We go behind the scenes with one of the most anticipated titles of 2011... (Part 1 of 2)

Whilst not 100% original, the first Shogun: Total War was a ground-breaking game at a time where the strategy genre was in danger of getting stale. To date the series has to be one of the best blends of turn-based and meaningful real-time gameplay, and the original game is to this day still considered a classic. Now, ten years later, the team over at Creative Assembly have decided to revisit the game that started it all. We sat down with Lead Designer Jamie Ferguson to talk about Total War: Shogun 2.

Strategy Informer: Jamie, thank you for joining us. Do you know how many people that are left at Creative Assembly that worked on the original Shogun: Total War?

Jamie Ferguson: About half a dozen.



Strategy Informer: So I guess there was a very much a 'fresh' perspective then when it came to doing the remake of Shogun, how did that affect development?

Jamie Ferguson: Well it allowed us to do quite a lot of things. Jeff Van Dyke did the original music, he's back. Our UI designer is still here, our Lead Text Writer, Mike Simpson obviously, and the guy who worked on the original assassination movies is still here. You can expect the same humour and amusing endings etc... We haven't gone for the exact same formula - there's an intro sequence, a central sequence, and then an escape section. You can fail at any one of those points so the result could be different each time.

So there's things like that - we've tried to keep some of the flavour and atmosphere from the original Shogun, but obviously it's been ten years, it's allowed us to do a lot of new stuff. Hopefully that will show through.

Strategy Informer: This will be the second time that Creative Assembly have gone back and re-done an earlier game using the latest technology - do you think this is a course that would work well for everyone? Would you recommend other companies with long standing franchises take this route?

Jamie Ferguson: It depends really on how good the original was and how good your new idea is. With the original Shogun one of the main reasons for doing it again was that it had been ten years, and so everything we had done then had pretty much become out of date. You can't run it on a modern computer without severe issues. Also the amount of things we've done since in terms of campaign gameplay, battlefields etc... I mean in the original Shogun it was sprites, with basic 3D landscapes - ground breaking at the time but looking at it now it's changed quite considerably.

Also in terms of the role of generals on the battlefield, that's changed as well. Obviously they still have that general morale boost, but they can do other things as well. Specific actions, making certain units fight better... and the way we've re-done traits is that now you can also almost customize the strengths and weaknesses of that general. The list goes on and on... the amount of things we've done since then and putting that all into a game... it will feel familiar to people who've played the original Shogun, but it is a completely new game. It's even a new game compared to Napoleon and Empire. We've really dug deep into the bowls of the game and looked at every single aspect and we decided we wanted to do a 'zen' of Total War, looking at every branch, every leaf, and asking 'does that deserve to be there?'.

Strangely enough that's meant that other areas have grown quite considerably. Take multiplayer for example - that's something that's not just a little stump, it's something that we probably didn't give the love and attention that it deserved in previous games. We're really going to make this work, really push this, really do everything we can to make sure that you get a feel of the single player campaign in the multiplayer.
 
Strategy Informer: Obviously as you say there's plenty of good reasons to re-do Shogun, but in terms of the scope that Total War games have been able to achieve in the past - Japan during this period was very isolationist, did you feel that limited you at all to what you could do with the game in terms of area, factions, people etc...?

Jamie Ferguson: Well I don't think it's really limiting as such, I mean it's really let us dive deep. With Empire, it was a necessary result of doing the entire world, you end up doing everything in a bit of a thin layer. You don't get to go as deep as you would like, especially considering you have to work towards getting it out within a certain time, and having it work on an average machine. You have to kind of cut corners and do things in a less deep and involved way.

With Shogun 2, we've really been able to delve deep into the Japanese mindset, the politics, the way the clans interact with each as both political entities and families. You can marry off your daughters to ensure loyalty. The way the campaign map is revealed to the player - in Medieval Japan it wasn't that case that you were aware of everything that was going on around the country at the time. You had a situation where if something was happening in the south of the country and you were in the north, you wouldn't hear about it for months. As a result of that we've tried to say that you need to use your agents and armies, not just as pieces to use against other pieces, but also to use against the campaign map itself to reveal it. You still get to see things like mountains, rivers, major castles ... all those things aren't being hidden from you, but what you can't see is the military or agent movements, and you can't see the strengths either.

Strategy Informer: Not to preclude the possible success of the game, but it's been very well received so far, possibly the best Total War game to date... as you say sticking to Medieval Japan as allowed you to dive deeper than you have in the past. Do you think if this does do really well, is there a lesson to be learned here? Does Depth beat Scope?

Jamie Ferguson: It's a difficult balancing act - I don't think you can say there's one formula for success, and if you do start saying that, it precludes you from going and exploring certain avenues. If you don't explore them then you won't find out what's good and what's bad. With Empire we certainly learnt a lesson there - to do a revolutionary game with a brand new engine, new graphics set as well as doing the entire world at the same time was probably a step too far.

On the other hand, if you look at Napoleon, we still have a very large map there with a very large part of the world, and it's still a very good game. So I wouldn't say that scope is not something you should include, but I would say it certainly made us more aware of what we can achieve, and that sometimes less is more.

Strategy Informer: Obviously with the Multiplayer you've gone all out, really giving it meaning and purpose. One could almost say you've laid the ground-work for taking the multiplayer aspect truly into the online space. If you look at Petroglyph, they're trying to do one of the first AAA MMORTS's with End of Nations - is that a route Creative Assembly would want to go down?

Jamie Ferguson: I certainly wouldn't want to rule out anything - I think what we want to do is definitely expand as much as possible on the multiplayer part of the game. We want to try and extend the life of the game even further. People still play Total War games for over 90 hours, but we really want them to take it up as a hobby, something they can pick up at any point. The single player campaign is how people learn about the period, how all those units work together, how to play the game. When you go onto multiplayer you then take those lessons and use them against other people. But yeah, making that something that happens in the future is a strong possibility.

Click here for Part Two.