Total War: Warhammer II

[Adam Beckett]

 

 

Let's start the thread, because it might take a while until the 3MA Podcast will be up. I hope Zacny, Frasier & Co. will take their time.

If you are a 3MA listener and not playing Total War: Warhammer II right now, what are you even doing?! 

(Aside from going to work, raising children, changing dipers, studying for med-school, etc - you are excused, obviously)

I learned to hate Elves, over my decades of D&D and Fantasy RPGs. They are just too much for my working-class, Marxist uprising. But I am now six hours and 50 turns into my first campaign as "High Elves" and enjoying every moment of it. The game 'flows' very well. It feels like the most polished, most accessible (for new players), most focused main Total War campaign, they made. Read the reviews. From game design, game flow, storytelling, to gameplay mechanics, UI elements all the way to the technical parts (amazing animations, 3D models and art, voice acting, performance, et cetera). For some weird reason, the campaign map - with all the Elven rainbows and unicorns remind me of the old "Heroes of Might and Magic" - only, now in 3D, fully voiced and animated. 

What do you guys think so far, fellow @3MA'ers? Please, share ...

[Cordeos]

I probably won't get to play much till Sunday but I can't wait to get my hands on the Lizardmen. From gameplay videos I have seen it looks like they have been making actual UI and engine improvements instead of just making this a kind of standalone expansion with only a new map and new races.

[Adam Beckett]

I can attest to that. CA made many tweaks and improvements, from what is visible and my experience so far. 

As for the game engine. I am always impressed by the senior Creative Assembly game engine team, still led by the original guy who started on Shogun 1. CA was always among the first to implement new, interesting technology. They were among the first triple A studios to embrace DirectX 11, for example. All to the point to re-writing half of Shogun 2 and retroactively implementing those features (mostly, technical background stuff, players don't get to 'see'). 

 

 

I am currently running the game on an old CPU: AMD FX8350 (8x4.0GHz - not a 'real' octacore, compared to Intel's superior CPUs) and a new Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB mid-level GPU. I get 40-ish FPS with everything on ULTRA in 1080p, 1440p and above. I could get 60FPS easily, but chose "Shadows" in "extreme" settings (the only option in the settings which is above Ultra, only for shadows). Otherwise, the game scales very well, as usual, all the way down to low-level PCs and those mythical, 10-year old 'gaming notebooks', everyone else is apparently using.

I used to run TW Rome 2 on a then 3-4 year old low-level GPU (Nvidia GTX 650 Ti BOOST) in ultra-widescreen on release day with no problems, while many others seem to have had their usual problems. I DO though have interesting frame drops, when using the highest shadow settings in Attila - but only on the campaign map, not in battles. One notch 'lower' and the campaign map runs smooth again. Must have been a driver (or drawcall) issue, which will never be solved. Warhammer I for me has had no issues whatsoever. But the overall performance never hit 60FPS on highest settings. Only when dropping down some features.

 

 

If you select DirectX 12 you will see the same 'worse' performance, the way it is in Total War: Warhammer I. There is just no way, it seems, to make the necessary adjustments for DX12 to out-perfom DX11. No matter if AMD or Nvidia cards. (I tested it with Radeon RX 480 8GB and Nvidia 1060 6GB). They would have to probably write the engine from scratch or go through their base code for 6-12 months to make a difference.

[Gwardinen]

Yeah I can second the little UI improvements - lots of minor quality of life changes have been made since the first game. Originally I was thinking that I'd play this for the new factions, but keep the first game installed for the old ones and the old map. Having actually played a bit, though, it's definitely a different and better experience. Hopefully the combined map for all the races from both games will come soon and be enjoyable to play.

 

I'm not deep enough yet into the campaign to say whether the new stuff really fixes the age old strategy game issue of "I've clearly won this, but I have at least 100 turns left to just grind it out", as they were claiming it would.

[Dewar]

I was a bit disappointed in the original Total War: Warhammer. But I heard (I think from Rob?) that it actually got pretty good with all the DLC and re balancing they've done. So I'm debating whether I should try to catch the DLC for the original on sale, or bail on it entirely and buy the second one.

[Cordeos]

I am pleasantly surprised that Total Warhammer 2 appears to be running better on higher settings than 1 did. Not sure how they did it, but i sure am thankful

[Marchettus]

I wanted to comment-

 

I cannot for the life of me get into this game.  I am waiting judgement for the mash-up map but none of the factions feel distinct in the way that Total Warhammer 1 did.  I also don't like how spread out the map is-  it feels wrong so far.  However, I really like some of the UI improvements.

And while I'm on the subject-  This is the first game I regret buying since Civ 6. Part of the reason is that Total War remains Total War and I should only buy a total war game every 3-4th go around.