My friend Kevin pointed out the countdown on the Total War home page. It’s now at 1908.
Obviously counting back to a new game to announce, but will it go back further? A Civil War game maybe? Could it be a Victorian/Bismarckian era game? What new setting will get Tom Chick angry in coming years?
According to a number of sites, it will be a “back to basics” setting. I’m putting my money a return to Shogun.
C’mon Creative Assembly, just leave the clock where it is and make 1908: Total War! ;)
Jon
Yeah, I really want to supress the Phillipines and take part in one of the Balkan Wars!
In which case, we could see the return of the infamous ‘Kill one villager/kill all villagers’ choice from obscure Amiga/ST early-90s game, The Lost Patrol. Tactful.
Well, it’s definitely an untapped market!
Jon
I would quite like to see unification of Germany/Italy, if only because it is an area of history I have studied :P. But there were quite a few battles that could have gone either way. It would be an interesting challenge to see if the player could modernise Austria quickly enough to maintain the empire.
It would be an interesting challenge to see if the player could modernise Austria quickly enough to maintain the empire.
The scale and size of the battlefields is just too big to fit into the Total War real-time segments, I think. I mean, at Koniggratz/Sadowa (choose as per preference), you had roughly half a million men meeting on a battlefield about 80 miles square. The scaling down was starting to creak a bit with Empire: Total War, but just becomes untenable once you get later (N:TW would seem to have a similar problem, from my brief playing of it to date.)
Based on this:
http://yfrog.com/5a40oj
That was twittered by CA and this whole back to basics thing that was reported, it looks like ancient warfare. The helmet looks Spartan/Greek like.
In terms of gameplay that actually sounds like a game that actually did get made — Crisis in the Kremlin, which plunked the player down in the position of General Secretary of the USSR in 1989. The challenge was to see if you could steer the Soviet Union through the crises of the early 1990s without it coming apart the way it historically did.
It was insanely difficult to actually do that, of course, but that was probably not unrealistic :-D
Whoops, my memory failed me — Wiki reminds me that Crisis in the Kremlin started you out in 1985, not 1989. This gave you a few years to try and get things in order before the proverbial borscht hit the fan, as well as bringing the Chernobyl disaster into the game.
I think they listened to your “forgotten fronts” podcast a couple weeks ago, and will be trying to create a game to cover them _all_
I kinda hope they go back to an ancient setting. Rome remains one of my favorite Total War games.
This will be the Evolution stage of their Evolution/Revolution model, so they’ll be focusing on improving and refining the engine they used for Empire. Which is good, because Empire has some really awesome underpinnings, but needed a lot of high level refinement. If they took some lessons from EU3 for the tech and diplomacy engines. I honestly don’t think EU3 had significantly better AI, it’s just that the powerful diplomacy engine forced the AI to act in a more intelligent seeming manner. The next Total War could take a major lesson from that.
As frags points out, it will almost certainly be something like classical greece, though another Rome game is also possible.
Also, CA just announced an expansion to Napoleon coming this summer on Steam.
I’d love a Civil War game, but at this point I don’t understand how CA thinks so who knows if we will ever see that. I don’t get why they did the 18th century as a core game (Empire) and then did Napoleon as an expansion. Seems like it would have made more sense to do it the other way around, or save Napoleon for a different game.
1824 and plenty of sand to go. That throws the Civil War out the window. I’m also inclined to discard my hopes that it would be Shogun 2.
I’d like to see Total War: Three Kingdoms. A period of Chinese history so epic, you don’t need to mythologize it… though they do. :)
Feels good to be right :) (maybe)
http://www.vg247.com/2010/05/28/report-shogun-ii-total-war-to-be-announced-at-e3/
Yeap it’s definitely Shogun 2.
http://media.pc.ign.com/articles/109/1093437/vids_1.html
I don’t know what the gentleman is saying or writing, but I do know that the music / sound effects are “Campmap Summer” from Shogun: Total War. It’s one of my favorite pieces of atmospheric sound design; I listen to it often.
Good Lord, I hope it is Shogun 2, I’ve wanted a sequel to that game for years. Hopefully it will simplify the World map/diplomacy mechanics, and focus on the core combat that made Shogun STILL my favourite total war game (although Medieval 2 is up there).
You know what else they could do (although they won’t)? Shogun Total War 2, set in the Meiji period, i.e. 1840s through to 1880s. This, my friends, would be superb. The great thing about this period is that the major clans all had their own private armies which the Shogun or Emperor had to call upon, and the Satsuma Rebellion shows how fractious the era was. Lots of potential there.
according to cyberstratege its going to be shogun 2. btw, this french site is a strategy only gaming magazine!
http://www.cyberstratege.com/magazine/2010/05/le-prochain-total-war-serait-shogun-2/