Yesterday I talked about the upside of Creative Assembly returning to Japan in their Total War series.
Today, five reasons why this idea gives me pause.
1) Homogeneity: Though I’m sure that CA will manufacture reasons to mix up the factions a little (even the first Shogun had some differences in costs and unit types), for the most part you will have very similar armies fighting in very similar terrain. Since the first engine, CA games have done well with giving you varied experiences depending on the side you took. So they either abandon that or shoehorn in a bunch of very stupid distinctions.
2) Sun Tzu: Creative Assembly says that it will build an AI for Shogun 2 that inspired by the maxims of the great Chinese warrior thinker Sun Tzu, the patron saint of bad business and management books that try to turn often vague, contradictory or context dependent ancient sayings into some sort of general practice. This is a little like designing a game’s personalty matrix based on the Sermon on the Mount. It’s a bullet point that sounds good but really means nothing when it comes to game play – a pattern that some CA fans have been noticing a lot in the last few games.
3) Lack of Ambition: You could say that moving to a simpler, war focused setting is a good thing since it means that CA can play to its strengths. You could also make the case that this means they are giving up on ever making the strategic AI much better than it already is. As resources are diverted from the design stuff that makes the strategic level work, I fear that we will have to settle for the strategic computer opponent we already have. CA is tossing a lot of systems overboard in this back to basics move; I would almost rather they stumbled forward and fixed some of their good ideas.
4) No Obvious Quest Giver: Rome: Total War introduced the Senate, a body that would dole out rewards and prestige for whenever you fulfilled a quest. The pope and merchant guilds did this in Medieval 2, and Empire had this as well, though more poorly implemented. This was a great design decision since it gave the player goals that both structured play and could sometimes impede player ambitions. If you are an all powerful warlord, who gives you your quests? The Emperor can’t – he’s a puppet you need to legitimize your claim to the Shogunate. You don’t really have a cabinet, do you? And why would you listen? There needs to be a way to keep this mechanic in that does not do violence to the setting.
5) Been There, Done That: I love the return to melee combat, but let’s not fool ourselves. This will be the same sword/spear/horse/archer circuit we’ve seen before in a setting that we’ve seen before. This is a setting that CA did not think was worth revisiting for ten years, despite churning out two Medieval themed games, an ancient one with two additions and a gunpowder one with two additions. Is there something here that CA has been avoiding? Is the samurai setting just not a winner for a Western audience? (Recall that the first Shogun was a hit because the mere idea of the game mechanics was so thrilling.)
I’ll report what I see at E3.
Not to be too contrarian, but: why?
I always found the Senate missions in RTW to be, frankly, superfluous. You got a nice benny if you completed them, but it was never anything particularly game-changing; and if you chose to skip them, the Senate would grumble, but the consequences were never dire. I found myself generally carrying out the missions if they were taking me somewhere I was on my way to already and ignoring them the rest of the time.
So if that’s the case, why include them at all? If (to channel Sid Meier) they don’t put the player in a position to make interesting decisions — and a decision you can safely ignore having to make is the polar opposite of “interesting” — what do they add to the game?
Or was my RTW experience atypical? Maybe I was playing on the wrong difficulty level or something…
The novelty value of the first Shogun was incredible for me. However, now, I think the Total War creators are just going to update the graphics and let it go at that. So we’ll get slipshod AIs and uninspired, dated gameplay.
It was hella fun when I first played Total War – but they’re coasting and have been for ages. I don’t have much enthusiasm for new Total War releases anymore. And I was a TW enthusiast for a long-time, but now they’ve got a lot to prove.
Its interesting your 5 positives are mostly about what won’t be in Shogun 2, where as your 5 negatives are also mostly about what won’t be in Shogun 2. I think that captures my feelings about the Shogun announcement, in that the only thing we can take from the title is the lack of ambition in certain directions.
Not that this is a bad thing, either. The Total War series has become more and more bloated with bells and whistles, while the list of glaring things that need attention has only grown. I can’t even count how many Total War titles I have purchased, only to be shocked and dismayed that a single unit still cannot be given a Control Group, to pick one example of the many interface issues that have persisted.
I think the most exciting thing about Shogun is that it seems like the ONLY thing they can put effort into is to streamline and update the tactical game. However, I have become jaded and wary of expecting Creative Arts to fix things like this, so I will remain skeptical.
I think that this game would offer an opportunity that they haven’t had since the first time around, and that is, as Greg said, to really focus on the tactical battles and a purely militant AI.
We’ve all developed the knee-jerk reaction that dismisses the possibility of significant tactical and strategic battle AI improvement because each iteration CA takes on a whole slew of new things to focus their attention on. I’m somewhat excited about the possible things they could do to finally make the game challenging from a combat perspective.
There’s plenty of possibility of accurate faction differentiation if CA does their homework, e.g. the Takeda having a cavalry-heavy army while the Oda get early (and better) access to troops with firearms. The problem, of course, is that this assumes CA will do thorough research. I don’t think there’s a Total War game that hasn’t been riddled with errors, myths, and anachronisms.
There were also ideas that were dropped from the newer total war games like the importance of spies and assassins. In Shogun, they were quite deadly & spies could actually give you information about an enemies plans.
I think CA could do well taking a page out of Koei’s book here… It would be great if this were a historical character-based game ala Nobunaga’s Ambition.
RT kongming, the first STW somewhat recognised and modelled this, with cheaper unit costs etc… for different factions, as well as exp upgrades. Although STW (1) had some hilariously odd units such as combat monks and kensai superheros.
In my humble opinion, its a good chance to get things simplified so that the computer has a chance again of providing a challenge. (In the most recent TW games, so long as you were vaguely careful, you would never be afraid of losing anything significant, or for long). Too much diversity within the unit roster means that human intelligence can exploit the nuanced differences better than the AI can, with the ability to learn and adapt new moves (and also exploit the AI, not too many people play Ironman rules for strategy games).
Mahaps they’ll even go to the community properly for balancing, and only sheer optimism hopes that the MP side of the game will recapture the community spirit of STW 1 and MTW 1, where people actually chatted and socialised in the lobby between games, all too often not seen much these days (sadly)
1. steam
I don’t remember if CA’s particular version of them was very accurate, but “combat monks” (AKA sohei) actually existed and the populist religious leagues they formed, ikki, could be quite powerful.
“(Recall that the first Shogun was a hit because the mere idea of the game mechanics was so thrilling.)”
This pretty much captures my thoughts on Shogun 2. The setting doesn’t have wide appeal (fair or not) and even a lot of the people who wanted a return to Asia were hoping for something that included China. Totalwar.net, a popular fansite, did a poll last fall that showed that a new Shogun game was far down the list of what people wanted.
I’m not going to say never, but I don’t buy all the TW games. Empire was the first one I bought at full price that wasn’t a historical period I had an interest in. Based on how that worked out, I can’t see buying Shogun 2 day one.