took some time to sort out. Not to mention that following such a model requires at least two people working full time: one with the code, the other sifting through the feedback and directing the interventions in the code. When the coding outfit can only work part time - and in an irregular manner on top of that - or consists of one single person, this 'agile patching' becomes harder to do.

So I can't wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone out there: it's not cheap - man hours wise - and it can be both exhausting and jarring.

What I don't understand are the reasons Steve dismisses change logs, he sounds a bit like a very experienced COBOL programmer - he was a real wizard -  I met 20 years ago during a summer internship in a bank, who thought that control version systems were only useful to cognitively impaired persons. He was wrong in that respect, documenting what changes have been done is fundamental.

But I do stand by my comments about beta testing as opposed to buying finished product. I'm happy to support products in development. But I admit to not understanding fans and reviewers who simply rate each game in the development stream as "perfect" when key features are by self-admission two or three releases down-stream. The developer's real incentive is my money, not my '10' rating on a website.

Fair enough about their expectations, Michael. Regarding ratings: I like your review because it doesn't have a numeric score. When I worked in teaching college undergraduates, I could definitely see a trend that 'anything less than a B+ is perceived as a D-'. There has been something similar going on during the 2000's on the gaming review scene, and I think it's about time that 'grades' are earned rather than taken for granted. It's also true that the argument that goes along the lines that 'war games are special' is bunk:  'special money' isn't accepted as a payment in exchange of war games, and there's nothing 'special' about how to make them happen (designing them is different, that's truly an art).

If you want to talk about dwindling demographics, I think we can examine reviewers, and in particular, those who have chose to write about Combat Mission. After CM:SF, the number of review sites, magazines, etc. that have touched CM releases has fallen off dramatically (I suspect, so have the sites and magazines).

One can only have theories about this. I hope the following doesn't sound too paranoid.

I reckon that the 'Tom Chick affair' essentially boiled down into Battlefront getting black balled by Troy Goodfellow (who is interestingly connected to Paradox, CMSF's 'side publisher'), Rob Zacny and Bruce Geryk. They're highly influential and are all three good friends of Tom Chick. You just need to check out the Three Moves Ahead podcast they made for Combat Mission Normandy. Four years after the CMSF release debacle, I could see they do still harbored hard feelings towards Steve, Moon and all things Battlefront in general. If you fall into the 'shit list' of powerful taste makers, those steeper slopes that wargame makers have to negotiate, become steeper.

[Bletchley_Geek]

Of all the subjective opinions in this there is one that sticks out as something that I hope never happens......ever.

Reviews need to be subjective and speak out the reviewer's mind, Elvis. One of the reasons for the glut of 'high ratings' for games in reviews is that stuff which is mostly taken off the shelf - like graphic engines, etc. - is used in an 'objective' manner to generate a numeric score that measures 'quality'. The problem with that is that the actual contribution of the game makers - game play, and personality, mainly - gets 'boosted' by technology they had no part in developing.

But I do agree with you that I don't want either CMx2 to be ever 'finished': that would mean it's dead and done.

[Elvis]

Of all the subjective opinions in this there is one that sticks out as something that I hope never happens......ever.

Reviews need to be subjective and speak out the reviewer's mind, Elvis.

Correct, understood and appreciated. It is exactly why I didn't do a point by point post about what I didn't agree with. A persons subjective opinions are theirs and are valid.  A failed marriage and coming up on 15 years on my second has taught me that, if nothing else. :)

But people like Dorosh put out reviews like this, I assume, to create discussion and hear other, sometimes differing, points of view. The reason I addressed the one I did is because it was the one glaring one that when I read I thought "I'd never in a million years rather have that."

But I do agree with you that I don't want either CMx2 to be ever 'finished': that would mean it's dead and done.

It's a no brainer to me. I'm always looking forward to what might be coming next. And frankly, it appears that the fan base shares that. I'm not sure that I always felt that way. When CMBO came out, people were excited and clambering for the next patch and I'd be sitting there wondering why they were getting so worked up. As far as I was concerned, I was already playing the game of my dreams. I learned a lot from that, too.

