Australian Gamer Interview :: Ken Turner from The Creative Assembly

THE 'WHITE LINE' OF GAMING FEVER

Ken Turner from The Creative Assembly

Ken Turner (Project Director for Creative Assembly) answers some questions about the history of the company and how it came about

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

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Yug: Can you tell us a bit of background about how the Australian Creative Assembly came about.

Ken: Yeah, it’s a long story, it’s been about 5 years now that the studio's been here. Basically, we left EA (they had a Gold Coast studio back then), and by left I mean in the nicest possible way - booted out the door. George used to get Creative Assembly to do all the sports products, local sports: AFL, Rugby and stuff like that. I think they even did an early version of FIFA on the PC way back when. So, when Tim, the owner of Creative Assembly at the time, heard that we were available to resources, he went "wow, that’s great, I’ve always wanted to have an Australian studio". Back then I think we were seen as terribly low cost.

Yug: Just curious, how does that compare today.

Ken: Look I think the local industry, with the efforts at Pandemic and other places, we’re getting A grade products coming through, slowly changing the way people perceive the industry here. We’re still the pimple on the back end of the games industry, and it’s really hard as the local market here is only 1 1/5 %. We don’t have an industry here that supports big projects, but there’s a great shift in perception that really games are being made all over the place. You don’t need to be American, or even English anymore to make stuff for this market. So Tim found out we were available, and was looking to expand the talent pool, because then he was finding it really hard to find people in the UK market. Here we had an abundance of less experience but high potential candidates down here. So Tim flew straight out, we had fish and chips on the Gold Coast, spoke a little about stuff, I had an interview as I was the first employee after George for the studio here.

So I went over to England for 6 months to work in the offices there on Rome Total War, and hire a few guys to bring back, as well as get up to speed on Rome and how the technology was used. Meanwhile George was setting up the infrastructure; we actually used to be on Level 2 of this building and took up only a third of the floor space.

Yug: You really like this building here.

Ken: Well we looked around at a lot of places, but this is a good location. We were upstairs, and when I came back we were initially meant to start on the very next Total war project at the end of 2002. Rome went through a lot of issues though, so they needed the guys here to help out, so we got some extra programmers and art guys, and got Jeff Van Dyck as audio director. For Rome, anything you can see or hear on the 3d battlefield was out of this office. Which was cool, it looked very good. Initially we were meant to come back here and start on the very next project, which is actually the project that they're currently working on in the UK office. Instead we spent another 18 months working on Rome to help get it out the door. After that we had 14 staff, and we helped out a little bit on Spartan Total Warrior - all the audio and some of the art was done here, our art director Jason Dalton was one of the early hires for that.

They really like their building

Pretty much from there we signed up to do Medieval 2, we had 3 or 4 months of thinking about all the cool things we could do. What we wanted to do was have a really solid project that we could build the studio up to the 60 people we wanted, including QA, and we wanted to do it on a short time frame, on time, and on budget, which is reasonably unheard of for Total War games. Because they're massive. I think one of the reasons we don’t have a direct competitor in that space is because they look at the size of it and go "how can you make money out of that?". But we did it, used it as a vehicle to train guys up, we had a whole design department to build and no one had any experience. Guys came from all over the place. You might know Dan Toose, who came from a media background. Some guys came from table top, some from theatre stuff, and some from universities.

Yug: It sounds very rough round the edges and slowly moulding everyone up.

Ken: It was definitely gathering together the rough diamonds, and then just rubbing against each other and smoothing things out.

Matt: That’s an interesting way of phrasing it.

Ken: The after parties were certainly a bunch of fun.

*laugh*

Ken: So Medieval 2 came out at the end of last year, reviewed pretty well, people were pretty happy with it. And Kingdoms is just about out the door, so people will have that in their hands very soon. What we really wanted to do with Medieval and Kingdoms is to really focus on asking our players what they wanted. We have 3 generations of Total War players, so we asked "Do you want new features? What do you want?" And they said "Well, fix it up, and give us some cool content". So we did that, and Kingdoms is just more of that, with the 4 campaigns, and we spent a lot of time internally play testing, such that each of the factions each have an equal opportunity to win but they all have a different way to play them.

Medieval 2: Total War was released to positive reviews

So that kind of brings us to now. Throughout the course of Medieval 2 and Kingdoms, we’ve been working on a hot new thing, which we can’t quite talk about just yet. It’s reasonably straight forward to think ‘large scale warfare’ which is what we do ... ‘cool new hardware that is around’ including game consoles ... and we’re kind of sick of history. Probably at the start of next year we’ll unveil more. The team is super excited that we’re having a shot at our own title.

