Australian Gamer Interview :: Ash Parker from The Creative Assembly

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Ash Parker from The Creative Assembly

Ash Parker (Lead Producer for Creative Assembly) answers some questions about the upcoming Medieval 2 Total War expansion pack

Studio Tour | Interview with Ash Parker (Senior Producer) | Interview with Ken Turner (Project Director)

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Yug: First off, tell us about the expansion pack ... I mean that’s the big thing right now.

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.

Yug: as in content wise?

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.

Matt: but its more the other way round, fantasy delved into their world.

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.

Teutonic soldiers look totally badass

Yug: Sounds like there’s a huge amount of research that goes into that.

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.

Matt: Is that helpful or annoying or a bit of both?

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.

Matt: Or even from within that city.

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.

Yug: You’d have to take some creative licence through the game though?

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

Yug: Well that’s true, because if it was accurate and you were playing as the wrong side, you’d lose.

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.

Matt: Tell us about the Americas campaign – is it the invasion of the west, or is it the actual Americas themselves.

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.

Matt: Is there any particular area you think is untapped if you were to do another expansion pack? Like would you be interested in going back to Japan for example.

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.

Yug: Are the voices of the characters recorded locally?

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.

Yug: When did you guys decide to make an expansion pack?

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.

The Crusades make for an interesting campaign

Matt: And there’s so much mythology from it.

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

Yug: I just keep thinking of Indiana Jones.

Matt: Yeah, so do I, I was trying really hard not to though.

Yug: But it’s not exactly historical.

Matt: Yes it is, Indiana Jones is true.

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

Matt: There was a board game?

Ash: Yeah, freaked me out!

Yug: So, the Americas are probably a bit of a big market.

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.

Matt: We don’t actually have it yet to review.

Ash: I’m sure we can arrange something.

Yug: Is there much involvement from the UK Creative Assembly offices?

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.

Matt: Just say something generic like ‘and many other helpful things’

*laugh*

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

Matt: When we’ve talked to many other companies that have an international division it’s often interesting to see how they work together, in regards to conflict and competition. Is there competition between you guys and the UK?

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.

Matt: Are you trying to escape?

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.

Matt: You guys have established a pretty solid base in strategic real time strategy games. Do you ever think “buggar this, let’s make a kart racer’?

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.

Yug: What other games do you see as your competitors?

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

Yug: I just always felt Total War always stood out.

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.

Matt: Have you ever been tempted then to change times? Future Total War?

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.

Matt: Maybe mess with time travel, and have groups from one time...

Ash: Could do.

Matt: I don’t know ... this is why I don’t work in the game industry. See I want to play a game where you play a modern elite army against Stone Age people.

Yug: Not historically accurate.

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.

Balancing out less advanced armies in the Americas campaign

Matt: Would the actual control and maintaining of the larger numbers of units compared to the smaller numbers be a problem?

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.

Matt: What about online play?

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.

Matt: Do you guys actually play online yourselves?

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.

Yug: I hear that often, if someone is very heavily involved in the community of a game, or if they play a lot of it, or mod it, they tend to get contacted by the company.

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.

Matt: How does that work in regards to online multiplayer, can you play the Indians versus the North.

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

Huge battles are playable online

Matt: The oceans alone would be an issue.

*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.

Matt: I used to play risk like that, on a really old Mac.

Yug: We might wrap things up there I think, Ash thanks so much for your time!

Ash: Not a problem!

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