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Total War Saga: Troy

CA on blending fact and fiction in Total War Saga: Troy

We talk to Creative Assembly's Maya Georgieva about how the studio has looked to balance plausibility with playability in an ancient world.

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Just yesterday we brought you our first hands-on impressions of Total War Saga: Troy, the next game in the spin-off series that casts a laser focus on a particular flashpoint in history rather than a more extensive campaign like you might find in Rome II or Three Kingdoms.

As part of our early access to the new strategy game, which as you'll have no doubt guessed based on the title is set during the almost-mythical Trojan War, we had the chance to talk with the game's creative director, Maya Georgieva. It's a big step back in time for the developer, and going back so far has had some implications. For example, and as we discussed in our interview, the game is set during a period when horseback combat was much less prevalent.

Total War Saga: Troy

The studio has approached this challenge by focusing much more on infantry battles, with new terrain types to slow soldiers down or provide cover/camouflage, and more pronounced differences between unit types. There's also a renewed emphasis on chariots, which works with the enhanced role that flanking plays. Finally, there are mythical units, which we asked Georgieva about during our interview.

"One of the challenges of taking this sort of period and representing it in Total War, we know that in the Bronze Age, a lot of the unit types and diversity and also strategy and tactics that exist in the later periods are lacking in this one. And we were looking into various ways to offset this limitation, so we did a lot of exploring in mechanics, in diversifying unit types."

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"One of the other avenues of exploration was how we could add other more gameplay-friendly versions of units and types of units that otherwise would not exist in this period of time and would expand the gameplay aspect of the game. So we were looking into introducing those sort of units through this lens of mythological units, which still had to be submitted to the same treatment as the whole game, which is uncovering the truth behind the myths and the legends. And the way we did that is we researched and found plausible explanations [..] for each of the different units."

This approach to balancing plausibility with playability extends to the Trojan Horse. For more on the multi-faceted approach that the studio took when exploring that particular slice of history, check out the full interview above, and there's even more intel about Total War Saga: Troy in the gameplay reveal that you can see below.

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Total War Saga: TroyScore

Total War Saga: Troy

REVIEW. Written by Marco Vrolijk

"Some of the new additions, especially the new resource system, should probably be included in future Total War games."



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