BrookM wrote:
And yet, Alien Isolation was a solid PC release that was a complete experience where nothing of the main story was cut or locked away behind pay walls.

Total War: Warhammer might be the most natural pairing in all of games, bringing Games Workshop's huge Warhammer fantasy universe into contact with Creative Assembly's franchise of massive scale war games. Its time was less so, coming just before a major reboot to the tabletop game that moved the universe into a new continuity call the Age of Sigmar. Jeremy sat down with CA's Andy Hall to ask what that meant for the game.

"The way I see it is, we've always been a historical war-game maker [laughs] and that's exactly what we're doing, it's just this one's based in fantasy. Our game's very much based in the age of Karl Franz, which is 2502 [when] he became the emperor. That's pretty much where we're staying. 8th edition, so to speak."

So definitely still a classic-Warhammer game, then. However, Andy didn't totally close the door on expanding, "Saying that, Age of Sigmar looks great, I've got a copy of it already and the minatures are fantastic. So I'm sure we'll be keeping an eye on that in the future."

The relationship between Games Workshop and Creative Assembly is obviously only just beginning, but if the game does well, clearly there's hope for it to continue. I myself have my heart set on a Total War in the galactic sphere of Warhammer 40,000, perhaps starting as a game about the Great Crusade and running you all the way through to the end of the Horus Heresy. Just imagining that game gets me salivating, so seeing what CA and GW actually come up with will be fascinating.

We just have to hope this first game is good and does well. We've had some hands-on time in Germany and will have an in-depth preview for you soon. While you're waiting here's the latest trailer, featuring dive-bombing goblins.

The idea of having a fantastical entry in the Total War series isn’t a new one. It’s been around for years, in fact, but a number of factors have conspired to keep Creative Assembly from ever truly being able to commit to such an idea. The studio’s commitment to putting out a purely historical title every three years coupled with resources always meant such a concept looked set to remain a pipe dream. Until, that is, Games Workshop came knocking back in 2012.

Sitting down with Andy Hall, lead writer for the upcoming Total War: Warhammer, it’s clear Creative Assembly isn’t taking the prospect of finally realising one of its dreams lightly. The added attention brought about by a massive license like Warhammer would daunt many but, thankfully, CA seems to be taking this in its stride. A prime example of this is in the hiring of Hall himself, who spent the last 15 years at Games Workshop writing the lore books now being used by the team as reference.

Of course, the benefit of having so many years to mull over just what could be done if a fantasy Total War title was to happen means there’s no shortage of ideas now it’s actually on the cards. And let’s just say, Creative Assembly isn’t afraid of a little ambition.

“This is Part One of the Trilogy,” explains Hall. “Each game will be a standalone game, but the map of the second one, for example, will slot into the first one like a jigsaw. So you can play it on its own, but if you have the first one then they’ll slot together to create a bigger map. The third one will do the same and by the end of it we’ll have the largest Total War campaign there’s ever been.”

The scale of this undertaking is something we keep coming back to throughout the course of our interview. Where Rome: Total War featured eight different animation rigs for its horses, Warhammer will feature more than 30 thanks to the extreme diversity of the steeds on show.

It’s an interesting fact, considering the initial reaction that met the game’s initial reveal. Upon announcement of the game’s four Races – Humans, Orcs, Dwarves and Vampires – some Total War veterans were slightly miffed. Considering how previous games were overflowing with different Factions at launch, some felt short changed. According to Hall however, there’s actually more content in the first game alone than franchise fans have ever seen.

“What you’re getting in effect is four Total War experiences in one game - their Campaigns are totally different with their own agendas, aims and value systems,” he says.” The Empire for instance is probably the most traditional for Total War players – they’re still human, they still collect taxes, they still like organisation and Karl Franz wants to unify them and get them under control. It’s traditional but heightened.

“The Orcs on the other hand aren’t going to take a human settlement and start policing it or put on some half-moon spectacles and start looking at tax receipts -they’re Orcs! They have totally different gameplay – they’re all about momentum and they have to keep conquering. If you don’t keep moving forward or if you can’t because of enemies or a landmass then the Orcs start to turn in on themselves and fight each other.

“Dwarves are all about getting back old glories. They had what’s called The Doom and now they’re in the Age of Reckoning where they almost need to start again and link up their disparate outposts. They also slight easily and have their Book of Grudges, so there may very well be a grudge mechanic in there… Vampires I can’t really talk about but you can imagine they need a lot of corpses, so maybe there’s something to do with making sure they kill enough people to sustain their armies? Who knows!

