WHAT THE TEAMS ARE WORKING ON – Spring 2018

It’s been a long hard winter for the Total War teams, but there’s not been a lot of hibernating with Empire Divided, Tomb Kings and Desert Kingdoms all sprouting through the snow. What’s more, there’s a new crop of releases just starting to blossom, and even a new team being added for an interesting new project.

Can you feel that chill wind still blowing from the North though?

SAGA TEAM – THRONES OF BRITANNIA

The Thrones of Britannia team is hard at work on the game, making final tweaks to features as well as focusing on bug fixing and balancing. We’ve been receiving regular feedback from both internal testers and our special veteran group of testers, and making changes and adjustments based on that.

Two weeks ago, journalists and youtubers got the opportunity to play and capture footage from an early version of the game. Soon you’ll start to see these preview features and videos appear, revealing more on certain playable factions, more on the mid-game and including some changes that we’ve implemented since the first ‘hands-on’ articles landed in February.

Now, as we approach the final stretch of development on Thrones, you can expect to start seeing regular glimpses of gameplay and we’ll also kick off some livestreaming.

HISTORICAL TEAM – THREE KINGDOMS:

The cat’s out of the bag, Total War: THREE KINGDOMS will be our next major historical Total War game. A couple of months back we were finally able to reveal the game to the world and we’re glad so many of the community shared that feeling of excitement. Three Kingdoms China is a period we have been asked to explore for years now and it’s always great to be able to announce a project that so many Total War fans have been vocal about.

THREE KINGDOMS will be the first Total War game to tackle ancient Chinese warfare, and we’re working on some seriously cool content that both ticks the historical authenticity box and brings some exciting new stuff to the Total War formula.

Development is continuing full speed ahead and we’ll have lots of exciting news to share with you in the coming months.

ARENA TEAM – OPEN BETA:

Hannibal has led us into Open Beta! With Carthage as a brand new faction, we’re kicking off our Open Beta testing (which you can join here totalwararena.net) with 3 new maps, 2 new commanders, custom battles and lots of mechanical and balance changes.

We’re going to be busy looking at your feedback over the coming weeks, but we’re also looking at the addition of Ranked mode and a new Barbarian commander, check out our official social channels and weekly developer livestreams to hear about those.

FANTASY NEW CONTENT TEAM – NORSCA & MORE:

Since Rise of the Tomb Kings releasing earlier this year it’s fair to say we’ve had no down time as our focus has been very much on Norsca and ensuring we meet our May date to implement it within WARHAMMER II.

As you may have read about already, Norsca has been a bit of beast in terms of wrestling it into shape for WARHAMMER II, with a good chunk of the project being rebuilt from scratch to work with WARHAMMER II’s code base. In doing this it has given us the opportunity to revisit a few aspects of the race and gear them up for their first tastes of sacking and razing the lands of the New World, in the forms of new technologies and Monster Hunts.

Beyond the campaign side of things we have been bringing Norsca up to par with the WH II races for battles and also re-introducing the 30th Birthday Regiments of Renown for you to play with. We plan to tie all of this in with the next DLC for WARHAMMER II which we can confirm will be a ‘Lords Pack’, in a similar vein to the King & the Warlord for the first game.

HISTORICAL NEW CONTENT TEAM – CAMPAIGN NEXT:

With the successful release of Desert Kingdoms and Empire Divided, ROME II has come a long way, but there’s more action and free content to come yet. One big win has been the reduction of players who have problems with mods crashing their game, by creating roll back builds for those who want to use older mods, and the new mod filter for those that want to play new content without forgetting old mods may still be enabled and might cause issues.

We’ve also looked at all of the fan feedback from Empire Divided through to Desert Kingdoms and feel we have a good understanding of things we need to address in the next content release for ROME II. We plan to line this up with the next campaign pack that we feel will be a fresh take on campaign packs for ROME II as well as a very exciting feature for the Free-LC that will release alongside it.

FANTASY TEAM – PRE-PRODUCTION:

Currently in early pre-production, it is dark and quiet in this team’s corner of the studio. Visitors do not dally long.

ACCESS TEAM – SOMETHING A BIT DIFFERENT:

This is an exciting new adventure for CA. We’re currently working on something exclusive for Total War Access members. We’re looking at innovative ways to reward players for their continued support of our projects, and this team is creating something that does just that!

So not really a Total War game such as you’re used to, but if you like thinking strategically and stretching your tactical muscle you should be interested in what we’re up to. We’ll let you know when we’re ready to test it, as we’d love to hear what you think.