Having ably assisted the UK office with the development of Rome: Total War and its expansion Barbarian Invasion, The Creative Assembly Australia set about Medieval II: Total War, a game that not only had to follow but improve upon its ground-breaking predecessors. The team are now working on the forthcoming Medieval II expansion pack Kingdoms, so we caught up with designer Dan Toose and senior programmer Dan Glastonbury to find out their thoughts on the company's first major solo project...
EXTENDING THE EMPIRE Glastonbury: We had a completely new game engine from the original Medieval, which allowed us to move the battle engine from being sprite-based to 3D models. Having these 3D models meant we could have far more visual detail over Medieval. With regards to building on Rome, the aim was to create a far more 'Hollywood' feel, so we added the variation in unit models, better combat choreography and better light controls. From a production perspective, we really focused on quality and I think the look of the game is a testament to that, as well as to the quality of our artists.
STATE AGENTS Toose: We wanted to give the player more ways to influence their finances, diplomacy and religion, but at the same time without creating any sort of heinous micro-management. The new agents like merchants and princesses are really simple to use, and that was a key part of the philosophy in adding things to the game. The new agents were a means of adding more depth without getting bogged down.
Glastonbury: Princesses were a part of the medieval experience that we felt couldn't be left out. By adding the other agent types, we tried to capture the feel for the era. At the time, the three merchant city-states of Milan, Venice and Genoa were very powerful; by adding merchants, we wanted to capture that. This was the same for heretics and inquisitors.
STONE CIRCLES Toose: Having multiple layers of defence for castles was the ideal way to make settlements that were genuinely difficult to siege. We're making castle walls even stronger in the expansion Kingdoms, so you may need several cracks at the bigger castles to succeed.
Glastonbury: Siege battles in Rome were too easy: besieging a castle is very hard, especially if the people in the castle have a good food supply. We wanted to have multi-turn campaign sieges, where it would take several turns to complete the battle one layer of defences at a time. In-between the battles, each side would be able to restock and regroup. We got the multiple defence layers into the battle engine, but the multi-turn sieges didn't make it.
CITIES AND FORTRESSES Glastonbury: Unlike games such as Civilization, in Total War each city isn't easily maxed out, so you have to really choose which ones are going to be economic or military powerhouses. Adding castles reinforces this and you really want to have a powerful castle near the battlefront to keep your armies supplied with good troops.
Toose: By having two types of settlements we gave the player a lot more choice about how they gear any given region. Castles produce a better spread of units, but cities make far more money. You need a combination of both to have the most effective empire.
SHIPPING BUGS Glastonbury: Since we started with the Rome code as the base for Medieval II, we were able to address the areas we felt gave us issues. But Total War games are by their very nature, huge undertakings. With a code-base the size of Medieval II there are always going to be bugs that we don't discover until the code is out in the wild.
Toose: Bugs tend to cause both the biggest headaches in development, but also help to provide the most laughs. We had one where men climbed ladders with so much gusto that they managed to insert themselves into the chap further up the ladder.
Glastonbury: The funniest graphical glitch I saw was caused by a change to the collision system for soldiers that resulted in them getting massive repelling forces from the ground. Men would randomly be thrown into the air, screaming and flailing. They were like popcorn in a frying pan.
MISSING FEATURES Glastonbury: A shipped game never resembles what the team originally sets out to create - there are always features that are added or removed for various reasons. You get so close to the product that it becomes like a child and it's disappointing when a feature has to get cut for whatever reason. Multi-turn sieges was one feature we couldn't include, and we also had plans to make further improvements to diplomacy and a completely re-imagined auto-resolve system.
Toose: There were a few features that we weren't able to put in like moats and being able to control reinforcement armies so you can assemble large forces effectively. These are features we're including in the Kingdoms expansion.
WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION Toose: Even though this was our first solo project and there were a lot of green faces in the studio, none of us suffered from performance anxiety, nor stopped to contemplate being compared to the UK studio. We just had self-belief and enthusiasm to do good work.
Glastonbury: Medieval II was a chance for this studio to stand on its own and prove itself - from day one of the Brisbane studio this had always been the plan. So it came down to us being masters of our own future and the pressure that comes with that. The core team for Medieval II worked on Rome, so by the end of Medieval II those people had been working on Total War for many years.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT Toose: The major area that could have been improved is AI, which is the answer most studios should give if they're honest. That's simply because creating good AI is really hard and the more complicated your game, the more complicated your AI has to be. Medieval II is really complicated and thus, we could always keep improving the AI.
The second area would be balancing, and that's purely because we shipped a game with 21 factions and close to 400 units. That's a ludicrous amount of stats to tune, and so more time would translate to better results. It's something we've examined again with Kingdoms.
History isn't balanced, and so certain factions are harder to play than others. We balance the game so that when you play in battle mode, each faction has strengths and weaknesses in its unit line-up. Beyond that, we let player skill and geographic opportunity dictate balance.
This is an excellent excellent game - but when oh when oh when are we going to get an expansion (i'll pay!) to change the awful Australian accents used in Rome Total War - it completely - and I mean completely - destroys the immersion, I just cannot get into the game however I try!
British English would be almost as bad. How about a mix between French (Normans) and Old English (Canterbury Tales stuff)?
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