Rome 2: First look at the biggest Total War ever

[Archangel Tyrael]

We feast our eyes on the huge strategy sequel.

 

 

For more info, check out our massive Rome 2 interview with the game's lead designer.

 

We're being shown a pre-alpha version of Rome 2, but already it looks stunning. It's running on a totally new engine, designed for the next wave of PC hardware, and the detail and scale is awe-inspiring.

 

The Roman Army is invading Carthage: a vast city perched on a hill, and the capital of one of the ancient world's greatest civlizations. The battle begins at sea. Naval and land combat are now seamless. A fleet of Roman ships sails towards the beaches of the ancient city, heaving with Legions of soldiers and siege equipment.

 

 

 

When the fleet hits the beach, the army disembarks en masse and begins the invasion. James Russell, the game's lead designer, says this is the equivalent of a 'boss fight'. You won't be invading Carthage in the first mission: it's the penultimate battle of a long campaign.

 

Amazingly, despite the staggering visuals, Creative Assembly say they're aiming for Rome 2 to have the same min spec as Shogun 2 - so you won't need a monster rig to play it. It's early days yet, though, and Russell asks us not to hold him to that.

 

Roman soldiers flood into siege towers, and catapults batter Carthage's huge stone walls. As the towers roll towards the city's perimeter, the camera suddenly zooms into the head of a single soldier. This is a new feature, and is designed to give battles a more human feel.

 

The battle looks amazing from above, but seeing it through the eyes of a soldier on the front line is absolutely mind-blowing. The Creative Assembly developer controlling the demo spins the soldier's head around and looks behind him at the ships we saw earlier, and we see thousands of soldiers amassing behind us. The scale is almost dizzying.

 

 

 

Russell described it as "the Saving Private Ryan of the ancient world", which makes perfect sense when you see the invasion in action. It even has the same jerky, documentary-style camera effects as Spielberg's war epic when you're inside the head of a soldier.

 

As the siege tower approaches Carthage's walls, the commander of the unit we're currently viewing the action from yells orders at his troops, and prepares them for the impending battle. You'll see tiny details like this whenever you zoom into a unit.

 

If a soldier gets an arrow in the neck, his buddy will recoil in horror, or try to drag him to safety. Being able to flick instantly between a vast overview of the battlefield, and these tiny, human moments, makes it the most immersive and cinematic Total War yet.

 

 

For the team at Creative Assembly, Shogun 2 was a chance to refine and polish the series' tactical gameplay on a relatively small scale, but in Rome 2 they're going all-out. It's not just the battles that are bigger, but the campaign map too.

 

It'll be bigger than Shogun 2's, and bigger than the original Rome's, and will be rendered using the same visuals as the battle engine. In previous games you'd control individual units, but now you have to think about entire armies.

 

 

 

The idea is that you'll make fewer, but more important, decisions. You won't be spending all your time nudging a single unit of archers around, or adjusting endless tax rates. Battle objectives will also be more varied and interesting, and city invasions are expanded with multiple control points.

 

Naval battles are also grander in scale, and offer richer tactics. A unit is no longer a single ship, but a number of ships. Because you're able to disembark on land now, you could potentially stage an assault on a city from multiple beach-heads. Some cities, like Carthage, even have entry points for ships to actually move inside them, which will allow you to use ship-mounted catapults on defending infantry behind their walls.

 

Russell is keen to stress, however, that this increase in scale doesn't mean you'll be swamped with hundreds of units to control; it's the bigger maps, richer tactics, and more interesting objectives that will make battles feel more epic.

 

 

 

The demo we saw was brief, but tantalising. The graphics, even at this early stage, are unbelievable. But it's more than just flashy visuals for the sake of it: Rome 2 is as in-depth a strategy game as its predecessors, if not more so thanks to the merging of land and sea battles, and the bigger maps.

 

The Total War team has almost doubled in size since Shogun 2, and the game's budget has increased by 40%, so this'll be epic in every sense: from those enormous battles, to the production values. Sega have yet to release any gameplay footage, or even a trailer, but when you see the demo in action that we saw running in real-time, you'll really understand just how insanely good the game looks.

 

Whether you're commanding the battle from high in the air, or viewing the action through the eyes of a lone soldier, everything will look super polished and hyper detailed. You've got until the end of next year to get a monster new graphics card and enjoy that new engine to the fullest.

 

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/356185/previews/rome-2-first-look-at-the-biggest-total-war-ever/?page=2#top_banner