Let me take you back to the year 2000, perhaps the peak of me naively thinking things were going to be great forever. Smash Mouth’s All Star was constantly on the radio. It sometimes still snowed in October here in Colorado and I’d get a few extra days off school. And I discovered a little game called Shogun: Total War that may have literally changed the course of my entire life.
OK, it wasn’t exactly little for the time. I remember being baffled by how I was supposed to free up 700 MB for one game. But the rest was history. Until it branched out into fantasy in 2016, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
(Image credit: Creative Assembly)
Total War is a series that I’ve been onboard for since the very beginning, that shaped my love for both strategy and history, which are still two of the main things people pay me to write about. And I just started up another campaign in Total War: Warhammer 3’s new DLC just last night, so I’ve never stopped playing it either. Across 16 major releases (with Medieval 3 now announced to be on the way) and a quarter freaking century, we’ve been together longer than any of my romantic relationships and almost all of my interpersonal ones.
So it’s hard to find someone whose history with the series goes back further than mine does. But lucky for me, I got to talk to Creative Assembly’s battle architect Scott Pitkethly, who has been with the company since before the release of Shogun. And you might be surprised to learn what else CA was up to before they hit it big with their digital toy soldiers.
“When I joined, I wasn’t working on Total War to begin with,” Pitkethly recalls. “We were still doing sports games at that point and we were porting to the PlayStation 1. That was the very first thing I did. But they were developing Shogun: Total War downstairs.”
The birth of Shogun
(Image credit: Creative Assembly)
The seeds of the project were planted not with a Kurosawa movie marathon or even a desire to make an RTS, but someone’s side project of extremely optimized 3D terrain. Programmer Anthony “TAG” Taglione showed up one day with a spline-based landscape visualizer he had written entirely in assembly language, which I can only equate to maybe building an entire house out of toothpicks. It’s very efficient once it’s done but extremely labor-intensive compared to more abstract programming languages.
“Just this amazing landscape demo… no game whatsoever,” Pitkethly says. “And he turned up with that and said, ‘I want to make a game using this.’ And he actually wanted the entire team to make the whole game in assembler apparently. That was a method we decided against.”
We were thus robbed of a world with a Total War so hyper-optimized that it could run on a digital watch, but we did get the original Shogun out of the deal, so it’s hard to complain. Two years later, CA would release Medieval: Total War, moving the action to the European continent. But something much bigger was already in the works, ditching the 2D sprites and flat, board game-like campaign map of these primordial precursors. Pitkethly was at the center of it.
(Image credit: Sega)
“We were doing this whole new initiative, Rome: Total War,” he tells me. “And it was a completely new codebase. Everything was 3D. All the characters were 3D. The campaign map was going to be 3D. It was going to be this completely fresh thing. So I was given the opportunity straight out of university. Never worked writing game code before. Someone’s like, ‘There you go! Make the game!'”
It was going to be this completely fresh thing. So I was given the opportunity straight out of university. Never worked writing game code before.
Scott Pitkethly
It’s kind of a humblebrag to say the first game you wrote code for was Rome: Total War, which I still think is one of the highlights of the series and holds up surprisingly well today. You can even play it on a phone now, which makes my brain hurt to think about in the same way quantum time dilation does. Is any of this actually real? Are we being pranked? Anyway, that’s beside the point.
2006’s Medieval 2 would follow quickly after 2004’s Rome, after which Total War took its first—and so far only—two swings at the gunpowder era with the ambitious but troubled Empire (2009) and its expandalone follow-up, Napoleon (2010). There was a brief return of black powder in the Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai expansion in 2012. But I was curious why every Total War game since then had focused more on bows and swords. Warhammer’s fanciful fantasy roster does feature some guns, but they tend to be more in a support role. Try as I might, I still can’t get handgunner-focused armies to work for our boy Karl Franz.
Musket madness
(Image credit: Sega)
“There definitely are technical challenges,” Pitkethly explains. “The most common bug I used to get in Empire from QA would be: I’ve got my line infantry. They see the enemy and they are in range. And I click to fire, but they don’t fire. They just move forwards. Bug! And I had to describe to them, well actually, the line-of-sight is being drawn from the barrel of the gun that guy actually is holding. So if you zoom down to the height of that man, you’ll see that there’s a tiny hill in the way.
“But part of my role as the battle architect is supporting all content, all eras, so it’s definitely something that we are working on and supporting. And there will be more gunpowder-based games in the future.”
Shogun 2 in 2011 was a big leap forward for the series visually, and Pitkethly still calls it “the purest Total War.” But it was immediately followed by Rome 2, which was released to a very mixed reception, with numerous bugs and broken promises. Creative Assembly would polish it up eventually, though. I happen to think the Emperor Edition you can grab right now is actually quite good, if your only memories of Rome 2 were from that rocky launch time. And a lot of that was thanks to Creative Assembly Sofia, a studio that’s going to play an even bigger role later.
