Medieval II: Total War is out... YAY!

Finaly after waiting all year :)

This game is totally awesome. By rule, im not a strategy game person, but i bought this to get the amazing looking collectors edition and give it a go, after enjoying the demo

The game is wonderful and i am enjoying it so much. The battlefield graphics, with the highly detailed landscapes, and sheer number of characters that are neatly displayed on screen is unbelievable.

i will be playing this for many months to come. just hope it doesnt clash with my theme pack making! lol

Steve


http://www.arteria-gaming.com

Thanks, I was wondering what to ask for "Sinterklaas" (Dutch version of Christmas) but now i know.

11 Gigs of hard drive space? :/

All those meshes... all those shadows... HOW?!

oooooohhhhh.....gotta to get it...

Shame they can't do a fantasy one - like Lord of The Rings where you can have huge armies of orcs, dwarves, elves, hobbits, men and stuff like that.

Oooh.

Alright, I see that they did some nice visual improvements, and that's cool and all.

But can anyone tell me where I can find a review or description that tells me about the gameplay improvements?
(There have been some persistent bugs in the franchise regarding troop movements around objects. Also, the AI
in both the campaign map and battle map would do silly things sometimes.)

What is it about the gameplay that's different?

Duh, almost nothing.. that's why it is a sequel.

Looks very nice - but why does every scene have to use a bloom filter these days? It would have looked more realistic without it.

The second shot especially, it should have the filter applied to the background only - the solders in the foreground have lost the contrast they should have had.

Piki - Been wondering the same thing myself

Tell me the 11gig thing was a joke?

Still, looks awesome. Rome Total War ate far to much of my free time.

Did these games have their start with Dark Omen, way way back?

Steve...

Cause they can, and the more things you can have and dont, makes your gameplay less good, apparently.

I mean... used to be a rule that the avatar should be a different color than everything else so it is easy to spot... nope, now that is out of the question.

used to be that clearity superceeded realism... what? Dense fog that makes it so you can't see 2 feet in front of you is realistic? We must have!

DampeS8N, I'm not really sure why you're saying that. I'm against needless graphical
tricks, too. But I don't get this:


What part of the picture is hard to see?

This is a subtle use of bloom here, guys. Why all the crazy hatred? It blows out the
whites in some areas sure, but it's mild. And it's what happens in real life photography
anyway. The contrast is fine. The clarity is there.

I think your complaints are a little unfounded and irrational. Complain about
the bloom in Oblivion, on the other hand, and you have my support!

I downloaded the demo and at one point it crashed because of a "fatal graphics error". I've only loaded it up once so far, so I'll try again later.

:(

I wish I could. It comes on two DVD's ( DVD5's, I guess, it surely couldn't require two DVD9's ) and requires 11 gigs of hard drive space when it's installed.

11 gigs is fine and the game is good. You can pick up a 250gb HD for about $80 these days and a 500gb one for about double that if you look around.

So you have to buy a hard drive as well as a copy of the game? And wear sunglasses while playing it. ;-)

I do like the series actually.

Rome was the first game in about a decade that I have come back to and played again. Normaly I play a game extensively for a week or two, get bored and never play it again.

With Rome, I went through about 3 phases of playing extensively in just the last year.

BTW with the demo, the original Medieval 2 demo had very bad compatibility, whilst the Gold demo of about a week ago has an extra battle and doesn't die on a lot of popular configurations.

the automatic graphics settings on mine go to all High except for low textures and shadow detail. All FX turned on. Looks kind of like the second shot. High detail textures and shadows look awesome, but its not really playable.

Thats on my AGP 6600GT 128mb

Holy crap, really? Well then I guess my 6800GT can handle it.

Downloading now.

Possibly because the demo battles were set-up for a challenge but I found it all a bit too frantic. I found Shogun sublime but, since Medieval I, I've been looking for a 1/2 speed button. It was mentioned as about the only downside in the PC Gamer review. Accelerated time is good but, with the scale of the battles, number of units and size of the battlefields, it would have been nice to slow things down without needing to pause.

'Possibly because the demo battles were set-up for a challenge but I found it all a bit too frantic. '

Unlike Rome, I was finding myself using the pause button to assess the battle and issue commands. I wouldn't agree that this is a bad thing though.