14 DAY TRIAL // The team working at The Creative Assembly aims to reach a Metacritic score of at least 90 for all its video game releases and, to achieve this, the leaders are not afraid of cutting big chunks out of their titles even late in the development process.
Tim Heaton, who is the studio director at The Creative Assembly, has told Gamasutra that, “Through production, actually, we do what we call 'Metacritic analysis'.
“We will break those features down into subsets, and we both look at it from a player's point of view, and a reviewer's point of view, and we'll weigh certain features as to how we see players and reviewers look at them, and they'll build up to a 100 percent score, and then we'll judge where we feel we are on those individual feature sets, and see the momentum on those and the velocity on those, too.”
He added, “And so if we see one flat line and it's not where we want it to be, we then will cut it. Well, we'll cut it really late in the day. I think teams are really scared about doing 90 percent of the work and then cutting it.”
The Creative Assembly is ready to spend resources and then eliminate a feature rather than leave it a game and then see it criticized by reviewers and then drag down the all-important Metacritic score.
The rating has lately been used by publishers as a way to evaluate the overall performance of a game and to decide some of the bonuses that a development team is entitled to.
The core business for The Creative Assembly is represented by the Total War series of strategy titles, which has recently received a mobile installment.
Shogun 2 also recently got the Fall of the Samurai expansion, which can be played as a standalone game and moves the action to the late XIX century, when Japan modernized and was moving towards the West.