From there, we got Attila, which is still my pick for most under-appreciated Total War game. I’ll wear my biases on my sleeve: Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages are my favorite era of history, and I was absolutely jumping up and down with excitement when one of my favorite strategy series decided to take the often ignored time period on. I thought the way climate change in the north and the Huns in the east pushed everyone into the southwest corner of the map, over the bones of the collapsing Western Roman Empire, was one of the most interesting and compelling campaigns in any strategy game ever. But alas, it had a lot of performance issues and kind of still does. This is the time often thought of as Total War’s first slump era.
“It’s always unfortunate when we disappoint the fans,” Pitkethly says. “When we make a misstep, and sometimes it’s things we should have seen coming. And other times it’s things we couldn’t predict.
“But I think we’re definitely getting better as a company with understanding and working with the community, and trying to resolve those issues. And we are listening to people, and we are making progress. Obviously there will still be mistakes. We’ll get things wrong. But I think we’ll rectify them more quickly. And I think that’s something we are making fairly big strides in improving.”
Chaos is coming
(Image credit: Sega)
Things were about to change in a big way once again, though, with Total War’s first steps outside of history and into fantasy. In 2016, Total War: Warhammer launched with the Old World campaign and eight playable legendary lords from four races. Over a trilogy of major releases and a forest of DLC, that number is now over 100 playable lords from 24 races on the colossal Immortal Empires map, with more already on the way in the just-announced Lords of the End Times DLC. Things are finally coming full circle, considering very early on in development of the first game, Games Workshop decided to kill Warhammer fantasy, which took the Total War devs by surprise.
“I’m sure I can say this now,” Pitkethly told me. “We didn’t know about End Times when we started Warhammer. So halfway through development of Warhammer 1, I remember Games Workshop saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re going to blow that world up.’ And we’re like, ‘What?! We’ve got three games worth of content to make in it!'”
I still think this may have been one of the all-time most baffling decisions in the history of media licensing. But what do I know? The first two Warhammer games would be punctuated by the pretty good but mostly forgotten Thrones of Britannia in 2018, focusing on a smaller geographical scope of the British Isles around the time of the Norse and Norman invasions. And then lightning would strike once again in 2019 with the superb Total War: Three Kingdoms.
(Image credit: The Creative Assembly)
Based on the classic, semi-historical Chinese novel and featuring epic martial arts duels between its larger-than-life leaders, this is still one of the high water marks for the series. Sadly, support for it ended unexpectedly, the main campaign was left in a somewhat buggy state, a hinted steppe DLC vanished, and a long-rumored sequel has yet to materialize. This topic, of all the things I asked about, was the one Creative Assembly was most tight-lipped about.
There’s always things that we want to be doing. There’s so many great bits of history that we want to come back to.
Pawel Wojs
“It’s a tricky one,” says game director Pawel Wojs, who also tells me Three Kingdoms represents some of his proudest work. “We always have a lot of things to focus on, and we have to prioritize. And at that time, we had to focus on other things. There’s not really much more we can say about it. … The Three Kingdoms team had already moved on to other things that were different. It’s definitely a very tricky thing.”
“I think it’s something we probably will talk about in the future,” Pitkethly adds. “And I think everything is always up for grabs. It’s not like that’s never going to happen. There’s always things that we want to be doing. There’s so many great bits of history that we want to come back to. It’s just time and where the technology is, and the games we want to make first.”
(Image credit: Sega)
While Warhammer was chugging along with sequels in 2017 and 2022, Creative Assembly’s support studio in Sofia took its first solo flight with A Total War Saga: Troy in 2020, based on the Homeric account of the Trojan War. They would follow it up with 2023’s Ancient Egypt-focused Pharaoh, which eventually added the entire Troy map to its own and expanded into Mesopotamia to make a full-blown Bronze Age grand campaign. It’s another one I feel was a bit underappreciated, to be honest. But historical fans were still clamoring for a return to more familiar pastures.
And it seems like they’ll be getting their wish, with Total War: Medieval 3 having just been announced—though it sounds like it’s a ways out yet. There’s even going to be another, different, major Total War title announced at The Game Awards next week. And Warhammer fantasy isn’t done either, with the undead overlord Nagash and his buddies finally coming to really piss on our picnic next summer.
The future of Total War
But what does the future of Total War look like even further down the road? The new Warcore engine, which is the basis for Medieval 3, is a big part of that.
“Now more than ever, we are focusing our technology on the future of Total War,” Pitkethly concluded. “So previously we always were thinking about the next game. And then the next game… So we’ve really reorganized ourselves to be able to think about the long term and how we make games that we can keep making for a long time.
“We can’t know what technology is going to be like in five years, let alone 25 years. But it’s something we’re definitely thinking about. And we’re concentrating a lot of effort—significantly more than we ever have before—on thinking about the Total War platform.”
Total War has had its ups and downs, but it has still remained one of my favorite strategy series for all of the 25 years it’s been doing its thing. I’m interested to see what changes a new engine will bring, since I was definitely starting to feel around the release of Pharaoh that a lot of its very basic mechanics are starting to get a bit stale. But I suppose all we can do now is wait and see.
And yes, I probably am going to start my 15th Wood Elf campaign in Immortal Empires. Some things really don’t ever get old.
