When The Creative Assembly first revealed Total War: Warhammer last year - an adaptation of Games Workshop’s warworld that promises to combine its lore and fantastical roster with the hard strategy the Total War series is renowned for - it felt as though real-time tactics enthusiasts the world over collectively asked: why hasn’t this been done before?
Having dipped our toes into the Total Warhammer-ian waters of CA’s latest grand strategy game recently, we can confirm the relationship does seem very well matched at this early stage. With just two months to go until release, we caught up with the game’s development manager Mark Sutherns, and campaign-focused developer James Whitson about the development and ambitions the first instalment of Total War: Warhammer hopes to bring to the turn-based strategy table.
GameWatcher: Is this the most ambitious Total War game you’ve ever made?
Mark Sutherns: I think it’s ambitious in that it takes on a fantasy which is something we’ve always wanted to do. Obviously, the foundations of Total War are historical, but we’ve always looked at fantasy settings and when the chance with Games Workshop came up, it was one we wanted to go after straight away. Finally the two come together and it’s something we’ve been looking at for years. In terms of the ambition of the game - yeah absolutely, we’re taking on a fantasy setting and what that brings is magic, flying creatures, giant creatures. That, when you think about the games we’ve did in the past - combat on the battlefield with thousands of men, with the odd elephant and horse thrown in - we’ve obviously never thrown in dragons and giants and trolls and flying units and spells. When you see the spectacle of that, it is incredibly ambitious. We had to look at our core mechanics in the game in terms of the technology and we had to change some of those to embrace that. We wanted to ramp up all kinds of things in terms of combat on the battlefield in order to make it much more spectacular. We think we’ve done a good job with that but, yeah, across the board we’ve had to change our thinking because we’re no longer dealing with historical warfare, we’re dealing with a war that, yes, has a ruleset but also has no rules as well, in terms of the chaos that can go on on the battlefield.
James Whitston: One of the things that we realised when we first started picking up the army books and reading through them was: these aren’t the same, they’re all very, very different, in terms of the balance of the roster, their history, their characters, what drives them. We realised that we weren’t going to be able to put out the same feature set for every single faction, and we wouldn’t do that, we wouldn’t get the correct flavour for each of them, so it’s been a lot of fun sitting there playing the tabletop game, getting our heads around how they play in battle, reading those books, doing our usual research phase. We’ve then thought about how we’re going to get the guts of what makes the Vampire Counts tick, for example, you know, raising the dead and corruption spreading around and how we’re going to get that into the battles with the campaign as well. I think we’ve covered the races well, each feels totally fresh. Even just within a race - you’ve got the choice of the Lord that you start off with, each of whom has a very different kind of trait that’ll influence the way the early and mid game will play out. It’s about bringing variety in where we can and just nailing that lore so that you get so much out of it.
GameWatcher: What was your relationship with Games Workshop like over the course of development?
Mark Sutherns: It’s been brilliant, we’ve really enjoyed working with them. From the very start, we work in the same way - we want to deliver quality, so we wanted to stay incredibly faithful to each of the races that we put into this game and as Jim said, that begun with playing the game, getting the lore, the vast library of material that GW made available to us. It was fantastic, big boxes of miniatures started appearing in the office and then people around the studio were gathering round as we unwrapped them. People then took them away, started painted them and all of a sudden people who used to play Warhammer came out of the woodwork. That was the start, really, just embracing the IP and trying to capture the essence of that. We then looked to see how we’d apply this to the Total War mechanics but actually the marriage is pretty seamless in many respects. There were some times where we had to get out of that mindset of balance - yes, there’s balance of course, but we don’t want every race to have the same mechanics. We then had to go: how do we include this feature which is so out there and how do we build that into the Total War system? That’s been a huge challenge, but also incredibly fun as well.
James Whitston: I think fundamentally, we’re both fans of each other’s games and that was the starting point. For whatever reason, we never got round to making that step and making a game together. Now we are. Starting from that point of view, it’s been easy, there haven’t been any problems at all and they’ve made so much stuff available to us. It’s been brilliant.
GameWatcher: Choice is something that’s always been valued in the Total War series, however that seems to have been upped quite considerably this time round, forcing some very distinct and different playstyles on players. How much more of a challenge was creating choice this time round?
James Whitston: I found myself in campaigns where I’d go for a bit of territory capture in the early game, and then I’ve thought: do I want to carry on with that or do I want to build a specialist army. In my last Vampire Counts campaign, I started off with Mannfred, then I recruited Heinrich Kemmler and thought: right, Kemmler, you’re gonna go off and trash the Badlands. I build him his own army, and set him off. All the while he’s going through the Badlands, he’s kind of taking casualties and can’t replenish those very quickly so he has to go back to his own territory and replenish, before going back out to knock out a couple of cities. Eventually, he was basically bank-rolling my campaign while he was doing that. I find that there’s distinct phases in the campaign where you find yourself doing different things that you wouldn’t necessarily do. Before Total War was very much about outward, rolling expansions, whereas here there’s definitely different phasing. In gameplay, mechanics, rosters, it’s all about variety as you make your way through the campaign.
Mark Sutherns: The end game mechanic is also different as well because you’re much more likely to have a strong enemy nearby. Typically in other Total War games you’re dominating and sweeping up near the end - this isn’t going to happen in Warhammer. There’s always a challenge right to the end and that requires a different approach.
