Total War: Shogun 2′s senior community manager, Craig Laycock, in an interview with strategy site Armchair General, bragged about the bigness of the game’s multiplayer.
“The multiplayer is absolutely massive,” states Laycock. “I have said it before, that saying Shogun 2’s multiplayer is extensive is like saying Neptune is far away. We have new features like cooperative multiplayer campaign, we’ve got the avatar progress map, the clan competition, the head-to-head campaign, plus the standard 1 v 1, 2 v 2, 3 v 3, 4 v 4 for the land and naval battles. We actually have so many new features that it is hard for us to explain the amount of new stuff in the multiplayer because of its wide range.
“Multiplayer has definitely been a focus, and we hope people play it, and live it… the clan competition in particular has the potential to be absolutely massive. We will wait and see how multiplayer goes and then adjust and balance it from what we observe, but we have had immense feedback so far on the balancing, and we will keep critiquing in an effort to reach perfection.”
Creative Assembly will also be counting on the modding community to give the game some extra freshness. According to Laycock, “The first thing to remember is that Empire was the first game in the series to be built on the Warscape engine, and the Warscape engine is something we built from the ground up, he said. “Warscape was greatly polished with Napoleon, (and) with Shogun 2, we really refined the engine. During that same time the modding community has been making their own tools from the Warscape engine, so the tool set that the community has developed is really solid now. To the point where modding for Shogun 2 right out of the box will be better than Empire a year after release, there is a lot of possibility there.
“The big names in the modding community seem confident that they can do a lot of retrofit mods right out of the box. We are also possibly planning a modding workshops that will teach people how to more easily mod the game.”
The inclusion of Korea on the map is reportedly “for aesthetic purposes”, but then Laycock added ”Extra stuff… don’t rule that out just yet.” This seems to be a hint that Korea may be “activated” in future DLC.
