SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR

SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR

FROM BOG-STANDARD C&C CLONE TO WORLD DOMINATION: HOW CREATIVE ASSEMBLY CRAFTED A PC GAMING LEGEND

THE MAKING OF...

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FIRST REVIEWED PCG 82, 92% PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER Creative Assembly RELEASE 2000

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Crosshead

e set off, says Mike Simpson, longserving creative director on the Total War series, with the intention of making a B-grade Command & Conquer clone. In the early months of 1987, one-time Amstrad bedroom programmer Tim Ansell found himself with more work than he could handle. Hed been converting Amiga classics to PC for Psygnosis and other publishers, titles now guaranteed to generate unjust nostalgia among longer-term PC Gamer readers: Shadow of the Beast, Microcosm and Stunt Car Racer. Now hed won a contract to develop sports games for EA a huge step up. He moved out of his bedroom and expanded the team. Up to the giddy heights of five, says Mike. These five programmers had a heavy workload. They built the first version of FIFA on PC, the first game to have play-by-play audio commentary. They went into minority sports; rugby, cricket, Australian rules football. But they wanted more. Mike was Tims producer at EA and Tim had recruited his ex-colleague to start a second team, working on a new title. That title was Monkey, an RPG based on the TV series, featuring Hanuman the monkey god and his travels and travails with a menagerie of other Chinese gods. To fund the project the newly formed Creative Assembly would have to pack their bags: they were planning to take advantage of huge financial advantages from the Singapore government by moving east. But the financial package fell apart and the team had to come up with a new plan. Enter plan B: build a B-grade C&C clone.

War. Brilliant.

We were going to have lots and lots of little ant-like men, says Mike. It would still be top down, with flocking little ants. We did some mock ups that looked pretty good. But once we got a 3D battlefield, suddenly you were making a battlefield look like a proper battlefield. Nobody had done that before. The larger strategy map was simply a way of tying the relatively short battles together and giving them a sense of importance.

Samurai rush

One of the biggest changes from the C&C clone, though, was the setting; the Sengoku Jidai or Warring States era of Japanese history between the 15th and 17th centuries. The period was characterised by the weakening of the Ashikaga Shogunate and the rise of powerful feudal lords Daimyos who carved the country up between them. It also featured

map meant factions had an equal chance of winning the game. There were hardware practicalities too, as the head writer, Mike Brunton, told us . When you think about it, the Samurai guy has a nice big banner on his back so you can see who he is. They all look the same apart from having different cloaks on to make them look good. It sounds silly, but it counted for something in those days. You know, when youve got 64 meg on a graphics card, you need to think about these things. It wasnt all roses though. Mike has talked in the past about the problems the team had with implementing the throne room, a key decision-making area of the game. It was a very simple idea; we have a scene, viewed from the throne. Someone walks in, you have a chat with them, they go out again. But making it work took years off peoples lives. Its making a video out of component elements. A large team worked on it and most of them were relatively inexperienced then. With such little 3D experience, even simple things, like making the NPCs have realistic cloth on their attire, became difficult problems. We wanted everyone to have nice flowing material, but the technology of the day really wasnt up to it. Oscillating bits of cloth led to the infamous trouser snake problem. Which is a sentence you dont hear very often, especially from the mouths of developers.

Copy and conquer

Command & Conquer had spawned a whole bunch of clones while we were working on our RPG, like Kill, Krush n Destroy, which sold really well. We looked at that and thought, thats so easy to write, we can do that. Isnt a bit harsh to call such a groundbreaking game B-grade though? That wasnt the game, he laughs that was our ambition! As development went on with the C&C clone, a silicon revolution was taking place inside our PCs. The first 3dfx card had just been released. Textured 3D graphics were now possible. Mike saw the opportunities and the team began experimenting with a new 3D graphics engine. We thought maybe, instead of a traditional RTS top-down view, we can have a spline-based landscape. So we put the camera lower down and, surprisingly, that all worked. It wasnt designed to be Shogun right from the start. It kind of evolved into it. The C&C clone wasnt dead, though. From the beginning of the project the team had intended to focus on infantry, a useful differentiation in an already crowded RTS genre that was continually repeating the success of Dune and C&C.

The technology of the day wasnt really up to it. Oscillating bits of cloth led to the infamous trouser snake problem
rapid cultural development and a temporary social meritocracy, as the non-rulers, alternately enriched and impoverished by the advent of international trade, usurped the places of the oft-incompetent aristocracy Although Mike had been involved in an earlier Japanese war game (Lords of the Rising Sun), the era was chosen mainly for pragmatic reasons. The changes in the era gave the team a period of rapid development: the first contact with the West, the internecine civil war to claim the title of Shogun, and the Samurai and gunpowder setting. They had a really good tech race in that period, going from simple medieval weapons to guns, explains Mike. There were lots and lots of different factions, many of whom could have won. The one that did win was pretty unlikely given where it started from. Strategically, the standardisation of Japanese troops in the game, save for one or two specialist units, used to balance the factions, and the Risk-like main

