GRTV: Rome II Interview

Rome II is the title that Total War fans have long been calling for, and happily it should be with us late next year after a long, long wait. Gillen McAllister caught up lead designer James Russel at Gamescom and found out how the strategy game is progressing.

"We've got combined battles," the lead designer from The Creative Assembly explained. "So this is the first time in the Total War series that we've had navies and armies in the same battlefield. So you see the guys disembarking from ships to fight on land and you see ship-born artillery bombarding the city."

In the most recent game in the series (Total War: Shogun II - Fall of the Samurai), naval units were able to support soldiers during battle via long-range bombardment, but the new features in Rome II should take this to a whole new level. It'll mean epic coastal attacks and sieges.

Russel explained how much more detail we can expect to see: "We're really pushing the graphics engine forward. The game looks so much better than even Shogun II. But we really want to push that level of detail, we want to make the soldiers feel more convincingly human. So we've got facial animations in the game we've got emotional interactions between men; so when my buddy next to me gets hit by an arrow i'm going to react to it rather than being like a robot."

One of the main challenges faced by the studio, is marrying up enjoyable gameplay with historical accuracy: "We're making a game that's got to be fun. We don't make anything up. What we do is we interpret history in a way that we feel is authentic, but makes for great gameplay. And of course, you don't want to be too realistic, otherwise the battles might take 24 hours with breaks for tea and collecting your dead."

"So it's about making the gameplay intuitive: what the player thinks should work from their understanding of the real world, those tactics have to work in the game. We use realism as the servant to gameplay, not the master of it."