The Art of Total War

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A select few games can be said to define PC gaming. What is perhaps most impressive about them is that they are all so different: knowing Starcraft tells you nothing about Oblivion, and vice versa. All these games are best understood by being played. So it is with Total War. While we love to delve into its technical, developmental and experiential innards, our reflections are no replacement for actual play.

The genius of its core design - which runs like a potent family resemblance through all the series - was to blend two existing types of game (turn-based strategy and real-time-strategy) to create an experience we had not seen before. Not only that, but it created a cerebral game: Total War requires mastery of both overall grand strategy as you run an empire, and minute local tactics as you scrap on its 3D battlefields.

It's a game where experimentation and martial grit are both essential to victory, and that's incredibly hard to convey in text. Yet it's a challenge we're constantly honoured with. The Total War series has been filled with games that confirmed our choices both as PC gamers and as PC gaming critics. In short, it makes us rather pleased to be able to write features like this one, where we have a chance to look back and try to pin down exactly what it is that makes the Total War games so utterly compelling.

Feudal Times
Creative Assembly were not always in the business of defining PC gaming. Indeed, they previously made games for... EA Sports. But things were to change. One man who has seen that change is writer and designer Mike Brunton, who has worked on all of the Total War games. We asked him how Creative Assembly came to be what it is today, and what decisions led to the development of Shogun. "The Creative Assembly was founded by Tim Ansell in 1987, and specialised in console conversions, then moved on to doing sports games," says Brunton.

"Making the change to strategy games with Shogun: Total War was not an obvious move, but a lot of technical expertise had been built up, and Mike Simpson had arrived, bringing a metric shedload of creativity to the company. He also had - and has - a bit of a thing for strategy games. Everyone at Creative Assembly was ready for a new challenge."

That challenge was to create a game that would launch into a market dominated by the likes of the Command & Conquer series. After some rumination, Creative Assembly decided not to take the giants of strategy on directly, but to come up with another spin on the genre. Getting there would take some time, and the game would have to move from being a top-down 2D game of warfare to the 3D battlefield we see today.

The team started out very small: they just had Mike Simpson and a programmer working on the Shogun prototype, ramping up to ten people (tiny by today's standards) at the end of the project. "Shogun was a risk," says Brunton, "but it was a risk worth taking. There wasn't anything else out there that was even vaguely similar, combining turn-based strategy (the campaign map) with epic battles (the real-time strategy element). In fact, the game was meant to be the other way round, with epic battles and a bit of strategy. The strategy expanded as a means of creating interesting battles."

Playing Shogun now, you can see precisely what Brunton means: the campaign map anchors the game, but also directs it. The effect of fighting for your clan can be seen in the regions you can control and in the threats you defeat.

The game comes alive as the factions crash into each other in the real-time battles. Rather than being set tasks in a story provided by the designers, Total War let the story to belong to you. The skirmishes arose from your interaction with the other factions on the campaign map. Those 'situations' were played out in single battles in which hundreds of soldiers fought across vast landscapes. We had never seen the like of it before. First glimpses of Shogun at trade shows left a whisper of excitement across the industry. Even before it was ready, people knew it was going to be interesting.

As it happened, the design was near-perfect, though it now seems astonishingly sparse. But it created a base upon which Creative Assembly were able to build. Their next challenge was to create a second, more mature title based on the same blueprint. This would be Medieval: Total War. As Brunton recalls: "The biggest challenge was making Medieval as good, or better, than Shogun. For a writer, a good second novel is more of a nightmare than the first book, and the same pressure is there when it comes to games. We were extremely lucky in that we had - and still have - a talented bunch of people who didn't scatter to the four winds when the first game was finished. Quite a lot of studios have to build teams from scratch to do any kind of sequel, or even another game."

The company had realised that an incremental build was the best option. There would be no starting from scratch, but there was a gamut of creative decisions to be made - such as the medieval setting. "The choice of subject matter was influenced by wanting to use as much of the Shogun code again as was possible," says Brunton. "People had sweated blood the first time round, and it would have been incredibly wasteful to junk that effort and start again. If you think about it, Medieval and Shogun share a common theme: that of men hitting each other with swords, shooting each other with bows, and riding around on horses - all in the struggle for land and power. The underlying commonality of 'historical purpose' meant that two games could utilise the same basic code structure, with suitable changes to deal with the flavoursome elements of each period and place. Viking Invasion (Medieval's expansion pack) showed how far we could push the same concept too."

That expansion was a fine conclusion, but for CA it masked a beehive of activity. What had taken place publicly since Shogun could now be regarded as just the first phase of the Total War game. There was also a revolution going in the background - the team had been working on ramping up the technology to add more detail to the battle environment, ditching the sprites in favour of a fully 3D engine. By the time Medieval was released they were ready to start work on a new phase of Total War. They would change era (although stick with swords and horses) to the high classical period of the Roman Empire.

