Johan Andersson: Yeah! It's kind of fun (smiles). Nowadays it's my game!
SPOnG: What's coming next, then?
Johan Andersson: I'm not sure yet. We'll see. Usually, when we make the games what we'll do is we'll sit down and discuss it over a few months, until we actually need to worry about paying people!
You know, the thing is, after release it's always post-support applications for people. But after that we need to have a decision on what to do, because you can't have people sitting...
SPOnG: It would be nice though, wouldn't it?
SPOnG: Going back to building the sense of history you've got in the game – do you ever think, 'it would be really nice to make something completely fictitious so we don't have to make it realistic and do all this research'?
Johan Andersson: Yeah, but then we would have to figure out 'what content do we add?'. A bunch of people have said, 'how does it compare to (SEGA's) Total War?' If you remove the obvious things, like they have battles, we don't, it's about, 'what's the content?' Their content is lots of units... lots of graphical content for various things.
But if you don't have the historical data, the research, in our game, it would have been very shallow. You need content in a game, and it doesn't matter if it's lots of unit types, or lots of graphics, or lots of characters, or if you're playing a roleplay game you want lots of classes and quests. You need content! However you do the content...
SPOnG: So... what do you think to Total War?
SPOnG: So tell us about your multi-player!
Johan Andersson: You can play up to 32 players – co-operative multiplayer, playing on LAN, over the Internet or on our own matchmaking server. We've been playing plenty of our own games online.