Too many awesome little ideas to imagine. I feel that once Sega took over, ie Medieval II, Empire, Shogun II, the franchise changed, and stumbled on a few blocks. However, Shogun II was the smoothest of those games, and I fully trust that Rome II is coming out at the right time. I think this could be real big and real awesome. Shogun's obvious weakness in terms of format is the restriction on diversity of factions. As all Total War fans will know, Rome blows this problem out of the water. Let slip the dogs of war boys!
Credit to blahz0r for the video find
The details in full:
-Shogun 2 was set in narrow geographical areas, with limited sets of units - a comparatively small scale to what's being intended with Rome II. It was designed with a focus on game systems, such as engine polishing and improvements to unit pathing.
- With that in place, Rome II is going big - it's bigger than Rome 1 in geographical scale.
-The game's key design vision is in taking players from a macro to micro scale, such as jumping from a campaign map to a single unit.
- Despite that focus, Rome II is still attempting to make its macro scale bigger - we're guessing the senate will play a large part of that, but Creative Assembly won't say just yet.
- As you rise through the ranks, your success will attract less-than-favourable responses from some of your friends. You will almost definitely get betrayed. There's "more human-level drama on the campaign map" in Rome II.
- The bigger campaign map has "hundreds" of regions to move your units around, but the game buckets them into provinces to make management easier. The idea is to have you thinking about armies and legions rather than fiddling around with individual units. Ultimately, the game will allow you to decide whether to favour the republic or become Rome's dictator.
- The game's cameras have been redesigned. You can now lock the camera to single units. In this mode it functions like a sort of documentary cam, shaking while the unit walks – it's "a soldier's eye view" according to Creative Assembly.
- The demonstration takes place with a scenario set during the Third Punic War, which took place during 149BC to 146BC. The scenario here is the Siege of Carthage. Rome II: Total War features a new graphics engine, which features particle and deferred lighting.
- The game can now combine naval and land battles into the same conflict, including naval invasions: in this demo a Roman ship lands on the coast of Carthage.
- Naval units now have more than one ship per unit.
- Though expected, we see catapults and ballistae being put to good use.
- The demo has a big focus on Roman siege towers, and the snap-to unit camera takes the view of the game inside the siege tower itself.
- Conflicts take place over much bigger environments - much of Carthage has been recreated in the demo. To accommodate this extra scale, the game now features a top-down tactical map.
- There are multiple ways to capture cities. Walls can be reduced to rubble after they've sustained enough damage, for instance. It's designed to create cat-and-mouse gameplay: "You're not just sitting in the plaza once the walls are breached trying to defend that one area"
- There's a real oomph when units engage, with walls of shields colliding.
- The new graphics engine can show some impressive fidelity for a game of this scale. We can clearly see that Carthage's walls have graffiti.
- Buildings crumble in the background as Carthage deploys its war elephants and the demo ends.
- The unit camera has been designed so the game feels like it's "almost Saving Private Ryan at the beaches".
- Each unit has its own facial animations, and leaders bark out a stream of orders throughout. each confrontation.
- Units react to things, such as their colleagues being slaughtered - the idea is that these aren't idenikit clone armies anymore.
LOVED the first ROME. The most recent TWs were good but always had that "but" with them in my opinion.
Empire: Awesome but Napoleonic warfare didn't really make for a good game (not to mention it was a buggy mess forever)
Shogun: Awesome but had the most uninteresting subject matter / era i could imagine. Limited in scope too.
I think Rome is without a doubt the best possible world to have a Total War game in. Hopefully there's no "but" with this one Looks absolutely amazing!
Man I cant wait, outside of startcraft, the Total war series has been my favorite game series. I loved Rome, and Medieval Total war 2 (also the crusades expansion was amazing). I thought Shogun 2 was a bit of a disappointment just because it was very similar to empire (just different units/landscape) and also partly because I played the original shogun to death, so I was kinda sick of the timeframe.
The bits about being able to zoom in to single-unit level make me nervous. It makes it sounds like the battles will require a lot less control and decision making for that to be possible. Cinematic camera is nice and all but I hope it doesn't end up like Sins of a Solar Empire where the battles don't really require any tactics/micro.
Having said that, still super pumped for this. Rome was my first game in the TW series and I loved it. Was a bit disappointed by Shogun 2's limited scope, but this should be awesome.
WoW nice news, i liked Rome , and TW: Medieval, i think there is much more potential then in Shogun 2, as rightly pointed. Will play this for sure. War Elephants! But i must forget i even read this , since as i see its coming in 2013, dont wanna get pumped too much
Hopefully, they make this game centered around melee infantry like the period was historically. Rome 1 was a great game but failed in this regard.
I love what CA did with Shogun 2. They grew too ambitious from Rome on and tacked on too many features that they couldn't get a handle on. Shogun 2 focused on the most important key features of the franchise. Now that they have a good handle on that, it's time to be ambitious with Rome 2 again. I hope they don't bite more than they can chew, though.
Ohhhhhh, my god, this will be so awesome !! I was just playing a bit of Shogun 2 , took a break to enter TL , and what do I see? awesooooome news !!! I so loved Rome , the best in all installments of Total war , imo.; countless hours I have played Need to start saving money for new comp , wanna see best of it
Awesome!! Rome:TW was a great game, hope they do the title justice and even improve on it (the AI for the most part) and keep it modable so twcenter folks will be able to provide us upgrades! \o/
Oops there was another thread, both made at almost exactly the same time xD.
I just remember the INSANE revolution that happened to the TW franchise when it went from Medieval to Rome. It was just pure insanity. From playing the intro battle I just couldn't believe how much better and cooler it was. It was like the transition from GTA 2 to GTA 3. I am optimistic that if they bring in the effort put into Shogun 2, the imagination put into Empire AND the just perfect temporal era for a war and strategy. All the awesome news about the unit animations and individual unit elements reacting to each others' deaths is the most exciting part for me!!!!
How fucking cool will it be to see some poor triarius rear back in horror as his comrade, with whom he has fought for you for several seasons, through hot and cold, is impaled by the mighty tusk of a carthaginian war elephant! And then turn around to run but be bolstered by the sight of a hard-as-fuck boss legionnaire steeling his elite URBAN COHORT (said in epic manly voice) men for a charge to run and cut the hamstrings of the elephant! Can't fucking wait!!!
EPT
Looks absolutely amazing!