Matt: Is everyone on a break right now for the team?

Ken: There are lots of guys taking time off now, although even on the new project we’re about 2 3rds through pre production, and its important now during the creative process to have time away. Delivering is more about ‘hammer hammer’, whereas if you’re trying to create things you need some perspective, to be able to step away and think about it. Sometimes you don’t recognise the cool stuff until later and sometimes you think what was cool is actually a bit stinky. By the end of this year we’ll be out of pre production, and looking towards a nice, tight time frame in regards to production. Because the business is all about stuffing boxes, getting it done. In terms of moving forward, we’re essentially handing the baton back to Creative Assembly UK for Total War. Kingdoms is our last involvement in that franchise.

Yug: Going out on a high?

Ken: It is, but the guys are super happy with the feedback, talking about modding, and hopefully the UK guys will continue that. There are some great mods, and great movies. We were looking at some stuff on YouTube, since we released the cinema editor, and there’s a guy in Japan doing some great stuff. Much better than ours.

Matt: What do you that, do you get them involved?

Ken: Well Jeff, who’s looking after cinema as well as audio, sent him a note just saying ‘love your stuff’. So, it will be a sad, joyous day moving on from that, but we need to focus all our efforts on the new project. So that’s kind of the past/present on the studio. We did some polling before we started on Medieval 2, given what was there and what people liked, and the Medieval content was what people liked, and that’s kind of why we went back there. Where Rome was more green grass, blue skies, and attack of the clones obviously, we wanted to make it grittier, dirty, and that way the colour that came out in it was almost something to contrast the gritty undertone.

I personally think Rome was the least playable of all the Total War games, but it turns out there’s lots of corporate dudes who were into the Roman Empire, just because of the way it handled early politics, structure, economy. I think they might even have to study some of that rubbish, as part of their business courses.

Matt: How to run a global empire.

Ken: It’s strange, a lot of late 20s to 40-somethings said "Oh, if you ever make your game about the Roman Empire we’ll be into it". And some of them actually think Rome is the best of the Total War games simply because of the content. And the Elephants probably helped too.

Matt: Elephants are a winner; all games should have elephants in them.

Elephants in Rome: Total War ftw

Ken: Well where they go after that, one can only guess. I suppose we could make the guys in Poland and Lithuania happy by accurately depicting their history, but I don’t think we’ll sell too many copies.

Matt: You could do Britain invading Australia, a very one sided battle in Tasmania. Which could be very fun in a very immoral kind of way.

Ken: I can see the diplomacy options now, with one at the bottom that says ‘sorry’.

Matt: You’d be there going ‘why can’t I click on that’.

*laugh*

Matt: Do you have an interest in console development, and if so, which ones?

Ken: Every console generation finds a new genre coming across or being created. I think the gaming community is maturing a lot more. If I want to have a casual thing I’ll stick it on easy and play along, but if I want a challenge I’ve got the option there, flowing through into multiplayer, which is really a huge push from Microsoft on the 360. In terms of the things people want to play, some of these things that were considered PC like are coming across, although not directly. We approach this whole thing by looking at the console customers, look at their needs, if they do want a tactical experience, what would they want as opposed to taking the PC tactical experience and porting it across, even though it’s proving to be reasonably financially successful at the moment, with C&C3 and Battle for Middle Earth.

Matt: What console preferences would you develop for?

Ken: Given the time frame that we’re looking at releasing this one, we’re likely to lead on 360, follow on PS3, and then look into Vista... Direct X 10.

Matt: Are you ignoring the Wii entirely?

Ken: It’s a great interface, and perfectly suited to what we’re doing. We’re actually trying to get hold of a dev kit so we can play with it, but it’s just terribly underpowered. One of the things that’s making strategy possible in this new generation is the power of the 360, and the power of the PS3, and also then the power of Windows Vista with Direct X 10. The Wii, it’s so interesting with what they’ve done, but then they just put it in a tiny little box with dodgy graphics.

Matt: It’s a GameCube basically.

Ken: A GameCube by two, yeah. We kind of considered that if this business takes off, we could do porting to handheld. The interface is great, I love all that stuff.

At this point in the interview we ran out of tape, needless to say we spoke to Ken alot more about the different Total War games, his opinions on the 3 consoles, and also a story about how Robin Williams is a huge fan of the Total War games. We'd once again like to thank Kim, Ash, Ken, and everyone else who we saw and spoke to during our tour of the studio, and look forward to getting our grubby little hands on Kingdoms as well as keeping our eyes on Creative's next title.

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