14 DAY TRIAL // Fall of the Samurai, the standalone expansion which will be launched for Total War: Shogun 2 during March, might still be a hardcore strategy game, but the developers are trying to make sure that newcomers will be able to get into the game quickly, using video tutorials that explain the game mechanics and units characteristics.
Speaking to VG247 Craig Laycock, who is the community manager working at The Creative Assembly, has stated, “We’ve done a whole new set of video tutorials this time, so new players to the series will have an idea of how the different units interact.
“That’s actually one of the toughest things about making these strategy-like games; you want to make sure the barriers are as low as they can be, but then you don’t want to annoy the hardcore players who actually quite like the fact that there’s high barriers.”
The Total War series has long had an exhaustive encyclopedia, offering details on every unit, building and tactic in the game. But the development team at The Creative Assembly has found that new players were not using it because it was seen as intimidating.
Laycock added, “We’re trying to hold the player’s hand a little bit, in terms of the rock, paper, scissors mechanic we had in Shogun 2, because it wasn’t always clear what kinds of unit beat other kinds of unit.”
Fall of the Samurai will move the action of the game to the late XIX century, a period when the Japanese islands were opening up to Western influences and civil war was again becoming a gruesome reality.
Players will have to choose whether they want to remain loyal to the old order and use the units and tactics of the samurai or they are interested in getting the rapid fire rifle that the West uses alongside a series of new social and political values.