[Bletchley_Geek]

A persons subjective opinions are theirs and are valid.  A failed marriage and coming up on 15 years on my second has taught me that, if nothing else. :)

I can't really argue about that, Elvis. And happy to hear your second attempt is working out allright, by the way  :)

[Michael Dorosh]

I appreciate all the constructive comments; failure to quote and respond to all of them isn't a lack of interest, I just don't want to monopolize the conversation. Frankly, I am enjoying reading the other reactions to the game and hope we will see more in the days ahead.

I will respond to this though:

Fair enough about their expectations, Michael. Regarding ratings: I like your review because it doesn't have a numeric score. When I worked in teaching college undergraduates, I could definitely see a trend that 'anything less than a B+ is perceived as a D-'. There has been something similar going on during the 2000's on the gaming review scene, and I think it's about time that 'grades' are earned rather than taken for granted. It's also true that the argument that goes along the lines that 'war games are special' is bunk:  'special money' isn't accepted as a payment in exchange of war games, and there's nothing 'special' about how to make them happen (designing them is different, that's truly an art).

One of the reasons I enjoy your posts is that you are quite intuitive. You may have surmised I left the numeric score off deliberately. I thought including one may have been provocative. I rated CM:SF on a review site or two as less than 50%, and there was some grumbling among the faithful when I gave CM:BN a 50%. If opinions are subjective, scores are even more so. Better to leave it off entirely - as you point out, they get wildly interpreted, or worse, used as shorthand. Anything less than 100% somehow means "don't buy it" and 100% means "fanboy legionnaire is shilling for the company".

One can only have theories about this. I hope the following doesn't sound too paranoid.

I reckon that the 'Tom Chick affair' essentially boiled down into Battlefront getting black balled by Troy Goodfellow (who is interestingly connected to Paradox, CMSF's 'side publisher'), Rob Zacny and Bruce Geryk. They're highly influential and are all three good friends of Tom Chick. You just need to check out the Three Moves Ahead podcast they made for Combat Mission Normandy. Four years after the CMSF release debacle, I could see they do still harbored hard feelings towards Steve, Moon and all things Battlefront in general. If you fall into the 'shit list' of powerful taste makers, those steeper slopes that wargame makers have to negotiate, become steeper.

I had Tom Chick in mind when I was typing my post. I can't speak for anyone at BFC, but I know there were members of the community that were taken aback by the events. I expect some well-meaning community members may have not helped matters, and I include myself as one of them at the time.

[Bletchley_Geek]

I appreciate all the constructive comments; failure to quote and respond to all of them isn't a lack of interest, I just don't want to monopolize the conversation.

I'm half expecting someone will turn up in this thread complaining about us hijacking it  ;D

Fair enough about their expectations, Michael. Regarding ratings: I like your review because it doesn't have a numeric score. When I worked in teaching college undergraduates, I could definitely see a trend that 'anything less than a B+ is perceived as a D-'. There has been something similar going on during the 2000's on the gaming review scene, and I think it's about time that 'grades' are earned rather than taken for granted. It's also true that the argument that goes along the lines that 'war games are special' is bunk:  'special money' isn't accepted as a payment in exchange of war games, and there's nothing 'special' about how to make them happen (designing them is different, that's truly an art).

One of the reasons I enjoy your posts is that you are quite intuitive. You may have surmised I left the numeric score off deliberately. I thought including one may have been provocative. I rated CM:SF on a review site or two as less than 50%, and there was some grumbling among the faithful when I gave CM:BN a 50%. If opinions are subjective, scores are even more so. Better to leave it off entirely - as you point out, they get wildly interpreted, or worse, used as shorthand. Anything less than 100% somehow means "don't buy it" and 100% means "fanboy legionnaire is shilling for the company".

Thank you for that. Yes, I could see that you had left out the numeric score off. That's one of the main reasons I think Rock Paper Shotgun is probably the best video games media outlet today. They don't do 'Reviews', they do 'What I Think's.

I must say I know a bit this 'review' thing because of professional interest. Many moons ago I used to work for a spin-off of a Computer Science research group that dealt with music recommendation. This was back in the early 2000's, when everybody and their dog were trying to go beyond the 'Rotten Tomatoes', or today most significantly, Metacritic, review aggregation schemes by accounting for 'context'. We spent a fair amount of time devising ways of incorporating 'reviews by experts' into the pretty standard mechanisms based on measuring correlation of ratings over sets of items (i.e. if Bob and Alice rate similarly a certain set of items, it is likely that Alice will rate highly stuff Bob rated highly).

