E3 2010: A lot of people aren't sure about the return to the series' roots in Shogun 2, but we've seen it in action and returned from the battlefield to report!
Sega, unsurprisingly, had a large presence on the show floor at E3 this year. However, for our money, all the best action was up in a small meeting room, where Creative Assembly were holding live demos of the upcoming Shogun 2: Total War.
If you know Atomic, you know we rate the entire Total War series very highly. Both Empire and Napoleon review at 98+, and amongst forum goers Empire was pretty much the unnofficial Game of the Year for 2009. For fans of deep strategy and immensely involving tactical challenges, there's no other series like it.
Which is why it's such an odd move for CA to go back to the start. Speculation was rife as to where Total War would go next, but no one expected a return to its roots. So how is the move looking so far?
Absolutely. Positively. Beautiful.
"This," said the CA bod demoing the game, "is the game we wanted to make 10 years ago." Hard to argue with that, really, especially as we're seeing screen after screen of gorgeous period art. It's not just for production, either - these are the screens of carnage and victory, defeat and diplomacy, that are going to punctuate the entire game. Indeed, a lot more cultural thought has gone into this game than any other Total War game.
Japanese thought and poetry revolves around the seasons, and so too does Shogun 2. Each game turn is a season, and the seasonal colour palette is an intense part of the game's loook and feel. Both the campaign map and battle maps are captured down to the last atmospheric detail, from leaf colour to tree design. "In fact," we were told, "if you look at the trees closely you're not going to see a lot of repetition. There are over 80 tree types in the game, all hand-designed. No SpeedTree models here, thankyou very much!
And not only does the game look good, but it seems to be playing good too. Even bearing in mind that any demo at E3 must be held in a certain... objective light, there seem to be mammoth improvements in game AI. CA's dropped the number of total units down to about 30, and this seems to have made AI decision-making much stronger. In the game we saw, archers were adept at hiding in trees, the enemy general made great use of fire arrows, and the advancing-wall-of-doom (where your entire enemy army just forms lines and advances) was nowhere to be seen.
We'll have more info on the game in our upcoming issue, but few games left us salivating for some hands on time as much as this one did. Shogun 2 could well be a contender for Game of the Show.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012