Hi CeltiK! Cool to see you here, I'm a subscriber to some of your TW:W mods. :)

I have to agree with what you're saying. There is no denying the colossal failure of DoW3 and the reason for it.

Likewise CA is going in a wrong direction and seem to listen less and less to their customers as time goes by.

I think CA certainly did some things right with the TW:W games by incorporating the Warhammer world properly into their style of games, but as far as customer feedback and fixing gross flaws in their games is concerned, they are in a downward spiral.

My comment and advice is: There are some things to learn from CA's TW:W series as far as world creation and immersion is concerned, but in the area of communicating with customers and fixing flaws in your games based on their feeback, you are a leading company and should avoid following their example at all costs.

On the contrary, Amlitude's Games2Gether platform is a feature that Relic and CA should use as an exaple of implementing their own customer communication platform.

Thanks for listening. :)

TheFunMachine wrote: Is there a English translation available? [...]

There is one posted on the Amplitude Community Discord:

https://discordapp.com/channels/227126593754103810/227126593754103810/471013085352689674

This is a two-way street. There are aspects where Amplitude can learn from CA and Relic, there are aspect where they can learn from Amplitude (e.g. community involvement, as alreay brought up by some people).

As long as Amplitude stay true to their philosophy, which I'm fairly confident they will, we shouldn't have to worry about complete disaster.

CyRob wrote:

TheFunMachine wrote: Is there a English translation available? [...]

There is one posted on the Amplitude Community Discord:

https://discordapp.com/channels/227126593754103810/227126593754103810/471013085352689674

Any place I can found this without Ciscord??

Won't have acces to it in various days...

lo_fabre wrote: Any place I can found this without Discord? Won't have acces to it in various days...

Well, you should be able to access discord in any web browser, but I'll post it here anyway.

Translation of French interview with Romain de Waubert, Amplitudes Co-founder & Creative Director 

Original Article: https://www.lesnumeriques.com/jeux-video/amplitude-studios-l-independance-est-genial-mais-bout-moment-est-usant-a3847.html%3E 

Amplitude Studios: "Independence is great, but after a while it wears you down" -Romain de Waubert, Amplitudes Co-founder & Creative Director 

Among the many French video game studios, Amplitude is a little apart. From the beginning, the company was created with the aim of becoming a reference of a kind called "4X" whose most famous representative is Civilization. A monomaniac of turn-based strategy, Amplitude has been successful with Endless Space, Endless Legends and, more recently, Endless Space 2. With Romain de Waubert de Genlis, creative director and co-founder of the studio, we return to this amazing adventure that has been going on since 2011.

It's been a little over a year since Endless Space 2 was released. How have the last 12 months been?

Romain de Waubert: We are happy with the sales. What was very difficult for me was to make a sequel. It's hard to know where to place the cursor in terms of innovations. The easy reflex is to say "I want to be brand new". It will take you a long time to make your game and then people will say "but I don't recognize this game". "It's another game, it's great, but it's not a two." And of course it works the other way around: if you don't innovate enough, people will say "I'm not going to buy the same game". It is this slider between too many innovations and not enough that is difficult to place. We learned how to make 4X, so we had to learn how to make a sequel. Endless Space 2 was from the start a hyper-ambitious game. We got some good reviews, it was great, but the negative side is that the game wasn't very stable when it came out. We had an early access phase, but we were still surprised by the problems we encountered at the exit, because, in the past, early access helped us a lot to clean up all the bugs. Like we spend our time learning by playing games. After that, we started the "live" part of the project, which is very interesting: we made the first extension, then a second one which is coming out. We're developing the game we created. On the sales side, we do a little better than Endless Space 1 and Endless Legend. Endless Space 1, we're at about a million and a half sales. For Endless Space 2, we have a slope that looks the same way.

I have the impression that you make games that sell mostly on the length... 

Completely. It was one of our wishes when we joined Sega: sharing our vision of how we make a 4X, which is a bit like free to play. Even if you pay your game at the beginning, we make sure that the entry price is lower and lower with time, but it is what we add behind that will give the player the desire to continue to invest himself. This is not a classic way of doing things, even if it is becoming more and more so.

It reminds me of Ubisoft's "gaming as a service" policy. 