“They’re all totally different so you can imagine when - or if - we get to the Elves and the Skaven, it’ll be different again. So it’s more than just different colour armour, not to be disparaging to the history titles.”

This whole mantra of ‘bigger and better’ continues with Creative Assembly’s refusal to simply adapt the features of the historical games for its new fantasy property. Instead, the team is completely revamping the Political System (with a reveal planned for the near future) and adding over 400 new Traits for characters. One of the biggest changes coming, however, is the decision to shift away from the dynastic models that made up so much of the Total War experience until now – with both dying of old age and family trees getting the chop in the upcoming game. As you can imagine, this really frees Creative Assembly up to innovate and mix up features that have been pretty static since the series’ launch.

“While your characters aren’t immortal – take them into battle and get their skulls caved in, they’re dead – they won’t die of old age,” Hall explains. “This also means we don’t need the family tree mechanic. So instead, you’re going to get these massive levels of customisation. You’ll have more than 30 levels of skill trees and deep customisations.

“What this does is, because these characters are with the player so long, you grow very attached to them. But then the kicker is you have this powerful lord – or even an agent, as while agents in the past stayed on the Campaign map, this time they can be pulled into the battlefield itself. So the Warrior Priest and Witch Hunter in the case of the Empire, Big Bosses, Shamen in the case of Orcs and Goblins. Once they’re on the battlefield they’re a great tool, but if they die… that’s 30 levels of progress gone.”
There’s still a lot we don’t know about Total War: Warhammer – yet – but increasingly it seems Creative Assembly is looking to push the boundaries. With the historical Total War team still working on titles to maintain its three-year release cadence, the Total War: Warhammer team has the time to make sure it gets this project right. This may be the realisation of more than a decade of dreaming, but Creative Assembly shows no signs of sleepwalking.

 Orlanth wrote:
DLC makes this a a game with an effective release date one year after the formal one.

So it looks like I will be playing Warhammer Total War late 2017 then.

 Zognob Gorgoff wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
DLC makes this a a game with an effective release date one year after the formal one.

So it looks like I will be playing Warhammer Total War late 2017 then.

Dont understand this mentality to computer games, would you consider it to be an unfinished game if they never released the future content?

 Wehrkind wrote:
A little worrisome that they haven't nailed down what the Dwarves and Vampires actually do yet. A year out and half the factions' main mechanics are not settled on thematically, much less mechanically balanced? It seems like that should be done already if this is going to be shipped in a functioning package.

 Brother SRM wrote:

 Wehrkind wrote:
A little worrisome that they haven't nailed down what the Dwarves and Vampires actually do yet. A year out and half the factions' main mechanics are not settled on thematically, much less mechanically balanced? It seems like that should be done already if this is going to be shipped in a functioning package.

I think it's more that they don't want to reveal them yet and the wording on that isn't great. With how long games take to develop, integral things like that are nailed down early in game development because if they aren't, there'll be a lot of wasted time for a lot of expensive people.

One has been the preeminent tabletop war game for the last few decades, the other, a series of grand strategy that blends turn-based campaigning with real time battles. A game to combine the two properties has felt like an obvious move for a long time, and yet it’s only now that Warhammer and Total War are uniting under the same banner.

There’s been a steady drip feed of new information about how this alliance will pan out over the last few months, from hero characters to magic powers, flying beasts and more. In fact, the Dwarves and their underground battles have been revealed in the last few weeks, but we spoke to Andy Hall, the game’s lead writer, and Al Bickham, Creative Assembly’s communications manager closer to the initial gameplay reveal of a classic showdown between the Empire and the Orcs at the Battle of Black Fire Pass.

TSA: This merging of Total War and Warhammer is a bit of a match made in heaven, isn’t it?

Andy Hall: Funnily enough, that’s the exact term that we’ve been using!

TSA: It does feel like such an obvious match, to be fair, but how did it come about? Was it a long and arduous process to get this to come together, or was it just a very easy fit?

Andy: I’m on the other side of the fence now; I worked at Games Workshop for 16 years, so I know the two companies have been talking to each other for pretty much a decade now. I guess the stars finally aligned, where Creative Assembly was in a place where there was capacity – we’re not slowing down our production of historical war games – and Games Workshop was in a phase where they were looking to license the Warhammer brand out.

I think they’ve been friends in arms for a long time. When the contract negotiations were going on, I was still at Workshop and we were saying, “We’ve got to make this work! We’ve got to make this work!” From what I gather, it was the same at the Sega end. Eventually, contracts were signed and here we are!

Al Bickham: I think there’s a lot of philosophical similarities between our companies, you know? We’re both sort of cottage grown, English gaming businesses that sort of sprouted up at about the same time, really.

