Ash Parker from The Creative Assembly

Interview from Yug - Monday, 27 August 2007 @ 4:00pm

Ashley Parker: That’s right, we’re just winding that up as we speak. It is Massive, that’s probably the single most defining thing about it. I think you’d be hard pressed to find another expansion pack which would rival its size and weight.


Ash: Yeah, content wise ... not that we’ve skimped on the features though. We basically took Med 2, and did 4 different variants on it focusing on 4 different areas of the world. Britannia, the whole campaign there focuses on Scotland Wales, England, and the invaders coming in. That in itself is pretty much the Viking invasion, but a different take on it. Then you have the whole Teutonic northern European, really scary, dark, nasty European wars that took place up there with the crazy knights ... it looks like we delved into the world of fantasy to come up with these guys and their crazy helmets.


Ash: I think so; I mean they are historical guys that wore these bonkers helmets, giant wings on them, fists pointing at the sky, really out there. And we have such a large amount of German and polish fans of the game, so they’ve been crying out for it, and we really wanted to do something for those guys. Plus, the Teutonic wars are something which, before we’d embarked on this game I’d barely heard of, and it sounds really out there. It’s a part of history that to date has been largely ignored by the games industry. So there was that, and we also wanted to delve right into the Crusades and the battles there. We had to approach that tactfully and carefully to make sure we didn’t upset anyone. We didn’t want to pick a side – Christians and Muslims – they both have their good and their bad. We wanted just a fantastic playpen for great wars.





Ash: Those guys were working for months. The designers were picking through any book they could get, doing multiple trips into the city and raiding stores for anything they could get. We get contacted quite regularly by historians out there that get wind that we’re working on a game about this content, and they start going through all the screenshots as they’re released and circling historical inaccuracies and sending them to us.


Ash: To be honest, at times it’s a bit annoying, as you often get them contradicting each other. There may be 5 different ways to write the name of a city throughout history depending on what country perspective you’re taking it from, or even multiple names from that country.


Ash: Yeah, there are tonnes of variations, and you want to lock as much down into the game as possible, make it as accurate as possible, but it can be difficult peeling through huge files.


Ash: We do and we have to for game play, as it’s not a straight history simulator as such. It is a game.


Ash: Or it would take 100 years to play the game! So there are a degree of liberties taken, although we try to make it as historical as possible. In saying that though, we will favour what may be a captivating unit (which was maybe very rare and only turned up in a couple of battles), but if they’re exciting and interesting we’ll put it in the game. And there’s the whole America’s campaign. In med 2 we didn’t feel we had really finished with it, you only see it right at the end of the game, and we’ve now fully fleshed that out. We’ve recorded all sound so we have a full set of audio of all the units, multiple factions there. It’s really bizarre to see northern Americans in a computer game – apache guys in tepees is quite weird for a total war game; it blew me away when I first saw it.


Ash: At the time where we decided to start the game, Spain was pretty much the only guys there and were very dominant. You can play as those guys in Cuba as they make their way into America. Or you can play as different factions – Apache, Aztec.


Ash: I think with the assets we’ve got in Med 2 and Kingdoms now, I think Japan would be quite challenging, it would be a whole new set of assets, and if you were going to do that you would redo Shogun. It deserves its own game, it’s where we started.


Ash: Yup, we have 3 recording studios – one specialising in sound effects, one in speech, and one in music. The scale of the game just blows me away and it’s scary to think about the number of words, text and audio in the game is off the scale. I’ve been working in games for a long time and this takes the cake.


Ash: Pretty much when we were winding up on Med 2, it’s been done in the past and it’s a good opportunity. People wanted it, we had the English who loved the Viking expansion pack in the past, and we had the Germans who wanted to see a Germanic based campaign; Crusades generally interest most people – because everyone’s vaguely familiar with the content and are usually curious to know more. And it’s such a weird contrast as well, European guys in heavy metal in the middle of the desert.





Ash: And recently been in movies, Kingdom of Heaven has sparked people’s interests.





Ash: My wife just came back from Melbourne and brought back Indiana Jones the board game.


Ash: Yeah, freaked me out!


Ash: Exactly. So, picking just one of these campaigns just wouldn’t do it justice, so we went for broke, and did the expansion in a very aggressive timeline, and have succeeded. We are highly anticipating the reviews.


Ash: I’m sure we can arrange something.


Ash: In Medieval 2 we relied on their studio marketing, which co-ordinates Sega’s marketing. They also produced a lot of the smaller cinematic moments throughout the game – like the assassination movies. With Kingdoms, less so, they still did studio marketing ... um, this will be terrible if I forget something they did and don’t mention it.


*laugh*

Ash: I think we did it all here except for many other helpful things.


Ash: There’s always a sense of tribalism which evolves. With Rome, the two studios were definitely co-developing, Med 2 it was a step further removed, and Kingdoms is pretty much just us.


Ash: I think this studio started off as a very small studio with a few people, and we’re maturing to a size where we don’t need to rely upon them as much. We don’t share any common business hours with the UK, so it’s extremely challenging to maintain communication.


Ash: I’m sure some of the guys do. We have an aptitude for making large scale war games, and we have a sense of pride that we excel and maintain the lead over our competitors.


Ash: In the total war line of games, it is games like Age of Empires.


Ash: It’s two games in one really, as it has the massive campaign game which is fully fleshed out, and it has the massive battle game. Then in Kingdoms you replicate that by four. You’ll be there for a hundred years playing the game.


Ash: I guess each new full Total War game picks a time frame and focuses on that and the expansions target roughly within that time period. I guess there comes a point where you get into mechanised war, modern warfare, but then the game would change. We consider everything across the board.


Ash: Could do.



Ash: See, I must admit, that was something we thought about. The Americas is a bit like that – you have very small but very powerful versus a large amount with less armour, ammunition and capabilities. It’s very hard to balance that well. We did look at South Africa and consider it, the Zulu wars, but that came a bit later. It was not what we were used to. You have 200 in a unit of Aztec guys versus 20 Spanish guys, and having that balance out was a challenge.





Ash: Well, the capability of the engine to manipulate that many people is a challenge, and we’ve actually improved the mechanic. Previously controlling large numbers, you had supporting armies that went off on their own. Now you can give them basic directions, tell them to attack, hold ground, stay the distance and fire with ranged weapons. You have the capacity to have a far grander war.


Ash: I think it will be well received; we tried to put lots of little touches in there. It would have been a lot simpler for each campaign to only have those factions playable against those factions, but we tried to bring in as many old favourites from Med 2 as possible, so you can play all of those guys against each other. We tried to bring those kinds of elements in, and we did a lot of work in Med 2 to try and raise the bar in regards to multiplayer.


Ash: We have a couple of fanatical guys here who actually started as community leaders out there, playing in clans and championships. One of those guys, Jason Turnbull, joined as a QA tester and quickly made his way into design.


Ash: We get emails out of the blue from people, CV’s related to a game we’ve made. Case in point with Jason – he just knew so much about the balance of the game it was invaluable. Really allowed us to review the whole way we were approaching balancing the game.


Ash: Across the four campaigns, no, we are rather limited. Just logistically it would be extremely challenging.





*laugh*

Ash: But just starting back to multiplayer, we have put in full hot seat support into the game, so you can now play a full campaign with 3 of your mates hot seating on the one machine. It’s all cleverly done so that it hides the screen, and you need a password to progress onto the next game. It even saves your game so that you can email to friends at a different location so you can hot seat with them. A lot of work got into that, we almost got that released with Med 2, but we wanted to polish it up a bit.



Ash: Not a problem!