Fans now have less than one month to wait before the release of Total War: Three Kingdoms, the upcoming strategy game from Creative Assembly. Ahead of the release of The Prophet and The Warlock, the new Total War: Warhammer 2 DLC, I had the chance to visit Creative Assembly’s studio to interview developers about the game.
This is the second half of an interview with Writer Pete Stewart and Art Director Pawel Wojs; if you haven’t already, check out part 1 first for the full interview! You can also read two other interviews about The Prophet and the Warlock, one about the DLC and another about its art and animation.
Total War: Three Kingdoms Interview, Part 2
What prompted the decision to split the game between the separate Romance and Records modes?
PW: “I think that’s because we really wanted to… obviously, it’s a historical Total War game, so that’s what we set out to do, but with the wealth of opportunity with the content within the Romance novel, it was just… we had to do that as well! So, it just naturally over time became what it is now – it just made sense.”
PS: “We didn’t really want to do either mode a disservice by just trying to crowbar them together, but then, we like to say, ‘I want a more historical experience, but I can’t have that,’ ‘Well, I want a more Romantic experience, but I can’t have that,’ so ultimately they’re very much similar games, with Romance elements or more historical elements added on top. It just made sense to have it that way.”
PW: “The power of characters is the main difference and the focus on characters is the main difference. It is a little bit fantastical compared to a traditional Total War game, which is why we kind of wanted to separate it in two. One is a very much unit-focused tactical mode and the other is the character-focused legendary heroes mode. But funnily enough, to the Chinese fans, they were initially confused by the split. They were kind of like, ‘Well, it’s all the same!’ To them, Guan Yu is the way he was depicted in Romance. There isn’t a more down-to-earth historical version – that is what it was.”
So, was it difficult to find an art style that worked with both the more fantastical Romance and the more historical mode?
PW: “Not really, no – it’s all the same, really. You know, the art style’s very much inspired by, like I said before, this modern twist on historical themes, but it fits with both, really. You know, the main theme of the 2D UI is flowing ink – that works with both. The character design is staying very much true to the historical descriptions and so yeah, it wasn’t really that much of a… we really wanted to go for a very striking visual style. You know, a lot more colourful than in previous Total Wars. We didn’t want to go down the same kind of gritty, war path.
“This whole period, even though it was a massive conflict, it was still underpinned with this feeling of hope, you know, this change had to come about; ‘What was once divided, must unite.’ It’s a cycle that everyone accepts, so there is a hope at the end of this kind of cycle, which is why we wanted to have this more vibrant colourful appeal. Again, regardless of whether it’s Records or Romance.”
PS: “Yeah, I think one of the things I said before is that the characters – obviously you can pull apart the difference in historical and Romance between the characters, and that’s kind of what we’ve done, but if you look at these places in reality, it’s quite ridiculous in its kind of outrageous beauty, it’s almost fantastical beauty. A lot if just looks like that! We’ve heightened the colour palette a little bit, added more bloom and more brightness, but ultimately, it’s like that! That’s what China’s like! So, it’s not really making it too different.”
So, talking about colour and the use of colour; obviously, we’re seeing colour being a key part of the visual design, with the use of different colours for the different character classes, and kind of tying into the philosophy of Wujing. Can you expand on that and talk a bit about how that underpins things?
PW: “Yeah, I mean, that was one of the first things we found when we started looking into Chinese history, was this philosophy of the five elements and how they manage to basically categorise everything into these five. That was our framework, our kind of design tapestry; the thing that we had at the base of everything. When we started to build up the design – both the visual design and the design itself – everything had to fit within this five.
“We intentionally didn’t want it to be too kind of ‘game-ified,’ you know, so you’re not playing with fire and water. We tried to keep it subtle, like a tapestry, almost, within the game where everything is categorised into this but it’s more subtle than that. Obviously with the characters, you can see the colours and you can see the attributes, but it’s not too kind of in-your-face, it’s basically just this… it’s everywhere.”
PS: “It’s the kind of thing that’ll unravel as you play more. So, when you’re building a city you’ll notice that certain buildings may help certain types of the populace and certain troops, or certain other buildings. It’s sort of the same with your reforms, as you’re going through and like, ‘Oh, this one gives me a benefit to my military,’ and then you start to see how Wujing fire has been underpinning it. But it’s rather than kind of going, ‘This will do this so I’ve got to do this,’ it will just slowly reveal itself to you.”
PW: “It’s a level of complexity that, as you play, you’ll go, ‘Ah, OK, so yeah, the Vanguards are red, OK, that’s fire, oh and all the military buildings are red.’ It will just start to make more sense as you play.”
So, it looks like this game is probably going to have the most in-depth character system that we’ve ever seen in a Total War game. Has that presented you with new opportunities for both storytelling and design, that we haven’t seen in previous games?
PS: “I think the storytelling… yeah, the storytelling is – again, to use the word ‘organic’ – has come out of seeing the system start to work together. So your spying system is a good example. It feels very functional in what you’re doing; you’re sending a person out, building up their network, building up their cover, and then doing something to the enemy faction. But the narrative starts to build, it’s like, ‘I trust you to go out and do this thing,’ and then as they start to get more credit, they start to work their way into the faction, they start to get liked by the people that they’re now part of, and they tell you they might decide to stay.