TSA: I think one interesting point is just how much Games Workshop are currently experimenting with licensed video games. Focus Interactive are publishing four or five different games alone, which is kind of crazy!

Andy: Obviously I don’t want to talk too much about Workshop, because I can’t speak for them anymore, but I think there was a desire after a very conservative period to start to leverage these quite valuable IPs.

TSA: Bringing the world of Warhammer to the Total War style of gameplay you’ve had to come up with some interesting ways of handling magic, aerial combat, and things like that? But how have you reconciled those elements with the existing battle systems?

Al: Well I guess the guiding light is balance. We’ve got things like big spells and big monsters, and if we did it a certain way they could easily dominate the battlefield. That would kill the gameplay that we’ve been designing for 15 years, with its ideas of rock, paper, scissors on the battlefield, troop movements, and effective and smart manoeuvres winning you the day.

We want those big, cool, fun, interesting, explosive crazy things to be tools in your armoury rather than things that dominate a battle. So magic’s a good example, and in this Battle of Black Fire Pass gameplay demo we’ve got three or four very high tier spells that go off, but in most games you’d be lucky to pull even one of those off, because you have limited mana, they need to recharge…

It’s based on the Winds of Magic system which is in the table top game, but our interpretation of that is that it’s variable. The amount of magic floating around in the air that you can use is variable at the start of the battle, and that also depends on where you are in the world as well…

Andy: Yeah, that’s because the Winds blow from the north, coming from the open Chaos gates. But it blows hot and cold, so sometimes it will blow a tempest, other times it will be a trickle.

For a start you’ve got to have wizard who is levelled high enough to unlock these powerful spells, and having enough mana from the Winds of Magic, and being in the right position – some of these spells have ranges as well – and being in a good place to cast the spell at the right time. There’s a lot of prerequisites that you need in order to get what’s effectively a nuke off.

If you do, it’s going to be a game winning strategy, but you’ve got to spend most of your battle alive as the wizard for a start, and that’s kind of hard to do…

Al: Yeah, they’re powerful, but they’re also very weak and you can’t hide them in a unit. They don’t attach to other units, they are their own unit.

TSA: I think that’s another interesting new addition, because this is the first time that you’ve really had individuals and hero units on the battlefield, like Emperor Karl Franz.

Andy: Yeah, we’ve got these legendary people and obviously each race will have their own mighty and special characters.

Al: Yeah, but we’ve had agents in previous Total War games and they’ve always been ways of altering your campaign game for the better. So, assassinating a general, causing riots in cities, sabotaging the gates…

Agents can now join armies and they may provide that army with a buff, but they can also appear in battle now. They’ll have their own magical or combat skill trees, which dictate what they can do in battle as well. So again, it’s another nice way that we’ve moved Total War on a bit and advanced the systems that we do have; we’ve taken agents and made them feature in battles.

Andy: At the same time, doing that also puts them at risk. You have deep skill trees for them, but effectively we’re not moving the timeline on. In a historical game, if you want to get to those historical battles, the timeline has to move, people might die of old age…

TSA: That would be such an ignominious end for some of these characters!

Al: Yeah, he just got a bit too old!

Andy: Because we’re in this heightened reality and we’re not moving the timeline on like that, we can have a much deeper skill tree and you as the player can tinker and custom build. Of course, that means you get attached to him as well, as they get very powerful, but bringing him into a battle also means there’s a risk, because if he dies, he dies.

Al: There’s a bit of risk-reward there, but this is, you know, the first Total War game where you really want to be throwing your generals into the fight with your troops.

Previous Total War games, he’s been useful, especially if you want to put the enemy army down – he’s still a cavalry unit – but you want to use him towards the end when there’s less risk. Here, they’re going to have sweet combat skills and spells.

TSA: They are also some of the most powerful units in the tabletop game, so you have to represent that, but they’re also giving you more of a focus on story. As opposed to following historical events, there’s a fictional narrative which you can tell.

Andy: One of the design pillars from the very first PowerPoint presentation was to bring a lot of narrative in. The Warhammer world has had thirty years of development into this IP, there’s literally hundreds of novels out there now, the army books themselves are crammed full of stories and stuff that we want to emulate. So our way of doing that is the quest battles.

Fundamentally, this is still a Total War game and a sandbox experience, but if you want to, you can take Karl Franz on a series of quest chains, which is a story and will feature choices to do one thing or fight here, and you play these very bespoke battle experiences. They’re not necessarily just a pitched battle, so they could be that you’ve got to hold on while a dragon is summoned, that you fight near a creature’s lair or chase a vampire through a fen.

