The much anticipated sequel to one of the more popular titles of Creative Assembly’s Total War franchise has finally been announced. PCGamer reports in their preview that Total War: Rome 2 is expected to be released in 2013, and will continue with the artistic style shift that Shogun 2 introduced to the series. Some highlights from the preview:
Combat/Battles:
- Combat scenarios and maps have been revamped, with the inclusion of combined naval and land combat occurring simultaneously in the same battle.
- Individual battles will have more significance: Instead of many small skirmishes, CA has shifted their design around armies that matter fighting battles that matter.
- A battle for a major city, for example, may require multiple battles/assaults to capture the whole thing.
- Unit detail to be a continued emphasis: 3rd person over-the-shoulder view of individual soldiers to give the player a close-up look into the action
- More individualized combat: Soldiers will engage individual soldiers in combat, take cover, as well as in-game cut scenes.
- Better camera control: New camera controls and view modes will allow the player to get a better idea of what is going on during the battle with their units.
- Players will be able to change the equipment load-out of their units(weapons, armor, etc.).
- Cities are larger, making battles more complex and making them multi-battle affairs.
- Regions will now be made up of smaller provinces. To conquer a region will require a faction to capture all the provinces it contains.
- With regions broken down into provinces, it will allow a player to control development at the higher region level, and not at the provincial level. This was done to lower the amount of micromanagement that occurs as a player controls more regions over the course of a game.
This game sounds incredible so far with the features the developers have mentioned already. I especially like the macro-level region control, the multi-part sieges, and the combined naval/land combat:
- While I do have a fondness for the micro-level region control, I find that being able to set region-level policy would help the flow of the game as well as make each region interesting, in that each one is broken down into functioning “parts” (provinces).
- The multi-battle sieges would help add to the grandeur and size of cities. In the older games, cities, albeit very large, in a way felt kind of small and too uniform in design. With larger cities, hopefully a greater level of detail will go into them, giving the player a feel of really having to overcome a large city with large scale street combat and building-to-building fighting.
- Having combined naval and land battles sounds interesting. Being able to perform an amphibious assault is the most obvious and interesting of possibilities and adds a new dimension to the combat system.
The first Rome game was very well done and definitely stood out as one of the best in the Total War series. I found myself replaying it even years later despite the aged graphics and engine. Rome: Total War has one of the best modding communities also, so there are a lot of great mods out there that balance, adjust, and transform the game. My hope is that CA will continue to release developer tools; however the developers stated that it may be harder to release complete creation tools as the games get more complex with larger libraries and databases to deal with.