Yeah, there you go. But we've been doing this all along. "Play as a service" is what you have to do, but from the moment you have a fairly strong entry barrier, players are much less willing to spend in the game. Our vision is to have a low entry barrier, so the player can choose to play the card. It's Amplitude's complete DNA. For us, the first 3 months of launching the game, it will be in 15 and 20% of our players, while it is often more 80% for other types of game. It's not easy sometimes, because when you work with partners who are used to more traditional life cycles, they may be a little surprised at first. We'll see how it goes with Endless Space 2, but on our other games, the second year was better than the first. The peak of life coming a year and a half after the initial release.

It has been two years since Amplitude was acquired by Sega, which also owns Relic Studios and The Creative Assembly. The publisher thus becomes a major player in PC strategy. Do you have any contact with these studios? 

Yes, very regularly. We see ourselves as little brothers, facing giants like The Creative Assembly or Relic. They have bottle, they make excellent games (I spent too much time on Total War or Company of Heroes). One of the reasons we joined Sega was to find experts to rely on, whether in production, marketing or finance. 7 years as an independent, it's still nice, because you can say to yourself (he breaks his fingers) "tomorrow I'll do that" and nobody's stopping you. But that's also what scares you since no one is here to tell you that you're going to make a huge mistake or that you have a great opportunity that you're not going to seize. Independence is great, but after a while it's tiring, a little creepy and, above all, you can't see very far. To come back to the other Sega studios, we meet regularly, we exchange on our projects. Whenever I have questions about my projects, I'm happy to call The Creative Assembly, which is not far at all. We go to them, they come to us, and we talk a lot about how to improve our games a bit.

And at Sega, you have producers who oversee all projects related to strategy? 

Fortunately, no! And I think we wouldn't have joined Sega if we had. All studios are completely independent. This is Sega's vision: studios manage their brands, their productions, their creations, their content, their community. We're each responsible for all this. And there is, fortunately, no one who will tell us how to do it, especially for our content. It's interesting to get feedback, but we don't want our games to resemble those of The Creative Assembly, which resemble those of Relic. What is important is that our games have a very different identity and obviously a different gameplay. And that, it is necessary to preserve it.

Let's talk about Games2Gether, your participatory development system. Impossible for you, today, to work without this "community" aspect? 

At the very beginning of Amplitude, here's how it happened: we were big fans, as players, of strategy and we had experience in development, but not 4X. We absolutely wanted to make a 4X, but we didn't really know how to do it, especially when it came to game design. These games are difficult to balance, complex, deep. On the other hand, we really believed in the success of Amplitude, but we were afraid on the "we're going to make a super 4X that will shake up the genre codes, but nobody will know" side. We didn't want a journalist to discover our game 3 years later and say "hey, but that's damn good", but in the meantime we're dead. The idea was to attract players to the project, while being sure that when it comes to game design, we are exactly where we need to be, that the game is innovative, motivating, and that 4X players like it. So we set up Games2Gether, which was a way to attract players. For me, it was quite difficult, because I was and still am the creative director of the studio. There you come and say to your community: "The most precious thing for me is the game design and I show it to you, I share it and you will help me to improve it". It's really hard, because you feel like you're getting naked. And I'm modest with my game design. It was a difficult exercise, but I couldn't work without it today. On the other hand, you have to be very careful about how you manage the thing. "Yes, I'll get naked in front of you, but I'll tell you where we're going." You have to give the framework, and it is within that framework that you can express yourself. It's a bit like when you work with a development team: there are game design pillars to respect and, as long as that's the case, we can innovate. But you can't remove one pillar or add another, otherwise it's a game that never comes out.

If I can't work any other way today, it's because I need to be told "that's good" or "that's a load of crap". All Amplitude development is done around that. When we recruit designers, we will consider that they will also be community managers and part of their time will be allocated to interactions with the community. When development is advanced, when one is in an early access period, the designer can allocate up to a third of his time to the forum and the community. So you need more designers, who are each on fewer features, but on which they have time to interact and make changes. What's complicated is that you have 1,000 people and 1,000 visions of what the game should be.

How do you sort good ideas out from bad? 

