Wes Fenlon
On the final day of E3, I had a chance to watch one of the show’s most exciting demos: a scripted run-through of a Total War: Warhammer battle. Orc shamans called down giant comets to crush whole units of troops. Giants stomped across the battlefield. Goblins rode on spindly war spiders. The battle was just a taste of the whole Warhammer package—I didn’t get to see any of the world map strategy layer or skill trees or politics—but Warhammer is first and foremost about battles, and these battles look like a blast.After the demo, I chatted with Creative Assembly’s Simon Mann, Total War: Warhammer’s battle designer. It was the most enthusiastic conversation I’ve had about orcs since my days of memorizing every bit of lore in Blizzard’s Warcraft II manuals.
PCG: So, we just got to see the demo and the first question I asked, which maybe you can’t answer, is where’s all the blood?
Simon Mann, battle designer: I mean, it’s been quite traditional in previous Total War games that we don’t strictly release with all the blood and gore in there, and it’s largely age ratings. It’s something we always explore and we’re always looking into, but I think you’ll find it will be similar to the previous Total Wars, where it’s something that's an option and it's something that you’re able to bring into the game.
PCG: I was trying to remember, because I’ve played a lot of Shogun and a lot of Rome, and I thought that was in there by default, but maybe it’s a thing I’ve always check-boxed.
Mann: Actually, it was a pack that you would download, so you get the blood and gore DLC packs like in Rome 2 and Shogun 2.
PCG: Clearly, it’s just instinct for me.
Mann: I think you just got it straight away and went, ‘Yeaaaaah!’
PCG: I just want to see the gladiators just chopping dudes’ heads off.
Mann: I find it more fun, I have to [turn it on].
PCG: So, what we saw looked great. I loved all the animation that he mentioned had to all be hand-done, because you can’t mo-cap a giant spider and stuff like that.
Mann: No, they’re really, really tempermental to mo-cap.
PCG: It seemed like there's a pretty big variety of units.
Mann: It’s huge! I mean, seriously, you look at previous Total War titles and it’s very much man versus man. Even though different factions would be quite unique themselves, you’ve still got a lot of commonality between them for the unit types that you would see in battle. Now, that commonality is gone. The Warhammer world embraces the differences between all the units. You look at the models and all things are different shapes and sizes and styles. We’ve really been trying to bring that to life in the game and literally the amount of animations that’s required, the amount of new animation skeletons—the skeletal rigs for the different creatures—all new in ways that we’ve never done before. As you said, an eight legged spider, that’s not something we’ve ever done before.
PCG: What are the factions that are going to be in the game?
Mann: So the four races that we have available in the tentpole release are going to be the Vampire Counts, the Dwarves, the Greenskins, and the Empire. This is the start of a trilogy for us, so this is the first game and there’s going to be two more expansions. The idea is that they’re all standalone, but you can kind of bring them all together, so if you own all three it’ll be increasing the size of the world, the races you get, and things like that. And we’re also going to be releasing DLCs and free DLCs to come along with it. We started small so we can concentrate, and as you saw the amount of detail and work we’ve gone into with each of these races basically means, with these four, we can give them that depth, that kind of attention, but then as we continue we’ll expand out and get larger.
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