So you still get that real time battle experience but in a very bespoke… I don’t want to say ‘scripted’…

Al: Crafted?

Andy: Crafted. Brilliant, that’s the perfect word.

If you’re successful, you get a little bit more of that story and you also unlock a very specific magic artefact that’s famous for being used by them. So Karl Franz, for instance, might unlock the Runefang of Reikland in one battle, but if he finishes Black Fire Pass then he would unlock Ghal Maraz, the warhammer itself. But you’re not forced as a player to do it.

TSA: And I guess you have to accept that some people are going to fail to win these battles?

Al: Well, you’ll be able to go back and have another go at them. They’re there as an outstanding event so you can always go back, but you might go up to it and think there’s not a chance of completing it with your current army, so you’ll go away, build up your army and come back later.

Andy: In fact, it’s a kind of alternative history, just like the historical games are. If you wanted to see if you were as good as Napoleon, you’d play Total War: Napoleon, and it’s the same here. Karl-Franz was a very successful emperor in the Warhammer IP, but you might not be! You might decide to sod uniting the Empire and head straight for Archaon.

TSA: A major advance in recent Total War games has been a much greater focus on diplomacy. Is that something that you’ve been able to bring forward to Warhammer?

Andy: There’s definitely a lot of diplomacy and, in fact, I’ve had a lot of fun writing those diplomacy arcs, because it is like, “What does Karl Franz say to an Orc?” [laughs]

There’s a lot of “Greenskin scum”…

TSA: I mean, you’re not going to be able to make a lasting federation of peace between the Empire and the Orcs, are you?

Andy: No. Warhammer is very heavily designed from the tabletop origins to give people reasons to fight and have wars, and that is definitely carried through with us.

Saying that, there will be times when you can maybe placate the Orcs for a few game turns? There are even instances in the fiction of Karl Franz addressing Archaon, but achieving peace with Chaos is going to be really, really hard.

Al: But there’s also domestic diplomacy as well. If you play as the Empire, you start with Reikland basically, and there’s all these other regions around you under the rule of the Elector Counts. So uniting the Empire is going to be a challenge to do diplomatically.

Andy: Yeah, that’s pretty much your first job, really.

Al: Exactly, and it’s the same with the Greenskins as well; can you unite the tribes through diplomacy? Diplomacy isn’t just between races, but it’s between factions as well.

Andy: It really plays into that, because the way the Empire works in the IP is that they’re not one happy nation, by any means. It’s a massive sprawling empire, and most of the time, the emperor himself is just a far off name, a status symbol almost.

Al: And all the other Elector Counts are jumping on each other’s backs to get ahead.

Andy: They’re playing the game of thrones, stabbing each other in the back and having petty wars.

TSA: Well, that sounds like an IP to attempt at a different time…

 Formosa wrote:

 Zognob Gorgoff wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
DLC makes this a a game with an effective release date one year after the formal one.

So it looks like I will be playing Warhammer Total War late 2017 then.

Dont understand this mentality to computer games, would you consider it to be an unfinished game if they never released the future content?

Yes, when they make a game and willingly remove parts of the game to sell back to you and they are on the disc...

Information regarding Creative Assembly’s upcoming Total War: Warhammer strategy game has been scarce, but some recently discovered comments have made it seem unlikely that the title will feature mod support of any kind.

Several months ago, the then community coordinator Will Overgard responded to fan questions about modding on the official Total War forum:

“As this isn’t just a CA game, regretfully there are no plans to support modding for Total War: Warhammer. An Assembly Kit will be available very shortly for Total War: Atilla however, and we will continue to support modding for that title and plan to for future historical Total Wars.”

The decision to remove one of the most beloved features of Total War will likely be extremely controversial, however it’s worth noting that this information was originally revealed before the latest release, Attila, had finished development, and therefore may be subject to change.

The community has been quick to condemn the decision, but blame has been directed towards Games Workshop, the owner of the Warhammer IP. This is thought to be one of many overprotective moves to prevent tampering with the licence. Games Workshop is notorious for threatening legal action against anyone they believe are infringing on their property, even going as far as to claim ownership on the term ‘space marine’.

It is unlikely that modding will be stripped from CA’s independent creations, as previous entries into the Total War series have strong modding support with release of development kits and more.

Other information discovered hints that naval combat will not take place in real time, with battle outcomes resolved automatically, and that family trees will not be included within the full release.

Total War: Warhammer is scheduled to release in 2016 for PC. For more information, check out our interview with Creative Assembly’s Rich Aldridge.

 Sammoth wrote:
Sorry if this has been posted but, here we go.