It is telling that, on the 2 events I’ve spoken to Creative Assembly concerning the Total War: Warhammer sequence, they haven’t despatched a coder or producer or designer. They have as an alternative supplied up their lead author, Andy Hall.
Hall labored at Games Workshop for a few years. But because the miniatures firm has flipped the Warhammer Fantasy desk and began once more with its Age of Sigmar reboot, he stayed behind – sticking with the beloved lore and monsters of the Eighth Edition. It is that Old World, typified by shroom-scoffing Night Goblins and explosion-prone Skaven, that powers Total War: Warhammer 2.
Read our review of Total War: Warhammer II here.
“To us, it’s almost like we’re doing another historical Total War,” Hall tells us. “It’s just this one’s in a fictional setting.”
It is just not the primary time he has used that exact quip, however this time he provides: “Also we can make shit up. If we need a quote, we haven’t got to scour the annals of the Roman Empire.”
We could make shit up. While engaged on their Warhammer sub-series, this has been Creative Assembly’s grand revelation. Their imminent sequel is “without a doubt” essentially the most story-driven that Total War has ever been.
Narrative was certainly one of Total War: Warhammer’s design pillars, proper from the start – again when the sequence was only a Powerpoint presentation circulating at Creative Assembly. But this time round it’s much more distinguished, much less depending on textual content and extra so on CGI cutscenes starring a solid of sage-like characters: the Dark Elf sorceress, Felicion; a Lizardman Skink Priest with a looming Kroxigor companion; and a pair of High Elf Loremasters.
These characters are a part of your turn-by-turn expertise, popping up in little bins to provide you story quests, and to hold out the Vortex rituals that punctuate Warhammer 2’s marketing campaign. Nowadays, Total War has personalities.
At occasions, the staff have relied on narrative to finesse a few of their trickier design challenges. In the primary Total War: Warhammer, they might solely afford to create one advisor for the entire factions. So Hall turned that right into a story level: “Why are all these races talking to this strange, human man? We flipped it around,” he says. Thanks to his net of intrigue, the identification of the mysterious advisor stays the topic of discussion board threads to this immediately. So Creative Assembly have doubled down.
“We wanted to seed the game with as much lore as possible and really immerse the player,” Hall explains. “But with that comes a caveat: how you play Total War can’t be interfered with. We can’t put the player on rails. It has to be a sandbox experience, and you have to be the story.”
This is one thing Creative Assembly have been considering an terrible lot about. In conventional Total War, you write an alternate historical past by means of your actions. How, then, do you introduce one other story with out overwriting that one?
“I think that’s what we’ve tried very hard not to do,” Hall says. The key to reaching this has been a sequence of nodal factors that construction the sport. Every race in Warhammer 2 goals to finish 5 rituals – ten-turn magic spells solid on the marketing campaign map – and thereby management the Great Vortex. The Vortex is a magical Elven plug gap designed to empty Chaos from the world.
“How you get to those rituals is up to you, and there are many different ways,” Hall notes. “But at some point you’ve got to pass through that threshold, and that’s when we can deliver a bit of story. It’s there to enhance the campaign rather than get in the way.”
Over the course of the 50 or 60 hours in between these punctuation marks – hours spent increasing, making alliances, and by chance entering into wars – there’s nonetheless loads of time for these emergent Total War moments to, effectively, emerge. And, in reality, Creative Assembly are beginning to benefit from the construction a bit further narrative affords them.
When a ritual begins, gaggles of Chaos Warriors and Marauders spawn onto the map – as do ‘intervention’ armies paid for by your rivals. Each time, the defence is centred on three key cities: a white-hot second of battle triggered by story issues.
These moments of stress create peaks and troughs that form the whole marketing campaign. They’re synthetic, however they don’t really feel that means, as a result of they’re wrapped lovingly in a story that explains their existence greater than satisfactorily.
“That’s what a fantasy element allows us to do,” Hall says. “It allows us to put these big, scary, world-ending MacGuffins in and try different campaign mechanics.”
The first Total War: Warhammer was, simply final 12 months, essentially the most story-heavy Total War sport ever made. But already it’s confirmed to be only a stepping stone to a extra narrative-driven imaginative and prescient for the sequence. Will that development proceed?
“I hope so,” Hall muses. “If people say this stuff is in the way, maybe we’ll dial it back. But my gut feeling is that people really enjoy it and actually want more.”
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