14 DAY TRIAL // After moving steadily up through the centuries of history, from Japan to Medieval Europe and then to the Renaissance, a lot of fans expected the Total War series to make the move to some sort of modern day conflict, fundamentally changing the mechanics of the real time battle sections of the game.
Instead, the team at The Creative Assembly, who is developing the Total War franchise for publisher SEGA, has decided to take a step back through time in order to revisit the Daymio dominated Japan and deliver a more focused experience than the most recent Empire and Napoleon.
Still, a Total War based around a conflict in the XX century is not off the cards.
Mike Simpson, who is the studio director at The Creative Assembly, has told Rock, Paper, Shotgun as part of a longer interview that the team is never sure what their next project might be around and the priorities shift constantly.
He said, “The 20th century is on the list, but of course it’s not exactly the easiest transition from the kinds of battles that Empire was all about, which was all about formal armies and men moving around in units.”
He added, “The 20th century is much more fragmented, much larger battlefields, and there’s just more to deal with: aircraft, and so on. It’s certainly something we want and intend to tackle one day, but it wasn’t the thing we most wanted to do after Empire. What we really wanted to do was go back and redo Shogun.”
Total War: Shogun 2 is set to be released only on the PC on March 15, 2011.
One of the focuses of the game will be on delivering a new multiplayer experience, allowing the players to both cooperate and control a faction together or to go competitive and fight against each other using customizable general avatars that can gain skills and retainers as they get more battles under their belts.