Empire: Total War Interview

06 Mar 2009 at 16:15:42 by

IncGamers caught up with the Creative Assembly guys and quizzed them on the latest installment in the classic strategy franchise. Mark Sutherns (Associate Producer), James Russell (Lead Designer) and Kevin McDowell (Lead Artist) told us about the new naval combat system, historical accuracy and the highly-anticipated multiplayer game.

Tell us about the naval combat in the game. Why did you decide to introduce real-time naval battles into the series?

MS: I think naval combat has always been an element of the game that the community wanted, because ships and trade and the combat element of the game have always been there.  But we’ve never realised it in full 3D, as we have the land battles. So, it was an obvious component to explore but the time was never right in our previous games. With Rome, when we revolutionised the engine last time, we didn’t think we could do naval combat justice and also the period wasn’t, perhaps, the optimum period for naval combat. This period (in Empire) definitely is because it’s the age of sail, which gives us a wealth of options we can explore in terms of the types of ship we can give the player, the types of strategy we can give the player – in terms of ammo types – and with wind playing such a massive role we can explore the simulation side of naval combat too.

When we looked at naval combat it was a balance between making sure we didn’t go too far down the simulation side and therefore sacrifice gameplay and fun. So wind is in the game and it is a major factor in the way you play out the battles because it gives you that initiative in the battle. If you’ve got the wind, you can make the first move – you can get to the enemy first, you can get the first shots off. And that’s really crucial to your prospects in the battle.

How will the battles play out?

MS: Like our land battles, it’s a strategy game with realistic elements of play. But, a lot of that stuff is going on under the hood. The types of ship differ, and there are over 25 different types in the game and they all have different hull strengths, manoeuvrability (with and without the wind, firepower, guns, crew sizes. These factors all contribute to the overall strategy of the game because you have to learn – if you want to explore the game and become an advanced player – how each of those ships work.  Learn what the strengths and weaknesses of each ship are so when you go into battle, you’re prepared and you know exactly how to match an opponent.

JR: With the initial inception, when we know what time period we wantto tackle, we have two considerations really. We’ve got features wethink would be really good and fun for Total War in terms of where wewant to take it, but at the same time we want to make sure thesefeatures are appropriate to the time period.  That’s one of the reasonswhy this was an ideal time to really push the naval battles.

How did you maintain historical accuracy when developing the game?

JR: With the ships, we went and talked to the National Maritime Museum in London, got all the ship plans and we were pouring over all these actual 18th century diagrams of the ships. All the blueprints were given to our artists so they could rebuild all the ships.  It’s been a massive undertaking but we’re really glad that we finally got it out there.

KM: The task at hand is to recreate faithfully all of the objects from history; men, ships, buildings etc. And for this time period, it was quite easy for us because it’s so well-documented.

Does the fact that you're playing in a real historical period limit what you can do in any way?

JR: The way we work is that we present the player with a sandbox but the structure of that is created by history itself. So, we did an awful lot of research into the way the world was in the year 1700 and we set up a start position for the player with the nations set up as they were, with similar technologies and similar land and cities that they would have controlled at the time.

MS: We don’t actually impose any restrictions on the player, we don’t say “by 1740, this event will occur and you’ll have to deal with it.” What we do is present the player with the framework of history and a sandbox to explore and then it’s up to the player to create their own history based on what we have given them. We don’t ever say to the player “stop what you’re doing, this is happening now,” that’s never what we’ve done in the Total War games.

What was your biggest challenge in developing the game?

KM: Most people might think the biggest challenge is getting the soldiers right, or the buildings right. That’s actually the easy stuff because we’ve got tons of reference for it. The tricky stuff is when we’re making new systems for things. We’ve got a new campaign map for Empire and this was a single object, essentially, which was in development for three and a half years. So, we’re starting with nothing and developing all the technology as we go along.   

For the landscapes, we’ve got new technology with systems for fields which can be turned on and off and different heights on the landscape. It all fits into an auto generation system which is very, very complicated.  That was our biggest challenge.

We did a few new things which we hadn’t done in the past. So, in previous games we had faction colouring for all the soldiers and in this game we decided to have faction colouring where it’s appropriate but on some soldier types it’s not appropriate because that’s not what they did historically. So we had to let go of this game mechanic and it actually works great and no-one has a problem with it because hey... we’ve got big green circles under people!

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