14 DAY TRIAL // The Creative Assembly, the development team behind the Total War franchise, has announced that in the coming weeks it will be launching an editor for Shogun 2 and for Fall of the Samurai called TEd, which will allow any fan to create their own battle maps using the same kind of assets that the developers had access to when working on the two games.
Gamers will even be able to create multiplayer maps that will automatically be shared with another player when a match is joined.
Elliot Lock, who is a designer at The Creative Assembly, stated, “It’s a great team achievement. It’s been a personal goal of mine for over a year to get TEd released, and there’s been a great team effort to make it happen. I couldn’t be prouder of everyone involved.”
Rob Bartholemew, the brand director for Total, added, “It certainly hasn’t escaped our attention that, despite what we’ve said in the press, the feeling in the community is that CA no longer supports mods, or the modding community. With actions speaking louder than words, it’s something we can understand the sentiment behind, if not perhaps the reasoning.”
The Creative Assembly team has been accused of actively working against the modding community that has evolved around the Total War 2 because it was interested in selling the fan base more content rather than allowing it to create its own.
The developers believe that this perception is not warranted and that the lack of official modding tools was linked to the complexity of titles like Empire and Napoleon rather than to their commercial interest.
The team says that it will be watching to see how the community uses TEd and might deliver more tools later, although it cannot confirm any of them at the moment. They also admit that certain aspects, like the campaign map and the overall Artificial Intelligence, will probably remain unmoddable for Shogun 2.