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Setting, depth over breadth, AI issues... The Creative Assembly discusses everything about the upcoming sequel...
The Creative Assembly returns to Feudal Japan with a sequel to the game that spawned the Total War series. TVG recently caught up with a few members from the team who shared their thoughts on the series, AI issues, and the inevitability of a return to Rome.
The original Shogun: Total War was obviously the first Total War game when it was released back in 2000, but you opted to do a sequel of Medieval: Total War (in 2006) before you returned to Shogun. Is there any particular reason for this?
Kevin McDowell: Creative Assembly Australia did Medieval II and I think, in terms of content, Medieval II was closer to what we were doing with Rome. If you take the sequence of Rome followed by its expansion packs, it actually followed a timeline sequence, so it was kind of a logical step for the Creative Assembly Australia team. We passed the project to them, it was a new project for them, and it was kind of a safer project for them to be working on following through the same timeline and starting off with the European map.
James Russell: I think they wanted to do that project. With this one, we really wanted to do Shogun. The team was excited about doing this particular era. With Empire, having portrayed the whole world with massive scope . . . with Shogun what we’re really excited about doing is getting into a more contained setting where we can focus-in on one culture in exquisite detail.
Jamie Ferguson: It just seemed like a really good time to do it. It allows us to do something that we can really concentrate on and refine every element of the gameplay. Everything we’ve done over the last ten years means we can refine every bit of that and make it as good as we possibly can, work on the representation of it, the art and everything.
Shogun 2 is a really strongly art-lead project in the sense of how it looks and feels, and all of that dictates the user-interface, the units themselves, all of the effects, and the accessibility as well as the gameplay quality.
I suppose a lot of people in the Western world have an image of the art of feudal Japan but not necessarily the history. Unlike Empire and Rome where a campaign map is a campaign map, you’ve got the scope to do something more artistic with Shogun 2, one example being the parchment paper and painted Japanese symbols you use to denote unexplored areas of the campaign map...
Jamie Ferguson: It’s a really interesting idea. You could look at it that way but it was more the case that we hadn’t really thought of it before [laughs].
Kevin McDowell: Every game that we do, we approach thinking equally about the theme and what’s appropriate about the theme. With Shogun certain things become obviously appropriate and doing these sorts of things with Empire would’ve been really difficult because Empire crosses a lot of different cultures. If you do something with Empire, which way are you going to do it? An English style, French style, American style or Indian style? So, with Empire, we had a more generic approach to the artwork. With Shogun, we kind of go all-out.
James Russell: It’s a lot more about exploration as well. Exploration is one of the themes that fits the time; that fits the setting, and I think for Empire that wasn’t necessarily the case . . . here we’ve got a feudal setting where the other side of Japan would’ve felt like a world away. We wanted to recreate that feeling of the unknown and that vast scope.
Critics have always lauded the AI in Total War games but, just judging from some of your team’s replies to comments on forum boards etc., I know that you’re often your own harshest critics when it comes to AI. Are there any particular flaws in the Empire games that you’re targeting specifically in Shogun 2?
James Russell: I think we’re just determined that the AI is going to provide a challenge and be a compelling experience for the player. You don’t want it to ever be seen as a problem.
Kevin McDowell: It’s an extremely complex problem and it’s not easily solvable. You can’t solve a complex problem with a simple solution. Things will go wrong very easily...
Jamie Ferguson: If you’re trying to simplify, you end up with very silly looking AI. You say you’ve looked at the forums and there are many people who have some very strong misapprehensions as to the scale of the AI problem. I’ve seen certain people suggest that we can create chess computers that can beat humans... well, the chess computer problem is an order of magnitude smaller than that on the battlefield of the campaign map, literally by billions.
Kevin McDowell: Yeah, you have like 32 pieces and 64 squares.
Jamie Ferguson: That would be like a map that has 64 pixels, or 64 cells on it.
James Russell: I think from a battle perspective at least, one of the things that made it particularly tricky for Empire was that there were spatial issues going on because it’s a game about field of fire. Because melee is more important [in Shogun 2] I think that makes it less problematic. Fundamentally though, we’re working on it harder than we’ve ever worked on it before and we’re determined that it’s not going to be a problem.
Kevin McDowell: Basically, we’re aware of all the big issues that the community has brought up and we have a hit list of things that we’re targeting and solving.
So, you’re doing Shogun 2 and you’ve done Medieval II. The obvious question is would you like to go back to Rome: Total War and do a sequel?
James Russell: We’ve got a big list of themes, ideas, and settings that we want to portray.