This was very hard and we discovered that those reviews had to be taken with a grain of salt: checking the social network connecting the 'tastemaker' and the 'producer' was critical (an example that I remember clearly is that of a critic reviewing very badly band X who happened to be the ex-boyfriend of the girlfriend of the band front man), freebies like tickets or albums do compromise 'numeric' ratings (this we could tell by seeing if the publisher was known by being lavish or not), and last, and most important, checking whether or not the reviewer was talking out of his ass, or had actually listened to the album and for how long.

The last bit was perhaps the most important of all, and impossible to check back in the day. Nowadays, you can.

Speaking of Tom Chick: I appreciate very much that he has a public profile on Steam, and one can check how long he's been playing the games he reviews. This isn't just an eccentricity: it's a proof of honesty that puts to shame everyone else reviewing games with Steam support that aren't so transparent. And the recently introduced user reviews system introduced by Steam blows out of the water Metacritic user's reviews: besides seeing the thumbs up/down thing, you also see how long that user has been playing the game. A positive review of a user with just 0.3 hours on record, is most likely to be complete and utter bullshit. And then, if the profile is public, they can see what achievements they have for that game (if the game has those) so just turning on the game and going to sleep doesn't work.

Valve is extremely clever.

I had Tom Chick in mind when I was typing my post. I can't speak for anyone at BFC, but I know there were members of the community that were taken aback by the events. I expect some well-meaning community members may have not helped matters, and I include myself as one of them at the time.

Well-meaning but probably blunt as hitting people on the face with a leg of ham (with bone and all)  ;D

[RyanE]

Over the years, there have been a lot of well-meaning BFC fans that have done more harm than good.  Most of those have gone by the wayside, but I have seen it starting to come back with the CMRT release.  I hope it doesn't get as bad as the early CMSF days.  That will do no one any good.

[Redwolf]

Over the years, there have been a lot of well-meaning BFC fans that have done more harm than good.  Most of those have gone by the wayside, but I have seen it starting to come back with the CMRT release.  I hope it doesn't get as bad as the early CMSF days.  That will do no one any good.

Yeah. I noticed that people on the official forum deal with each other almost like nobody at all has rabies anymore. Quite a change even from the Normandy release. When was that, anyway?

[Redirected]

Of all the subjective opinions in this there is one that sticks out as something that I hope never happens......ever.

Reviews need to be subjective and speak out the reviewer's mind, Elvis. One of the reasons for the glut of 'high ratings' for games in reviews is that stuff which is mostly taken off the shelf - like graphic engines, etc. - is used in an 'objective' manner to generate a numeric score that measures 'quality'. The problem with that is that the actual contribution of the game makers - game play, and personality, mainly - gets 'boosted' by technology they had no part in developing.

But I do agree with you that I don't want either CMx2 to be ever 'finished': that would mean it's dead and done.

It seemed beyond subjective, almost like a person talking out loud to them self.  It seemed almost like the bold section words were questions and the ramble afterwards often went off its own topic.  The 'Verdict' strangely was not at the end but at the beginning.  Oh well.

I guess since it was published at Wargamer, and Dorosh is an administrator there, Battlefront will probably post a link to it on the Home Page.  For those wanting even more discussion of the Blog, er...I mean 'review', the forum section at Wargamer has more.

[Con]

I sense that you have an axe to grind.

I  bought the game as a preorder and I am interested in anything that is written about it as it provides more levels of information for my enjoyment.  Call it whatever you like I am just glad that someone went through the effort to write about CMRS and did so in a thoughtful way with in my opinion calling out there own background and potential bias.

Thanks to all those of you in this hobby who do put the time in to share your thoughts and I for one appreciate that you are contributing and not destroying.

Con

[bayonetbrant]

I reckon that the 'Tom Chick affair' essentially boiled down into Battlefront getting black balled by Troy Goodfellow (who is interestingly connected to Paradox, CMSF's 'side publisher'), Rob Zacny and Bruce Geryk.

I've known Zacny for a few years now, and I've never known him to be a vindictive person.  But I've also not read everything he's written, either.

