Al Bickham is the studio communications manager for the studio, and I managed to have a sit down with him to discuss the nature of the live-action trailer, CA's work in the mobile field and whether we'll see a browser future for the classic strategy series.
SPOnG: You guys announced this title by releasing a live action trailer. It’s a different kind of tack for Creative Assembly to take, isn’t it? Are you going for a much more dramatic angle here?
Al Bickham: Well, I think that live action trailer is a statement of intent. You’ve got three story threads running in that action trailer, that relates to machinations in the senate, betrayal and division between families. It's these kinds of story elements that Total War is best known for. It’s about emergent stories. You’re making a massive series of choices about which territories you’re capturing and where to put the bulk of your forces, and interesting things naturally fall out of that.
But for Rome II, we’re expanding the Dilemmas feature that we introduced in Shogun 2. These were little quests that would appear that, if you chose to acknowledge them, could benefit you at an appropriate cost. You’d get great power, but also a significant downside. We’re extending that system and offer you multiple paths depending on the choices you make during key decisions. That trailer is essentially a representation of those archetypal Roman storylines that we’re working into the game.
Gamescom 2012
AB: Yeah, well actually towards the end of Fall of the Samurai expansion pack.
SPOnG: So what kind of things did you learn from Shogun 2, that you carried over to Rome II?
AB: A tonne of stuff. Shogun 2 could be seen, in retrospect, as an exercise. We came out of making Empire, which was a massive, sprawling, enormous game, and decided to focus a bit with the Napoleon expansion pack. When we got to Shogun 2, everything was about focus. Tight geographical focus, sure, but also a focus on polishing in-game systems that we recently introduced.
After learning a lot from that, we revamped the system again for Rome II, in terms of how the campaign AI approaches diplomacy, the way you interact with it and the understanding of the AI’s actions. That was one thing we wanted to change - the AI made a decision, and you weren’t necessarily given any visibility as to why it’s done that. We want to offer some visual cues to aid that process. If the AI seemingly stabs you in the back, and you’re given some vague understanding as to why, you’re less likely to say that it’s being completely arbitrary. It’s all early stuff, but that’s what we’re trying to work out.
SPOnG: So you’ve made it more accessible.
AB: That’s the aim. I’m gonna be deliberately vague about it now, because we’re still working on that part of the game, and exactly how it’s going to pan out in the final version. But yeah, so there’s certain things like that we’re working on - but besides that we also learned a lot of things from Shogun 2 in terms of how the battlefield works, the unit movements and swordfighting styles and things like that.
For Rome II, we’re quite happy with where the game systems are, so now’s the time to roll the map out wider. The campaign map for Rome II is going to be much bigger than the original Rome. And that was huge. There’s a number of interesting problems that this throws up, though. How do you manage that many territories, for example? Strategy games are about giving the user lots of interesting decisions to make, but they shouldn’t be about giving the player the same decision to make from turn to turn. So you can imagine that with the amount of territory and regions on offer, you are at risk of overburdening the player with micro-management.
AB: One of our aims is to create a province system. Before, in something like Empire, you could capture France by simply storming the capital. That’s not the kind of thing we’re aiming for. So in Rome II each province will contain a number of smaller territories, but there will be province capitals that can give you control of multiple territories at once. This way, you still get the tactical and strategic depth of having more land to conquer, but you’re not controlling each and every section of a country by the end of the game.
SPOnG: Creative Assembly jumped on board with iOS development with Total War Battles: Shogun. You mentioned making Rome II a bit more accessible - did the iOS philosophy come into your PC design approach at all?
AB: No, the teams work fairly separately. I think that’s important from a design perspective, because the tenets of device like an iPad... obviously, it’s much more than just the input functions. You have to consider shorter play times, the ability to switch the game off and on again, and so on. Whereas with classic Total War, you’re sat at your PC and you may play for two or three hours at a time. It’s a very different experience.
So there’s not an enormous amount of cross-pollination between those teams. One thing that does pass across is stuff like animation. The combat animations [in Total War Battles] are quite detailed, and the audio mirrors what’s in Shogun. There are similar sword strike noises, music, etc. Of course, on the design front, it’s very different again - very stylised and arty. Everyone’s quite proud of it.