What the Teams are Working on February 2019

Creative Assembly is now the biggest studio in the UK – incredibly, we’re more than three times bigger than we were when Alien: Isolation and Total War: ROME II released. So what are we up to now?

Must be time for another dose of what the teams are working on!

Saga Team – new project

There’s been a flurry of visits to our Sofia studio recently. In fact, members of the team just got back from being there all week – all because there have been some exciting developments as production continues apace.

While Sofia works across all sorts of Creative Assembly projects, their biggest is our next Saga title. This week we passed milestone one on this game and we’re starting to see more and more of what it will look like. We’re becoming incredibly excited to be able to share more about this project with you in the coming year – stay tuned!

Historical Team – THREE KINGDOMS

As you know, we’ve bought ourselves a little more time for THREE KINGDOMS by shifting the launch date to May 23rd, and it’s been gratifying to hear many of the responses from players who’d rather wait a little longer and get a more finely-honed game – because that’s absolutely the plan. Alongside the usual debugging and polishing business, we’re seeing what else we can fit in and there are definitely a few plum items on the list we’ve wanted to do, as well as a number that players are asking for. More on these as they bed in!

One little overhaul we haven’t talked about yet is the new autoresolver in THREE KINGDOMS. We’ve completely redesigned the system that calculates and displays the battle prediction in the pre-battle panel to be entirely deterministic. This means that when you choose to delegate a battle and you’re predicted, say, a pyrrhic victory, that’s exactly what you’ll get.

You can also get a capsule view of the balance of power simply by selecting your army and mousing over another. This works for both friendly and enemy armies, so you don’t need to declare war and burn up action points approaching and attacking an army to get optics on the outcome. As you can imagine, this all of this takes a lot of guesswork (not to mention a measure of save scumming) out of autoresolved battles.

一会儿见!

THREE KINGDOMS – New Content Team

With excellent progress having been made on the Yellow Turban Rebellion DLC (and help lent to the main Total War: THREE KINGDOMS team where possible following the release date move), the THREE KINGDOMS New Content Team has now set their sights on their next endeavour: further post-launch content.

We’ll be releasing more information about this in a dedicated blog post soon, so keep an eye out!

Fantasy New Content Team – WARHAMMER II

As we said in the last what the teams are working on blog, the Fantasy New Content Team is powering away at a Lord Pack DLC – which we can confirm will be the next content released for the Total War series!

You may have noticed that we sometimes include Old World Updates alongside our DLC releases, and this DLC is no exception as we are working on a bespoke new feature for one of the WARHAMMER I races that’ll have you bending the knee.

Launcher Team – launcher update

You probably noticed a new experience when you launched your last Total War game…

Introducing the new Total War launcher, which now supports the following games: Total War: ATTILA, Total War: ROME II, Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, Total War: WARHAMMER, and Total War: WARHAMMER II (with more to come).

A few notable enhancements include:

• An improved UI for the Mod Manager including a bigger layout, Steam workshop mod description panel, and filters
• The ability to change the load order of mods
• The latest news, trailers, and DLC for your favourite Total War games

See the full details in our blog post here.

We’d also like to extend another big thank you to our early adopters, who gave us valuable feedback in the early stages of development. And the work doesn’t stop here: we’re committed to continuing to improve your launcher experience over time as well as rolling out new features.

If you’re experiencing any issues using the launcher, please read through the end of the blog post for an FAQ and troubleshooting tips to see if there is a solution to your problem. You can also find these in this thread on our forums, where you can leave us feedback and suggestions – it’d be great to hear from you.

Fantasy Team – pre-production

The Fantasy Team is still very much hard at work in pre-production for their next project.

This month they’ve been slaving over a hot (for February) mocap studio, with some excellent performances by our resident mocap artists now in the can and waiting to have that all-important digital flesh applied to their bones. Or perhaps more bones, or indeed flesh. After all, some things just can’t be legally motion captured…

Don’t get any funny ideas, though – that picture above is unrelated to their recent endeavours. However, if you’d like to find out more about motion capture at CA, check out this article and video over on the Creative Assembly blog.

Access Team – secret project

The Access Team’s project is ramping up testing this month as we get ready for announce later this year. We’re very excited to share our secret project with you all as it’s a new genre for Total War and has been a real passion project for the developers involved. Keep watching this space, and if you want to hear more about our latest Total War updates and news, sign up to Total War Access.

Beyond Total War

But all that is just what we have cooking for Total War – we’ve also got a team working on a brand-new FPS, which you might have caught wind of already:

So, this happened. @NeillBlomkamp dropped by CA HQ for a behind-the-scenes look at the development of our brand-new FPS IP! pic.twitter.com/hXEAnAHEEX

— Creative Assembly (@CAGames) February 4, 2019

In short, there’s lots of thrilling stuff going on – and we’re hiring. If you want to join us in making some incredible games, head over to our careers page.