The celebration of 25 years of Total War continues at Creative Assembly with more developer retrospectives. Previously, CA revealed how its aborted attempt at a console Total War helped create one of Total War: Medieval 2’s coolest features. The latest discussion video focuses on Total War: Empire, a game that’s still influencing the series’ most modern titles thanks to being the first iteration created on the Warscape Engine that’s still in use today — though this is a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, since every module of the engine has essentially been switched out and replaced over the years, as was the goal behind it.
But Empire wasn’t simply a step forward in the technical sense: CA began to rethink its process of making these games.
“We constructed a simulation first and then saw where the gameplay was after the fact,” battle designer Scott Pitkethly described the approach of the time. “Sometimes that worked very well and sometimes it didn’t, because it was well simulated but it wasn’t fun. […] Now I think we think about those things ahead of time.”
He named sailing as an example for this process: Initially, CA didn’t plan on letting players sail against the wind directly, so ships took zig-zag courses like they do in real life — naturally, that was a bit confusing for players, since boats took radically different courses than ordered.
The simulation was equally uncooperative on land, where urban warfare made an appearance for the first time in the form of buildings you could occupy. Infantry could take cover inside and use windows to shoot out of — unfortunately, troops placed outside fired way faster and easily destroyed units inside of buildings, which was the opposite of what the developers wanted.
“Gunpowder was definitely a problem,” Pitkethly concluded. “There’s a constant trade-off we’re making between paying homage to history and making it a fun experience.”
The original idea for the game was to model the entire world, but this was replaced with the idea of trade regions. “At some point ambition had to match reality,” said Tim Gosling, who worked on the game’s AI and had to repeatedly reset his progress, because core aspects of the game kept being changed.
Developing the AI had its own pitfalls, though. “When we had diplomacy up and running, at one point the AI would happily negotiate amongst itself and decide ‘No, this is fine. This is good, we’re good. We like how things are.’ At this point the joke was that it had become Empire: Total Negotiated Settlement. Everyone was just happy,” Gosling added. “I was glad that the AI was doing its job, but it wasn’t exactly what we intended.”
Looking back at Empire’s legacy, Pitkethly said that it “set a precedent for us in terms of scope and complexity and detail that you can’t really go back on. We set a line in stone and that set an expectation for Total War. […] We showed that this is what a Total War game can be.”
Ellie Koorlander, who is now the technical art director on Total War, called the game a “creative eye opener” for herself and the series, paving the way for new settings — historical and otherwise.
The plans for the next Total War games will be revealed at the end of 2025.