“You can see players thinking, ‘Ah, I just lost a really good character because I sent them out.’ And then the next time you see them, if they do defect, for instance, and they’re a general and you see them on the battlefield, in the general’s speech or in the conversation systems you might find one of your characters going, ‘How could you? How could you do this?’
“So, a lot of the systems that are based around characters are sort of trying to be quite reflective to the choices that a player makes during the campaign and that the characters make as well, for you, as you go through. So, everything is sort of feeding back to you, so you can say later on, ‘I had a battle earlier and man, Dong Zhuo is really annoyed that Lu Bu betrayed him,’ for instance. So yeah, it’s underpinning all the characters is a layer of ‘How can we reflect this back to the player and show them what they’re doing?'”
PW: “And it works amazingly. I mean, we’ve always had, in previous Total War games, players making stories about the characters and their generals, you know? We always had fans writing to us about their amazing campaigns and the stories that they’ve kind of wrapped around their experience, and the way that characters played out throughout the world. This time around it’s so much more immersive, poignant and impactful because of the strong characters, and all of the toolsets that surround the characters mean that there’s a lot more of this narrative that emerges in your playthroughs.
“We’re hearing a lot more of people telling us about the crazy campaigns they’ve had and the characters and their relationships and how the campaign has played out. Personally, for me as well, I’ve played all of our games and for this one I’m far more immersed in the character narrative, and I care far more about the characters themselves. With each playthrough it’s very different and you end up really understanding and knowing these characters and actively trying to recruit them and collect them all in an obsessive kind of Pokemon style! It’s really very new for Total War, but it’s very exciting because it is so different.”
PS: “I do end up spending quite a long time on each of my turns, saying, ‘Are you happy? Are you happy? Why aren’t you happy?’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t like being in an army with Dong Zhuo, that’s fine. That’s why you’re not happy.’ But yeah, you become quite involved and immersed in the ‘well-being’ of your campaign.”
PW: “And there’s such a pride to it as well, and a sense of achievement. You know, at times I’ve emailed out screen-grabs of my court to show everyone all of the awesome heroes I’ve got in various different positions! It’s like, ‘Look at my family, look at my court, I’ve got the most badass court right now!’ And there was one point where I had Dong Zhuo, Lu Bu, I had… I was Liu Bei, I had them all, it was amazing. So, anything’s possible if you work on those relationships and you can really play to it as well, you can really manipulate the state of play to acquire characters that wouldn’t naturally join you. You can be the puppet-master and make things happen. It’s really cool.”
PS: “Yeah, I had Dong Zhuo in my Liu Bei campaign a few weeks ago. It’s like, ‘Sure, why not? This is a thing now, I guess.'”
PW: “Because that’s the thing, again, we’ve never had that before. We’ve never had the opportunity to recruit the faction leader of another faction, but if they survive their faction being destroyed, they go out into the world, so you can employ them, right? It’s great.”
PS: “And that literally happened in the Romance as well for so many people – maybe not Dong Zhuo – but for so many people, people were just kind of like, ‘Well, I guess I’m just a sell-sword now, let’s see who’s buying.'”
Do you think you have any favourites among the cast of characters?
PW: “Oh god, yeah.”
PS: “They’re all my sons. [Laughs] I always gravitate to Zhuge Liang, even though he’s not one of our ‘main main’ characters, but he’s just so good. He’s just so smart.”
PW: “Yeah, I started really playing as Liu Bei, that was my first campaign that I played many many times, Liu Bei and the brothers, but I’m really digging Cao Cao right now. He has so many strong characters, there’s Dian Wei, Xiahou Dun, but yeah, many favourites. I love playing as Sun Jian. He’s got the most sort of ‘celebrity’ family at court, you know – his kids, and Zhou Yu is just amazing.”
PS: “I was enjoying my Yuan Shao campaign more than I thought I would because he’s just faintly ridiculous. His pomposity is like… you can’t help being drawn along by it sometimes! He’s like, oh, you are talking hot air a lot of the time, but you’re doing it with such vigour.”
PW: “His faction support is quite ridiculous too, like the fact that he can just raise captains, it’s great.”
So, one last question: are we going to see the more famous battles of the era, battles like the Battle of Red Cliff, are those going to feature in the game in some way, or is that going to be something that features in campaign, or… ?
PW: “We have historical battles, as we do, and yeah, Red Cliff is one of those historical battles.”
PS: “It’s a mode, rather than like Warhammer’s sort of system. You can just choose to play them.”
PW: “Yeah, it’s essentially… it is a land battle, because the naval conflict was a bunch of fire ships hitting stationary ships. So, you deploy on the decks of ships and some forces on land and you have to assault Cao Cao’s camp, basically. Yeah, it’s quite a spectacle of a battle. There’s quite a few, it’s one of… seven?”
PS: “Six? I was looking at them earlier and I’ve forgotten already!”