Total War: Three Kingdoms players "to write their own story"

We talked to senior designer Leif Walter about what players will be doing in Three Kingdoms-era China.

Earlier this year we got our hands on the opening section of Total War: Three Kingdoms at a press event in London, and we were back in the city last week for Rezzed, where we were able to catch up with Total War: Three Kingdoms senior design Leif Walter.

During our chat, we discussed this storied period of Chinese history, and how the studio was approaching the challenge of giving players the tools they needed to tell their own stories via the sandbox gameplay that characterises the series.

The game has a Romance mode that builds on the more traditional Records mode by giving the in-game characters more personality and more power. This results in feuds between characters and an emerging narrative that won't stick to the script as the team doesn't just want players to replay the Three Kingdoms story, instead they want to enable "players to build their own narrative and their own story - write their own Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, if you will."

Later Walter explained how "Romance mode adds this additional layer of tactical choices on top where your heroes are now a bit more capable than in Records mode - in Records mode heroes are just [bodyguard units, generals] with their cavalrymen amongst them - whereas in Romance mode they are individual heroes with larger-than-life abilities on the battlefield. So suddenly it becomes a very important additional match-up, if you will, how these heroes interact with each other."

For more on Total War: Three Kingdoms, check out our latest preview right here.