That's just the job of the designer. You take the ideas, you synthesize them, you show them to those 1,000 people and you see how they get all this. People are much more open than you might think, but they shouldn't feel like they're peeing in a violin. We need to make sure that people can follow the progress of the ideas they have brought into the game. Transparency is important. It is as much co-creation as transparency, communication, and rigor. If you don't listen to them for 9 months and then you only listen to them for 3 months, what they will remember is that, for 9 months, you didn't listen to them.

Amplitude exists since 2011. Is it easier or more difficult today to run a studio in France? 

A little of both. What has definitely changed is that today's market is no longer the same. To create in 2018 a company which makes video games, that seems to be super hot, because the market is ultra-charged and the actors' ultras numerous. This is one of the reasons why, seeing this coming, we were motivated to find a partner like Sega, who helps us sail in these troubled waters. On PC it's difficult, on console there are still some opportunities, especially on Switch, even if the launch window is already closing, for independents anyway. If I were an entrepreneur starting today, I wouldn't be reassured. And on the other hand, there's a lot of money in video games today. In 2011, there was no money in the video game. There was an incredible market that was coming along and we had to go, and today it's the other way around. It is as if there is a funding gap. The funding sees the success past and says "we have to put money into it", except that the window is closing. So you have a lot of money, but you don't have many opportunities, even less on PC strategy games.

Yes, but you are in a niche, the 4X, that has a loyal audience, that always wants to play this style.

Endless Space made some kind of a draught and showed that the 4X wasn't dead. Before there was Civilization, which is apart, it's "Civilzation". And then there were all the others, sold at 30,000, 60,000 copies, which are good games, but not very accessible. With Endless Space we showed that by dusting off the mechanics a little, we could attract a lot of people.

There have been quite a few happy deals in French studios in recent months: the strike at Eugen System, scandals at Quantic, the creation of the STJV, investigations into the crunch worldwide... As a studio owner, what do you think of all this? 

What I find unfortunate overall is that all this is happening at a time when there are still a lot of improvements in working conditions in video games. Between the time I started 20 years ago and today, it has nothing to do with it. Here, if I arrive and I say "go, we'll crunch for 3 months and you don't come home on weekends", nobody will listen to me and follow me. It's never been our philosophy, because we've burned ourselves pretty badly in the past like that and we understand the damage it does to teams. The bottom line is to keep the talent: you make them live a crunch or two, not only will they leave your box, but they will also leave the video game business. And that's a huge loss for everyone. Our objective is to build well on our strengths and therefore to monitor well the time we spend on our projects. That doesn't mean you won't have a week where you say, "Well, tonight we'll work an hour or two more. There are times when one or two people will have to "sacrifice themselves" and will come on a Saturday because we are on a tight schedule.

Beyond the crunch, which is an aspect of the business, there are also the behaviors between teams that have changed. Everything was much rawer before. Fortunately, video games are becoming more feminine and generations are coming. They have their qualities and their faults, but in the qualities, there is a mixed, modern way of working, as we expect it today. This is what contributes to the fact that the video game goes in the right direction on this point. And that's exactly when the problems you're quoting happen. The problem, I think, is more related to entrepreneurship than to the video game itself, when someone launches into the video game in "start-up" mode and considers himself there to get high. This model can hold, but certainly not over time.  If it works here, for example, it's also because there's a great agreement between the studio creators and the employees. Confrontation is not something that works. If you have the creative who gets hated by his teams and vice versa, you will have a rotten game in the end, and everyone will have lost. And most of all, we're getting old too. Before, video games were a bunch of kids who got together to do demos after school. Today, we are fathers, mothers, we want to have a life next door, to enjoy our children. We want to get home pretty healthy. We must understand that, yes, it is a passionate profession and that we may have to make some sacrifices, but not at the expense of our life balance.  

[ Translated by DeepL ]

Thansk!

Interesting interview.

Thanks for posting that up!

Ashbery76 wrote:

CA Warhammer support has been great.Not sure what your smoking.

This is what is going on with CA's TW:W2 right now (see CeltiK's post)::

[..]many easily fixable bugs that ruin people's experience. We reported those bugs many times, with screenshots, with save files, with Youtube videos. They don't listen, they don't answer. People are getting angry here and there.

Ashbery76 wrote:

CA Warhammer support has been great.Not sure what your smoking.

