Total War Saga: Troy's battles feel a tad dry, but its mythology is fascinating - Eurogamer.net

The Bronze Age, it turns out, is not an easy period to turn into a historically accurate, highly detailed video game like Total War.

Playing it, I think there's room for a little more of the mythical stuff - but talking to Total War Saga: Troy's game director Maya Georgieva and senior game designer Milcho Vasilev, I'm also confident there's a good deal more to come.

So, from the beginning, we decided that one of the key points of the project will be: we are going to make a sandbox Total War game, but the events of the Iliad will be a plausible playthrough in that sandbox." (Worth noting here is that there's definitely no two-campaign option like the Romance and Records versions of Total War: Three Kingdoms, although it's not something Georgieva ruled out for something post-launch. "That would have been a very nice option, but the scope of the Saga really doesn't allow us to do that. I mean, we don't have the luxury of making two games in one. But still, there are possibilities, probably after release. We'll see.").

As for how those gaps are filled by the more fantastical parts of sources like the Iliad, Creative Assembly has opted for a "truth behind the myth" approach, effectively looking to make as factually accurate a Total War as possible and using the most probable explanations for the myths and legends to complete the history - a fascinating approach, philosophically, but one that can make you feel slightly underwhelmed when, say, the Minotour turns out to just be a big, tanky bandit dude in silly armour.

"We knew that we were going to have a difficulty with the unit variety in the game because of the Bronze Age and the way that warfare was conducted at the time," Vasilev explained, and this is where mythological units, or mythologically inspired units, come in.

The Cyclops, for instance, is a giant that sounds like more or less a properly mythical being in the game, and works to supplement the units of the era.

"The Cyclops can be really good at sieges, because he is a unit that is able to destroy even huge gates, he's able to throw a boulder over the siege walls to damage units behind it, and so on." Others like the Centaurs, meanwhile, are more easily explained by the available facts, and so in-game they're effectively just cavalry.

Total War's real-time battles are, more often than not, about using speed, positioning, and flanking, and taking almost all cavalry out of the game completely disrupts the balance of that, and so Creative Assembly has had to quite noticeably shuffle some other things around.

A big change is light infantry are faster, heavy infantry are slower, and there are more infantry types that have special bonuses like increased flanking strength, increased resistance to flanking, or outright immunity to it.

Light infantry can move into long grass to be hidden, like units traditionally would be in forests.

Heavy infantry are severely slowed in mud, while light infantry are unaffected and medium only slightly slowed - similarly with sand.

Basically, flanking-specialised light infantry units become your traditional light cavalry, and micro-managing unit positioning around different types of battlefield terrain becomes more important than ever.

There's also not a huge amount of visual distinction between units, especially the more elite ones, like Achilles' Myrmidons say, that in other Total Wars you'd expect to be more instantly identifiable in the fray.

"The siege of Troy needs to be a spectacular event, or at least a special event in a Bronze Age game.

- there is a Trojan Horse in the game, despite some suggestions that it would just be implemented as an earthquake for the sake of historical accuracy.

"There are actually three horses, three Trojan horses in Total War Saga: Troy...

So that was one of the interpretations, which is modelled into the game as a window of opportunity where you can attack Troy well after an earthquake because the walls are down, the garrison is weakened and you can just approach the city in a much more favourable way.

"The other ways to approach Troy with a Trojan horse are with a siege tower that is shaped like a horse.

So we see that probably in the Trojan War, this is like a prototype, a 'beast of war', we call it in the game.

It's during the night, the gates of Troy are open, and you start with several units inside the city.

And those three ways exist in the game and give you the opportunity to choose your own Trojan horse.".

Vasilev also explained that there are at least three separate versions of the battle map for the siege of Troy itself, including the standard 360-view one you'll know from usual Total War sieges.

"It's not just an earthquake that we've implemented as a Trojan horse." Finally, although Creative Assembly was at pains to make clear there'd be little talk of the campaign just yet, there's an intriguing tease of a proper rework for agents, the units like spies and heroes that roam around providing support and intel on the campaign map.

Translating this era into something like Total War sounds extremely challenging - the slight flatness of that battle I tried a few times being evidence of the fact - but the novelty of it, the magic of the period, and just the magnetic quirkiness of the actual required historical process itself, is still undeniable.

More about A Total War Saga: Troy!

Total War Saga: Troy will be free at launch on the Epic Games Store.