#TOTAL WAR THREE KINGDOMS DEMO SERIES#
I’m not sure I’ve seen a Total War battle that felt so sweeping since the series was using sprites. The intended effect might be predominantly aesthetic, but I couldn’t help but feel thrilled at the sheer space that seems to have opened up on the Total War battlefield for Three Kingdoms. “But yeah, it’s part of the epic scale we’re going for with this game, getting that almost ‘arrows so thick they blot out the sun’ effect with the archers.” “Well, they’re elite archers,” he cautioned. “Hang on, sorry,” I said, pointing at the screen, “Are those special siege units or can archers really shoot that far in this game?”ĭesigner Leif Walter paused, mid-explanation of the Battle of Xiapi. It looked like a neon roller-coaster hanging suspended in thin air between the armies of Cao Cao, and the defending forces of Lu Bu, anchored at one end by hundreds of archers and at the other by a burning cityscape. So when two developers from Creative Assembly gave me an E3 demo of the Battle of Xiapi, an historical siege battle in Total War: Three Kingdoms, I found myself distracted from what they were saying by long streaks of flaming arrows soaring through the air.
The ways the games sometimes don’t feel right, or the little micro-managerial tasks you fall into the habit of performing in order to keep your soldiers from doing something self-destructive. The way formations of soldiers get strung-out as they move, and the way they dissolve as a battle turns into Mo-Cap Mosh Pit in the center of the map. The stuff that you probably don’t notice so much at first but-after dozens of hours or a dozen games across almost twenty years-you find yourself fixating on.
I’ve been playing Total War games for long enough that I get weirdly hung up on minutiae. The first things I noticed were the fire arrows.
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