As for article I cant believe he said we was suprised by ES2 shape at release unless he never played it.The game was a mess for quite some time.

Not sure what your standard for "great" is, but CA doesn't have a "great" track record for game support, especially with the number of titles that they've released. I have nearly 6,000 hours logged into Total War games over 6-7 years and I haven't seen, heard or experienced "great" when it comes to their game support. 

Suis3i wrote:

Ashbery76 wrote:

CA Warhammer support has been great.Not sure what your smoking.

As for article I cant believe he said we was suprised by ES2 shape at release unless he never played it.The game was a mess for quite some time.

Not sure what your standard for "great" is, but CA doesn't have a "great" track record for game support, especially with the number of titles that they've released. I have nearly 6,000 hours logged into Total War games over 6-7 years and I haven't seen, heard or experienced "great" when it comes to their game support. 

Yeah I mean the free gameplay improvements and patches for RTW2 5 years after release it terrible.

What is your frame of reference? 

All their games since Empire got patches and support a long time affter shipping. far better than what most companies do.

redsimonDE wrote:

Ashbery76 wrote:

CA Warhammer support has been great.Not sure what your smoking.

This is what is going on with CA's TW:W2 right now (see CeltiK's post)::

[..]many easily fixable bugs that ruin people's experience. We reported those bugs many times, with screenshots, with save files, with Youtube videos. They don't listen, they don't answer. People are getting angry here and there.

And? Endless Legend was left with some major bugs ala the Forgotten tech trading.EndlessSpace1 was left with an A.I that could hardly invade with the ground added combat mechanics.

All strategy games have bugs.

Ashbery76 wrote:

Yeah I mean the free gameplay improvements and patches for RTW2 5 years after release it terrible.

What is your frame of reference? 

All their games since Empire got patches and support a long time affter shipping. far better than what most companies do.

And many of their games still retain old bugs and issues. CA is also notorious for not communicating with the community and not following up with community complaints about a wide variety of issues. Using Rome II as a reference point is actually a poor choice since the game has done very well (content-wise) and still retains a large player base, hence the continued maintenance of the game and the continued DLC releases (If the player base had started to shrink, I guarantee CA would have abandoned it in a heartbeat and decided to not fix any persistent issues). Perfect examples of games that have been shunned by CA would be Total War Attila and Total War ToB, Attila still has horrible game related issues that have been reported to the company for years and have been ignored (for years), while ToB has been largely ignored, with even modding tools coming far, far later than expected due to a low turnout on the game's release. 

Most of their games obtain patches until shortly after the last DLC patch, and even with those, they still have a history of bugginess, issues, and overall lower quality (which is unfortunate b/c many of the issues seem to transition over to other titles). 

CA releasing new content for games + balancing patches =/= great game support.

That's just them making money off of a game. Great game support comes from listening to issues reported by and presented by the community and fixing those issues. Choosing to ignore those issues and then just "balancing" a game is not great, that's expected. They should be releasing balancing patches after release, and they only release DLC b/c its the current model for making money rn. But doing what they should be doing does not make their game support great.

For contrast Amplitudes model of game support is tittering on great, they have their own forums for reporting bugs and problems, they have dedicated members that survey the forums every day or two, and they generally fix issues related to the game that are reported by the community. They also keep the community updated and seem to want community input on the game. That is an ideal version of actual game support. 

As much as we believe everyone is welcome to have and express their own opinion on our games, I feel that the way this thread is devolving into just a straight-up criticism of another studio is kind of pushing the envelope (regardless of that studio being a sister company).

While we have different approaches to game support, community involvement, and in general to the way we do things, it would be nonsensical to pretend there aren't many things we can learn from the greater SEGA family. This means benefiting from their expertise in many areas where we are relatively green. This does not mean we will align our policies tomorrow.

Romain mentions it himself: our games will remain our games, and what makes our identity is something we're very intent on keeping.

Hope this makes things a little clearer. :)

Frogsquadron wrote:

Romain mentions it himself: our games will remain our games, and what makes our identity is something we're very intent on keeping.

Hope this makes things a little clearer. :)

Yeah sorry 'bout that, didn't mean to cause this forum to devolve into a roast of another studio. Glad to hear that Amplitude will remain unique