DECLARATION OF
How SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR started a 20-year legacy… but almost didn’t.
Two decades ago, Shogun: Total War spawned a historyspanning strategy series, several spin-offs, and even a detour into Warhammer. Almost all of them are unified by tactical real-time battles, turn-based empire-building, and a foundation that was established all the way back in the late 1990s, during Shogun’s development. But the first concept for the game looked very different.
In 2000, Creative Assembly released its hybrid. There was diplomacy, trade, ninjas going around murdering people; then you’d quickly have to switch gears so you could micromanage individual units and crush your enemy in real-time scraps. These fundamentals haven’t been changed, but before the studio came up with the enduring formula, it was creating a traditional Command & Conquer- style RTS.
SHOGUN CONTROL
The first change came when graphics cards started appearing, giving the team the freedom to build 3D maps with more realistic terrain. When, on a whim, the camera was changed so that it pointed at the horizon, the traditional top-down perspective was also thrown out. But one vital ingredient was still missing.
“The campaign map was meant to give context to the battles,” recalls artist Nick Tresadern, who joined when the Total War team was just seven people. “We thought if we just did a series of battles in a row it wouldn’t be as personal to the player, because they didn’t choose to fight that next battle.
By doing the campaign map, the player chose to move into that province and fight that army; it made each battle particular to them.”
Features more common in meaty tabletop wargames at the time also made an appearance, but thanks to the real-time 3D fights they were less abstract. Cowardly units could make a break for it and flee the battlefield, ignoring orders, while line of sight could be affected by fog and terrain.
“The battles innovated in a few ways, certainly in terms of battlefield realism,” says UI designer Joss Adley, who also joined Creative Assembly during the Shogun days. “We still had these sprites running around, which everyone is familiar with, but we added morale, the idea of fatigue and the idea of weather affecting unit performance. It was quite severe in some cases—if it was a rainstorm, the primitive arquebus guns just wouldn’t fire at all.”
GRAND AMBITIONS
Shogun was two deeply connected games in one, and not a lot was left on the cutting room floor. At one point a ‘Guess Who’ feature was considered, where you’d have to look for traitors based on vague descriptions like ‘he has a moustache’. It didn’t survive. And even back then Creative Assembly was considering a multiplayer campaign—and a play-by-email system—though it didn’t end up appearing until Napoleon. At least Shogun 2 benefited. “It completely laid the foundations for all the Total Wars to follow, and there’s very little we removed,” says
Adley. “It was mostly adding on stuff. Obviously there was a big change with the campaign map style from Medieval to Rome, where it went from Risk-style to more action-point-based, but apart from that pretty much everything [else] remained.”
Creative Assembly, which had previously developed EA Sports games, didn’t know it had a series on its hands, but it was prepared. “The Total War part is the brand, and that was in there quite early,” says Tresadern. Total War was there before Shogun was settled on, and the team knew it could translate the game to another setting, which it soon did with Medieval.
With future games came new systems inspired by the settings, but other changes came with better tech. Multiplayer, larger army sizes, sieges with loads of destructible buildings— every iteration pushed things forward. Back in Shogun, even with the sprite units, memory constraints imposed some serious limitations.
“We didn’t have enough memory to do left and right, so when the guys moved left it just flipped the sprite in real-time,” Tresadern remembers. And while the campaign had a bespoke, themed user interface, the battle UI was stuck with some white boxes because there was no more space for textures.
While Total War has carried on what Shogun started, surprisingly few other games have even attempted to take a crack at it. Strategy developers have definitely taken notes and built on Total War ideas, but hardly any have remade the whole. Maybe they’re the sensible ones.
“Setting out to make a project that’s essentially two projects in one—double the amount of work—I think is just a crazy thing to do,” says Adley. “I don’t think anyone wants to go there. I’m surprised we did.”
en years after the Wright Brothers outwitted gravity at Kitty Hawk, the revolution they started went into overdrive when European militaries realized flying machines were useful for more than just reconnaissance. Microsoft Flight Simulator experienced a similar growth spurt a decade after its birth, but happily in its case all-out war wasn’t the spur.
Flight Simulator 4.0 inadvertently turned a franchise into a hobby by throwing open the hangar doors to all and sundry. The 1989 release came with a simple tool that allowed users to tinker with airframes and flight characteristics. More significantly, it was designed with the kind of porous edges and friendly file formats that helped people to build tools for it.
Soon meddlers had access to a pair of powerful aircraft and scenery editors. Within a few months the sim’s high-detail landscape areas were multiplying furiously and being shadowed by all kinds of exotic cloud cleavers. There were bat-shaped Horten flying wings buzzing the tower at Meigs Field; low-flying supersonic SR-71 Blackbirds spooking invisible motorists on the Golden Gate Bridge; X-wing fighters barrelling down Broadway.
Because websites like FlightSim. com and Avsim.com weren’t even eye twinkles at the time of this flowering, FS4’ s enthusiastic band of fuselage sculptors and landscape gardeners relied on CompuServe’s ‘FSFORUM’, the sim community’s very first online meeting place, for distributing and discussing their wares. Little did they know it, but these pioneers were laying the foundations for what is today, gaming’s most enduring cottage industry: FS add-on crafting.
PLANE PLETHORA
If it has wings—fixed or rotary—and has ever carried a homo sapien aloft, there’s a pretty good chance you can fly it in a recent version of Flight Simulator. For an aviation enthusiast like myself, one of the joys of the series is that I can slip a bookmark into a pilot memoir or reference book, and, within minutes, be sitting in the cockpit of one of the machines I’ve just been reading about.
Today the choice of aircraft is dizzying. Fortunately for those of us with slim wallets and limited leisure time, for every jetliner so brainbruisingly faithful that customers use real aircraft manuals as training aids, there are hundreds of free or far cheaper offerings that can be enjoyed without hours of preliminary PDF study. Repaints, scenery enhancement packs, mission-style adventures… if you’re not careful you can spend more time downloading and installing tempting extras than sampling them.
FLYING LESSONS
The failure of aspiring Flight Simulator replacements such as Microsoft Flight and Flight Sim World illustrate just how important open architecture is to a community that has known little else for the past 30 years. Both Microsoft’s and Dovetail’s short-lived experiments felt restrictive in comparison with what had come before and suffered for it.
Will the next Flight Simulator make the same mistake? It’s hard to tell at present. Official statements insist third-party add-ons are part of the grand plan, but until details of the business model emerge it’s difficult to predict how enthusiastically the newcomer will be received by the hundreds of studios that are currently fixated on Flight Simulator X.
Sadly, one fairly safe bet is that the coming instalment won’t be as overtly playful as 4.0. Lurking under an unapologetic ‘ENTERTAINMENT’ heading in the veteran’s menu are a host of modes designed to appeal to thrill-seekers rather than autopilot programmers. You can dogfight, barnstorm, crop spray, and alight on carriers, when the crosswind low-visibility landings cease to stimulate. I hope Asobo’s offering isn’t so busy being ravishing and realistic that it forgets to include a few similar activities. Aerial firefighting, air ambulancing, or helicopter cattle driving, anyone?
But it’s Microsoft Flight
Simulator’s attitude to add-ons that could make or break it in the eyes of some silver-templed simmers like myself. FS4 opened an aeronautical Aladdin’s cave, and I’d hate to see that cave closed off.