Ancient Eras
"Rome is just such a good subject for a game, isn't it?" Brunton asks, rhetorically. We've already agreed with him - since its release, we've repeatedly cited Rome: Total War as one of the finest games ever made, in the PC Gamer Top 100. "Roman ideas are built into western culture to such an extent that we don't even notice most of the time," says Brunton. "We're still stuck with having the last month of the year called 'December' (the 'tenth month') because the Romans stuck two extra months, July and August, into the calendar." As it turned out, the familiarity of the Rome setting was to be both a curse and blessing for developing a game. "Rome is something that nearly everyone knows a little bit about," says Brunton, "even if it's only standing up to shout 'NO! I'm Spartacus!' or endlessly repeating the Biggus Dickus and 'People called the Romans, they go the house' jokes from Life of Brian. Actually, they were problems during meetings. But it's period of history that sells itself." It would also be sold by the 'Rome Boom' that went on at the time, and the popularity of films such as Gladiator.

"Even better, for our Total War purposes," says Brunton, "the Romans were a ferociously warlike lot. When they weren't out conquering the known world, they made do by having a bash at each other, the mad fools."

This historical fact was particularly important to Rome's appeal. In fact, it made for a moment of drama in a turn-based game that seems unprecedented. After your initial successes in conquering the known world alongside the other two Roman houses, you are backstabbed, and suddenly vulnerable to civil war. It's a moment of brilliance that sets the game apart from other, similar games. All the Total War titles rely on similar historical events to define the course of their campaigns, with both technology and politics developing along similar lines to those of real history (crusades in Medieval, European trade in Shogun) but only in Rome did we see this so spectacularly change the shape of the game, and expose our strategies with such a clear challenge. It's one of our favourite gaming moments.

Perhaps what was most exciting at the time, however, was that Rome delivered a world that had far more depth and detail than the previous games. The contrast between nations and different cultures was now thrown into sharp relief against Rome, with Greek and German cultures finding their own place in this ancient world. Brunton explained the importance of real history to the Total War series. "What we try to do is use history to inspire and inform design decisions," he says. "We create game features and content to include as much history as possible, in an entertaining way. We have to look at the patterns of history, and look at what can be rationalised, coded and quantified. Fortunately, we're blessed with a team of coding gods, and we can get a surprising amount of historical features into the game as a result."

The series hit a peak of historical richness and diversity with the 2006 release of Medieval II, which both remade the first game in the Rome engine, and also revamped the series to deliver a more complex Europe, and the first glimmers of the Americas. Medieval II pillages the era for ideas, with a unprecedented amount of both real-world events and technological advances being reflected in the campaigns we played. It was an astonishing infusion of game design and historical research.

While what results is a fiction, Brunton explains, the game does meet up with real events. "We try to stay true to the history as far as possible, without tying ourselves into some kind of historical straitjacket. We don't recreate a history that will unfold along one path, regardless of the player's actions. We're trying to create a counter-factual, an alternate history, that will reveal itself in the same kind of way as 'real' history, but not follow the same course. There will be an empire in Empire: Total War, but it might not be the British who come to dominate India, for example. It's quite possible that there will be a Dutch Empire that straddles the world, or a French Bourbon king on his throne in Versailles ruling Europe from the Atlantic to the Caucasus. Total War games should proceed differently every time they are played."

Indeed they do - thanks to that wide-open campaign map that Shogun spawned, we can find ourselves writing alternate histories across the ages, time after time. Brunton warms to his theme: "We do try to be honest about the history of a game period. That can be a problem, though, because all history is subject to interpretation according to the dictates of national identity, politics and even fashion. A simple example: tell an American that he owes his national independence to Louis XVI of France, and he might not be best pleased given recent relations between the two countries. Louis, on the other hand, soon regretted his support of such dangerous revolutionaries. His regrets were terminated when a French Revolutionary guillotine ruined his cravat."

The Empire ages
The third phase of Total War is about to begin. Empire is the culmination of years of work from the Creative Assembly team, and it brings with it lashings of new technology and an overhauled game. AI, campaign map and battlefields have all been reworked, and as we've seen, major changes been made to incorporate rifle-based warfare and ship-to-ship combat. It's set to be another giant leap for PC gaming.

But we had to ask Brunton a little more about the studio itself. Many studios simply don't survive to make games for this long, or they find themselves unable to deliver consistent quality over a number of titles. Clearly the team has changed enormously since Simpson and his programmer started work on Shogun, but has it developed a particular philosophy of game design along the way? Do Creative Assembly have any principles that dictate how the studio runs? And is that reflected in their games?

"Aside from the righteous and merciless persecution of the bourgeoisie and collectivisation of all production under the beneficent supervision of the Organs of State Security and the Party? No. Not enough? Good grief, do you expect a magician to show you how the trick works as well? If I must, then: we try to have fun making our games." Perhaps that does reflect in the games after all.

So where could the Total War games be heading next? Empire is certainly something of a turning point for the series. And they're creeping into the modern age, little by little. Are we going to see something even more modern from Total War in the future? Can Creative Assembly make the big step up to bring the brilliance of Total War to a more contemporary era? "Maybe. Maybe not. We always said that we didn't want to do a game with sea battles until we could do things 'properly', and the same is true of a modern period game."

World War II? An alternative 20th century? Brunton really can't comment. "Let's just say we have some staff that have tiny joygasms over Tamiya and Trumpeter plastic tank kits and leave it at that. We won't be able to restrain them forever."

Jim Rossignol