[bayonetbrant]

I guess since it was published at Wargamer, and Dorosh is an administrator there, Battlefront will probably post a link to it on the Home Page.  For those wanting even more discussion of the Blog, er...I mean 'review', the forum section at Wargamer has more.

There's no one 'right' way to write a review.  They can come in all shapes and sizes.  Heck, just look at the different ones I've done here

A Distant Plain:  http://grogheads.com/?p=3815  pretty straightforward
Eight Minute Empire: http://grogheads.com/?p=3407  straight-up review, with a bit of occasional snark; it is me, after all
Card Hunter:  http://grogheads.com/?p=2570  describe the game, and then all the implications for the game outside the game
Seasons:  http://grogheads.com/?p=2408  Maybe not the best review I've ever written, but certainly off the beaten path

There are lots of ways to write reviews.  The question really is "do you have enough information to make an informed decision about the game - even if the decision is 'no thanks' and you look elsewhere?"  If you got good info out of the review, fine.  If not, then either the review was lacking, or perhaps you were already more informed than the target audience of the review.  In any event, the style in which the review was written might not agree with you.  C'est la vie.

And a 'verdict' up front isn't wrong.  It's just different.  Some people live in a BLUF world. YMMV

[Bletchley_Geek]

I reckon that the 'Tom Chick affair' essentially boiled down into Battlefront getting black balled by Troy Goodfellow (who is interestingly connected to Paradox, CMSF's 'side publisher'), Rob Zacny and Bruce Geryk.

I've known Zacny for a few years now, and I've never known him to be a vindictive person.  But I've also not read everything he's written, either.

I don't know him personally, but some of his 3MA's become a sort of "Let's Rip" session. The Rome Total War II one was a bit juvenile, and I got the impression that one of the main reasons for the snark was related to a presentation given by CA at some games conference, which was found to be jarring by the members of the panel that attended that talk because of its assertiveness. An 80$ game released like that deserved some snark, but I think they got a bit carried away.

The Combat Mission Normandy one sounded a bit like a Stalinist show trial: judge, prosecution and defense all being the same person. A healthy thing in a panel is to have people with opposing views debating, rather than corroborating each other shallow statements like "Nah, didn't press any buttons for me, mate".

On the other hand, I consider him a serious reviewer. Stardrive was a huge case of unsubstantiated hype, and he panned it out very incisevily on IGN.

[bayonetbrant]

{MOD VOICE ON}

so here's the deal guys - and I'm addressing everyone here in this thread

Combat Mission games get people's blood pressure up.  I have no idea why.  They're good games at what they try to portray, but they're not my personal favorite.  Some of the games I love aren't your personal favorites.  We've all got different tastes, and that's why there's all sorts of games out there.

We can all hang out and have civilized disagreements about what we do and don't like about the game and take all day talking about it.  We can discuss how cover and concealment are modeled, if the AI is more "A" than "I", and whether the uniforms should've had square buttons on them.  Talk about the game.  The.  Game.

We need to stop talking about each other, other reviewers, other writers, etc.  We need to stop it with the assessments of other people's playing style, behaviors away from GrogHeads, and whether or not someone insulted someone else in the Great CM Throwdown of 2006 on some other site that no one goes to anymore.

The mod team is sick of getting reported post after reported post for what are, quite frankly, silly and stupid quasi-infractions.  At this point, the majority of this thread is crossing the line on rule #3 of the GrogHeads forums.

We tend to let a lot of things go, because we have sought, attracted, and retained a (mostly) civil and intelligent crowd capable of reasonable discussions about wargaming and all manner of other topics.  We have (by and large) wiped the slate clean on people's previous behavior on other sites, and focused on their behaviors here for any sort of moderator attention, and previous antagonists elsewhere have pretty much played nice at GrogHeads.

This thread is proving to be an exception and at this point, we are going to rein it in more tightly than most other threads around here.  Why?  Because you guys have proven unable to keep yourselves in check.

I am not going to embarrass people by calling people out by name, so let's just approach it this way:  assume that I am talking to you and get yourself in check.  Stop reporting every post because there's some misplaced adjective you don't like, and start worrying about what you say and how you say it.  Focus on not fanning flames instead trying to play some stupid tit-for-tat game of veiled insults.

{MOD VOICE OFF}