Kevin McDowell: I think we’d be mad to say that Rome II wasn’t on that list.
Jamie Ferguson: But there are so many other things as well. We’ve got 2,000 years between the birth of Christ and now, and 10,000 years before that in terms of gameplay to explore. Yes, we’ve come back to Shogun but that’s partly because people can’t even play the original game on PC anymore and there are a lot of people who didn’t play it ten years ago.
Jamie Ferguson: In the future at some point – inevitably at some stage – we will eventually, probably get around to it [Rome II].
Kevin McDowell: We will get around to it...
We’ve always loved Total War for its depth. Of course, the pressure is always on you guys to streamline the experience; make it simpler from a marketing perspective. How do you balance that?
James Russell: What we’re trying to do here is both. We want to do more with less, so we want to streamline the game but actually make the gameplay deeper in many ways. The design analogy is kind of like Bonsai: we’re cutting off things that are extraneous; that don’t really fit the form, creating this perfect thing that’s streamlined but actually has beauty and depth.
There’s a lot there that will add to depth, but we take things out to add depth as well. If you think about the master of the arts and technologies, the fact that there are fewer than before doesn’t mean that there’s less gameplay in many respects. There’s more because each one can mean a lot more and we can make sure that you’re not researching parallels, so you don’t end up getting through the entire tech tree. Instead, you have to make choices with a branching system that propels you down one way or the other. Hopefully you’ll see that the RPG progression element and the characters certainly add a lot of gameplay depth but, at the same time, it’s not a sort of bulky feeling that will intimidate new players.
I think we counted the actions in Empire and it was something like 114 actions. The point is, that doesn’t really add depth...
Kevin McDowell: No, it adds breadth.
James Russell: Yeah, it adds breadth; it makes the situation more complex. Actually, we did a lot of honing down when we started with Empire but with Shogun 2 we've really tried to hone it down and create that experience where you’ll still have just as much depth. Even with the map itself, although it’s much more focused on a single nation, it’s still on an epic scale; the whole of Japan still feels like an enormous place. The map is actually just as big as it has been before [in previous Total War games] but it just feels cleaner, more contained and simpler. It’s got just as much depth.
Kevin McDowell: Japan is very mountainous, so there are a lot of different routes and paths, and there’s a kind of strategic layer to the actual physical map that isn’t really present in Empire and before.
Jamie Ferguson: For any hardcore Total War player, there’s going to be enough in the map that they’re going to angst over what choices to make, what paths to take, and whether that will suit the war that they want to fight. If you’ve picked a faction that’s great with cavalry and your nearest region that supplies cavalry is three regions away, and that faction also needs some iron to make samurai units that’s in the opposite direction, then where do you go first? You’ve got to make a choice and those choices are meaningful and impact the game.
People do play our games, come back to them later and then realise that there are things which they never realised were there.
James Russell: Even some of our development team!
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Game Information
Available On:
PC
| Release Date: | Players: |
|---|---|
| Out Now | Online |
| Publisher: | Genre: |
| SEGA | Strategy |
| Developer: | PEGi Rating: |
| The Creative Assembly | 16+ |
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Added:Sun 18th Mar 2012 18:15, Post No: 20
THAT SOLDIER NEEDS A KILLERS KABUTO !
Added:Tue 05th Apr 2011 22:28, Post No: 19
freeradical is a successful troll
Added:Sat 26th Mar 2011 12:40, Post No: 18
plz tell me CD key Shogun 2!!!!
Added:Fri 18th Mar 2011 19:55, Post No: 17
nobody notices how long it takes to find a game? only to have one person leave and go back to wait 20 more minutes?
Added:Fri 11th Mar 2011 17:45, Post No: 16
haha, loving the opening paragraph gwynne.
Added:Tue 08th Mar 2011 10:26, Post No: 15
Errr, yeah - point taken. A Romell: Total War about tanks and stuff sounds much more fitting to the series anyway.
Added:Tue 08th Mar 2011 07:28, Post No: 14
Freeradical, are you a **** idiot? Erwin Rommel wasn't in the Luftwaffe. He was a **** tank commander
Added:Fri 04th Feb 2011 10:42, Post No: 13
Is that Rome II: Total War or Romell: Total War? Because if it's Romell, then the prospect of a Total War game that focuses on the life of Luftwaffe flying ace, Erwin Romell (a.k.a. 'The Desert Fox') sounds awesome. Much better than Rome II...
Added:Thu 03rd Feb 2011 18:39, Post No: 12
I want RomeII:Total War!!!!!!!
Added:Sun 09th Jan 2011 15:00, Post No: 11
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