James Whitston: Confederations also mean that, for example, Greenskin tribes might start lobbing together and suddenly you’ll be looking at a place that thought you could pick apart and divide and conquer and suddenly it’s coalesce and something you mightn’t be able to handle and you’re forced to adjust your tactics.
GameWatcher: You guys have spoken in the past about how Total War games place authenticity over accuracy when depicting real life historical events. How much did that transfer to Warhammer?
Mark Sutherns: It’s very similar because. When exploring a historical period, we’d obviously research that to death and we’d be painstaking, we’d try to be true to that; with Warhammer it’s very similar. This history arrived with us via the library of materials and miniatures we were given and so on, and our task is to replicate that in a Total War game, so actually the parallels are very similar. Having said that, the artist working on this game had a degree of freedom working on this game that they never had before - animating creatures rather than men. That freedom has allowed folk to express themselves in different ways and it’s been wonderful to work with. If you’re coming into work of a day and are animating a flying dragon or you’re animating spell casters, then it’s a very different proposition to the game’s we’ve done before so it’s a balance between staying authentic but also exploring that creative freedom that we had in this universe as well.
James Whitston: We’ve given ourselves a degree of freedom too as we don’t track years within the game. So, we have the starting point just after Karl Franz has come to power as the Emperor of the Empire - it’s a divided Empire and so on, but, beyond that point, the game is played out in turns, allowing players to follow the lore if they want to, they can model exactly what happens in the Warhammer universe or they can completely diverge. It’s taking all of that flavour and events that happened in the lore, but we’re not bound by that either.
Mark Sutherns: The essence of Total War has always been make your own stories, really, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.
GameWatcher: Although it’s very much about getting Total War: Warhammer out there at the moment, however what can we expect in the future?
Mark Sutherns: It’s great for us, we’ve been able to build teams working on different disciplines but as you said, this is the just the beginning of what we’re doing with this game. That team will get to stretch their wings shall we say, covering much more material in the coming years. It’s very, very exciting.
James Whitston: The expansion of the team also allows us to commit to Total War: Warhammer fully. We’ve got a dedicated team on this, a dedicated team working on the DLC - overall it allows us to not do a half-baked job on any of those projects. We’ve got people that are focussing on the historical projects, but there’s also a lot of cross-pollination throughout the team as well, so it’s a great place to be at the moment. It’s taken a while to get here, but this is definitely the right time to be doing this game for us because we’ve got the resources to actually do it properly. It’d be horrible to do this and not do it full justice and that’s what we’re aiming to do. And that’s also why we decided to split those 15 army books up into this trilogy of releases and DLC in between because that allows us to do each of those races justice.
GameWatcher: What’s been your favourite part of development so far?
James Whitston: You have a broad overall design that you’re working towards and then you tend to focus down on mechanics. It’s great to sit down, have a chance to play the game and realise that it’s coming along nicely, however we’re very lucky to have Andy Hall, an ex-Games Workshop employee, with us and he did a lot of writing. You’ll be playing through as a Greenskin and you’ll get an event message through about some looney Goblin shaman and find yourself laughing at the screen. There’s a lot of slapstick flavour and I’ve really enjoyed seeing that sort of stuff coming through.
Mark Sutherns: For me, I see a lot of things from the ground up and the concept arts and models coming together and what not. When we got to the phase where we were starting to see things animated and interacting in game - when I first saw a giant attacking empire troops and knocking them flying, and trolls vomiting on enemies - when you start to see those elements coming together it’s great. We decided early on in Total War: Warhammer that we needed different animations due to the different scale of units this time, and we needed animations that meant if, say, a giant attacked a man, then we’d have an animation set that worked.
We wanted to better syncronise the systems, and we weren’t absolutely sure if that would work but when we started throwing in these units and bizarre animations and started seeing it working, two lines of men/beasts coming together. Here, you could be fighting in your little pocket of the map and suddenly a man flies across the screen after being bashed by a giant further away. These are things that made me realise we’ve got a good thing here!
GameWatcher: Will Total War: Warhammer draw new fans to Total War as well?
Mark Sutherns: That’s something we hope for with every Total War release but I think this one, because of the spectacle we’ve spoken about and obviously the IP as well, I hope we will. We know fantasy games are popular - we’ve all played them - and we do hope that this draws the eye of fans who perhaps haven’t looked at Total War games before. Then knock on for that can be tremendous for us because we believe in the Total War formula but maybe there’s players out there who haven’t noticed it or been put off for some reason and we hope that Warhammer can draw those people in, to not only enjoy this Warhammer take on the series, but maybe also look back at our historical games we’ve done in the past.
James Whitston: We’re of course hoping to appeal to Warhammer fans too, not just of the games but of the tabletop too. We had a guy who was well ranked in the tabletop game who came to an event we did in America. He was just absolutely over the moon with the little details we’d tried to include to be true to that lore, he was very impressed by that - he could see immediately that we haven’t just reskinned an old game, to us it’s no different from approaching a historical game. So, yeah, we’re really hopeful and optimistic on that front and we think Warhammer’s got a chance!
Total War: Warhammer will be released on 24th May, 2016 exclusively for the PC. If you need any more information, please check out our Total War: Warhammer guide.
