TSA: How have you tried to integrate the concept of Wu Xing into the game?
Pawel: You know what? This is the closest you’re ever going to get! TSA: So maybe it is a bit like a football management sim? The Chinese Super League? Pawel: You pay their salaries, right? And depending on their position in the faction, you’re paying them more and how you promote them, you could be paying them for all these additional ranks and titles. So, if I have a financial crisis, I can also release someone to avoid going bankrupt, but if they’re on good terms, they might be coming back just because you got on quite well! Pawel: Yeah, they can just leave, and you can also kick them out!Īttila: You don’t have it in the preview build, where you can only banish characters, but you can also release someone. TSA: I do like that you’ve got character management, you’re trying to keep people happy, but when they do get dissatisfied, it doesn’t always end up in civil war. You can have several faction leaders of failed factions all in your faction after they came looking for work once they were, you know, out of a job!
We’ve never had that before in a Total War game One of the wonderful things that makes these stories and characters far more poignant is that characters are no longer tied to factions, they move around. You’ve got harmonies and disharmonies, so if you put two characters that have opposing values together, their relationship will deteriorate over time and culminate in one of the characters leaving and potentially worse. Pawel: You’ve very much got relationships that can build. Then not long later, I had war declared against me by his brother Yuan Shao, and I’m like, “Do you want to team up for this one?” And he was like, “Yeah, actually I don’t like him either!” But then he accidentally captured one of my counties where I had my province capital, and I was like, “There’s no other way, I have to go to war with him!” But we had a very good relationship, so I asked, “Would you mind trading it with me?” And yeah, he gave me a couple of answers, wanted a little bit more food, and I was like, “That’s perfectly reasonable!” It made our relationship even better. I made lots of farming buildings, made heavy reforms there, certain governors, but I needed money, so I start trading with Yuan Shu. I can tell these stories, like my favourite one where I allied with Yuan Shu at the beginning. I’ve had five campaigns, I made different friends at the beginning, I made different decisions and ended up with a completely different chain of events that I’ve created for myself. My favourite in Cao Cao right now, but right before him it was Sun Jian, because I’m going through all the factions and enjoying them thoroughly. We give you the starting position, and you know however much you know about it, but from that point you’re the director, you decide who will be your friend and then it’s totally your own story.
TSA: I suppose that once the first five or ten hours are up, you’ll have grounded yourself in this setting.Īttila Mohacsi: Even more, with the full depth of the game it’s hundreds of hours! But what we’re really emphasising is that this is your own story. They’re far more complex than they’ve ever been before in a Total War game, so you will naturally create war stories that are far stronger than ever before, because we give you so much more to play with. The starting point that we give you of their titles, their traits, how we describe them and present them to you through the faction intro and narrative that we give you for events will hopefully, even if you’re not familiar, let you come to understand and know these relationships.Īnd as you play through the game and these relationships build and collapse, you will make your own narrative to ground these characters. So it’s through the game mechanics, when you play, you will come to know that this guy does this, that guy does that. Pawel: Well, obviously if you’re not familiar with the Three Kingdoms, then it’s a bit of a learning point, but I think that the characters themselves are quite evocative and quite unique.