When Napoleon: Total War* is released, hundreds of thousands of PC gamers will watch Bonaparte’s career crumble in front of the gates of Hougoumont, at their personal Waterloo. When it does, the pint-sized General can take comfort in the fact that he is helping in no small way to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Creative Assembly’s phenomenally successful Total War series.
There aren’t many games that can claim to have invented a genre. Fewer still have gone on to release an average of one new version or add-on a year, while always hitting critical and commercial success. Napoleon: Total War will mark the point at which The Creative Assembly has been at the very top of its game for as long as the Petit General was on top of his.
When the revolutionary Shogun: Total War appeared in 2000 it married real-time strategy battles with the slower, turn-by-turn tactical overview of a campaign map. It could have gone very wrong. Blending the resource management and empire building model of Civilization* with the fast battles of Command & Conquer* was ambitious, to say the least. Setting the resulting game in
a period of Japanese history with which the majority of its potential audience was likely to be unfamiliar compounded the whole project’s “experimental” nature.
a period of Japanese history with which the majority of its potential audience was likely to be unfamiliar compounded the whole project’s “experimental” nature.
The creative gamble paid off. And it continues to. Total War isn’t just still the best example of its genre, it’s the only competitor in a race of one and continues to grow its audience with each new release.
“Sales of PC boxed copy has probably declined over the last couple of years,” said Creative Director Mike Simpson, “But each Total War game that we make sells a bit more than the previous one, which is a good way to be going.“
One of the reasons for the enduring appeal of Total War, said Simpson, is the sheer breadth of subject matter that The Creative Assembly can draw on for inspiration and the different ways it can approach a title. So far the company has covered feudal Japan, medieval Europe, the Roman Empire, and the colonial conflicts of the Eighteenth Century.
The biggest departure for the previous release, Empire, was the introduction of naval warfare, opening up the tactical map and adding more variety and new challenges to the battle sequences. Napoleon: Total War marks another new direction for the team as they get closer to the characters involved in the conflicts. As the name suggests, there’s a heavier focus on narrative and the personalities of the time than seen in previous episodes. At the beginning of the game, for example, players will first encounter the French Emperor as a young captain in an artillery battalion.
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