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Then, as the dramatic actions of those individual troops propagate up through the simulation, Creative Assembly hope that the new level of detail they can achieve will pay dividends for the game as a whole. The early build of Rome II that we've seen in action uses a fraction of the capture work that will go into the final game, Creative Assembly tells me.Įverything from simple marching animations to choreographed 'matched combat' sequences between two or more fighters will be pulled from a vast pool of data, breaking up the monotony of the battle line and investing each combatant with their own personality. It is, they believe, the largest developer-owned mocap suite in Europe – and the culmination of years of work on the part of their animation team.įor any other developer a facility like this would be a tremendous extravagance, but Creative Assembly can be confident in the fact that they will always be working on Total War games, and that they will always have a need for detailed and realistic depictions of men murdering one another on the battlefield. Real-world tactics should win in the game.”Ĭreative Assembly's state-of-the-art motion capture facility is hidden on the edge of a railway yard in west Sussex. “You don't want to see the hand of the designer, in that respect, because you want it to feel like it couldn't be any other way. When troops clash on the battlefield, in other words, the player shouldn't see a mathematical formula resolving itself: they should see thousands of individual people acting and responding according to the orders they've been given and the events around them. “Our battles feel realistic, in an intuitive sense,” he says. If men taking cover behind a line of rocks are dying to arrow fire faster than is desirable, then the solution has to come from the whole team – whether that's a designer tweaking the accuracy of bowmen, an artist redesigning the scenery, or a programmer tweaking the behaviour of the AI.Īs much as Creative Assembly have stressed drama and spectacle in the early marketing push for the game, Russell is keen to point out that building a detailed presentation of war is a crucial part of improving the game's tactical depth. In order to balance a system like this, Rome II's designers need to go back to the properties of real life – not the abstractions of wargaming. “But it does mean that you get all of these interesting properties of reality falling out for free.
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Whether or not cover affects the kill rate is a property of that cover – it's not in our control, directly, and that's really scary for a designer. “Because we're a simulation, the kill rate is determined by whether the arrow hits or not. “If a target enters cover you'll apply a modifier rule to the kill rate – minus 20 percent or whatever it is,” he adds.