Tweet
This was always supposed to be the perfect mix, wasn't it? The sheer unmatched scale of Total War meeting the extraordinary races of Warhammer Fantasy; I think I've been daydreaming about this game for more than a decade now. And the demo looked incredible: a Greenskin horde crashing violently into the organised lines of the Empire at Black Fire Pass. Being able to sit back and watch it all play out is captivating. However, that's a pretty important clarification to make. We watched the battle, but we didn't play it. The demo was entirely scripted (I'm sure of this, as we saw it twice), with the developer zipping the camera around the battlefield, pointing out all of the interesting things that we should be looking at. We never intervened, aside from one wonderful exception: the Doom Diver Catapult. This is a Greenskin siege unit that flings suicidal goblins towards their enemy with a surprising amount of accuracy, as the goblins themselves guide their trajectory. In both demos the developer manually controlled one of these goblins as they flew towards their demise, with different results. It looks like a really fun unit to play around with, but importantly showed that this was all in-engine.
Now I feel like it's important to mention all of this before we get started, as the entire experience reminded me of watching that stunning Carthage demo for Total War: Rome 2 - a demo which would unfortunately prove misleading.
Read more…
More...