Would Console Players Go for a Total War Game? A Question for the Ages
After some hands-on time with the latest title by Creative Assembly, A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, we sat down with Project Lead Jack Lusted and Communications Manager Al Bickham. At length, we talked about changes to the franchise in their latest installment: a more streamlined UI, greater character emphasis, and the elimination of agents, all of which has seemingly made the property more accessible. Here’s what they had to say.
“I think, in terms of historical Total War games, we’ve done more for some character customization and development in Thrones of Britannia that we haven’t in previous Total War games,” Bickham told COGconnected. “And in previous games, we’ve had skill trees that you can work through. But the system of customization through the followers in the game—by spending points and granting different followers to them, you can really super-power them to perform certain roles very specifically or you can spend your points and make them generally good at loads of stuff. You can really focus them down certain paths; superb commanders are really, really great at getting across the map really quickly to the flashpoints developing throughout the war.”
“…For Thrones [of Britannia], we just tried something different,” Lusted added. “And because of the focus on events and trying to build more of the story on our characters, developing the functionality of agents into the followers for your generals and governors felt like a good way to still retain that level of gameplay functionality. Like, you’ve got followers who will reduce public discord in enemy provinces, that will increase your raiding bonuses, that can affect the replenishment rate of enemy armies, that kind of stuff. So, the functionality is there but it’s concentrated on the main characters, so it makes them even more important as you grow part of the story. Whether we’ll have agents factor into the next title game, we might expand from game to game.
When asked if there was a bucket list of Total War games, Bickham admitted, “There’s tons we’d like to do. There’s quite a few interesting periods that aren’t quite feasible for a Total War game but would be really cool.” While they didn’t dive into specifics, it’s safe to say that Creative Assembly will be busy with historical pieces for a very long time. Perhaps there will be more collaborations, like Warhammer? As for the periods that aren’t quite “feasible,” maybe the devs will consider delivering a new installment to console. When asked whether Total War would ever reach Sony or Microsoft’s systems, Bickham responded:
“Anything’s possible, right? You know, never say never. We’ve got no plans; we’re certainly not working on anything at the moment, but, traditionally with consoles, the main thing in previous generations that’s held us back from even thinking about it was thing’s like memory allocation. A console with just 256-Bit RAM wasn’t even a consideration. Those sorts of limitations have disappeared because current-gen consoles are now basically PCs. They’re powerful machines, and there’s nothing that can stop us from doing it. You know, there is input device? I think that’s a conquerable problem…”
Thrones of Britannia’s Project Lead, Jack Lusted then chimed in, saying, “We have controller support on our PC titles,” to which Bickham said, “There you go.”