Flaming pigs

Finally, they chose it so they could watch lots of Akira Kurosawa movies. The offbeat cultural research has always been one of the hallmarks of Total War games. From Romes flaming pigs to wasp pots, theyve gloried in finding the obscure and emphasising how different ancient cultures were. Its in the DNA of the team, says James Russell, lead designer of the Total War series. Everyones into history and the core pillar of Total War is vividly and accurately recreating and immersing the player in the setting, whatever it is. Theres this kind of glee when you find something strange or wonderful, adds Mike. Youre almost compelled to share with everybody. The designers look for the strange, the weird and the wonderful and the offbeat, because often it throws a strange light on things. For example, the way the designers integrated the precepts of Sun Tzus Art of War, not only into the look, but also the design and tactical system. The new money system of feudal Japan, the Koku, was based on the amount of rice a man needed to eat in a year. However, they dont always include what they find. Theres some stuff that we couldnt put in though, says Mike Simpson. It was just too weird. Theres all the Egyptian stuff you really dont want to get into. The different
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THE MAKING OF... SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR

historical periods compete against each other for coming up with the most insane and unusual thing. Worryingly, their sometimes exaggerated research has cropped up on Wikipedia as fact. When we had to research Shogun 2, we would be researching all the foibles of all the different clans and a lot of the source material was basically straight out of Shogun 1. We were like, No! We dont want that! The lesson: dont trust what you read on Wikipedia. Board games were a secondary influence. They are almost perfect examples of the type, says James. They end up taking complicated concepts and forming them into some really simple methods, which is kind of what we aim to do. From the teams description, the Creative Assembly office is a hotbed of geekery, with board games, war games and even pen-and-paper roleplaying games taking place. Notably, Shogun itself was partly inspired by a board game of the same name.

GAMEOGRAPHY
The Creative Assembly were founded in 1987, originally just to port Amiga games to the PC. These are their key games. FIFA 94 (1994) Creative Assembly worked with EA Sports to create the first PC FIFA. With it, they pioneered the idea of reactive commentary now a standard feature. Rugby World Cup (1995) Continuing to work with EA Sports, CA found their groove in making high-quality versions of non-mainstream sports games. Fans appreciated the effort, and these games became steady earners. Shogun: Total War (2000) They only set out to make a modest Command & Conquer ripoff, but it evolved into an ambitious mix of turn-based and real-time strategy. Medieval: Total War (2002) Shogun became the template for CAs games, and Medieval expanded it to a grander scale. Medieval topped UK charts for weeks. Rome: Total War (2004) For the Roman era, CA rebuilt Total War from the engine up. It paid off: Rome is still a fan favourite even today.

a game but our average player gets 95 hours of play out of that. Then its a drop in the ocean in terms of your average spend for somebody. Especially if theyre only buying one or two games a year. Publishers are discovering that game players are a lot more price attuned than they thought they were and value for money is something thats very high up their list of requirements. Priced per hour, Shogun is up there for value with Angry Birds. You spend 30, you get 10 hours out of a console game, agrees Mike Brunton. You spend 30 and you get 100 hours out of one of ours. Mike Simpson pondered on this. Maybe games are getting a bit more like books, where, if you make a good game its going to be there for a long time. Moreover, good strategy games are less dependent on their visual look for their longevity, compared with other genres, which are a little bit more purely about the look. Do the team think the game appealed to something particularly British in its recreations of historical events? James doesnt. I think the Germans also have a similar approach to war gaming, from the strategic side. The whole thing of filling in the map in your colour is a very strong motivator. Mike Brunton notes that though the Germans took to the game, they played it very differently. Germans actually tend to like playing the strategy side of the campaign map over all the other platforms. They love all that intricate building your camp up, making sure youve got all the right buildings in every area to maximise the bonuses. James agrees: [They enjoy] maximising your economy, to get the most amount of money coming in. Immediately after release, the team started work on three new projects, including the first of their Barbarian expansions, The Mongol Invasion, as well as Medieval: Total War and Rome, an entirely new engine. Others have followed; Medieval II, Spartan: Total Warrior, Shogun II. So has the team ever considered moving on? Making Total War, because of the whole team dynamic, is actually a really exciting and fun experience, says James. If youre having fun doing something and it makes money, why stop? Will they ever stop making them? Mike Brunton doesnt think so. Well, we dont like to retire, eventually pay the mortgages off, things like that. Why did we continue? asks Mike Simpson. Partly it never occurred to us to stop. Weve not stopped having fun making them, to date. It seems as long as gamers keep enjoying them, Creative Assembly will keep making them.

Successful strategy

Growth spurt

It all makes sense, but there was a problem. This wasnt anything like the game that Creative Assemblys then-publisher EA had commissioned. A low-risk, accessible B-grade game had turned into an obscure new genre that required the newest, most expensive hardware to work. To their credit, EA welcomed the idea. We went back with a pitch for what we wanted to produce, [saying] how much better it was than the original idea, says Mike Simpson. It did make sense. They went ahead with it. The Creative Assembly team grew rapidly. The core of the team ended up being about 15 people. It mightve gone up to about 20 by the time we finished. Their working space needed to grow too. So Ansell moved out of his bedroom and, first of all, into a small industrial unit, then ended up working out of a selfcontained building near Horsham, England. It was quite a good office to work in, says Jamie Ferguson, battle lead designer. Because there was a country pub across the road and a pub on the other side of the other road. Kevin was a little less happy though. If you didnt drive, you had to take the bus from Horsham. Ten minutes as the crow flies, but about an hours ride.

You spend 30, you get 10 hours out of a console game. You spend 30 and you get 100 hours out of one of ours
Creative Assembly such names as Mark Sutherns, Ian Roxborough and Al Bickham are working there right now.) The surprise was that not only did it do great numbers at launch. It carried on selling. And carried on selling. And carried on selling. Three years later, it was selling more copies in a week than the launch week. One of the major things about Total War as a series is that the games sell for a very, very long time, says James. If you can make something that is fun to play and has deep involvement, it becomes value for money. OK, you might be spending 30 quid on

Smash hit

The game was eventually released in June 2000. Suffice to say, it was a hit, garnering scores in the high 80s and above, across the media. PC Gamer gave it 92% at the time (its metacritic average is still 90%), calling it, a very satisfying wargame, if not the end-allbeat-all game wed hoped for. (Several PC Gamer writers have since gone onto work for
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