Interview with Jason Fitzgerald of Creative Assembly 

The Creative Assembly is a company of computer games developers working on a variety of products for Electronic Arts including Australian Rules Football, Cricket World Cup, World Cup Rugby Union and the Japanese strategy wargame, Shogun: Total War. The Creative Assembly is based in Southwater, near Horsham, south of London.

Interviewer: Anthony Sage
Jason Fitzgerald Studio Marketing Manager

1. Shogun’s strategic style is being compared to some of Koei’s great strategy classics. How do you feel about this?

I think that there's much to be said for Koei's games, they were very intriguing and engrossing but unfortunately never really succeeded in growing their appeal outside of a hardcore wargaming group. With SHOGUN TOTAL WAR we hope to make a game that is deep and involving enough to keep those hardcore gamers happy but also easy to play and intuitive enough to reach out to those who have not played wargames before, or maybe played just a basic top-down RTS like Starcraft. Our game will be as easy to play as Starcraft or C&C but it's got heaps more depth and you'll need to think like you're on the battlefield to win - not just think like you're playing a game. Real tactics work and generals will be rewarded for thinking strategically and reading the masters - like Sun Tzu and Musashi from Japan or even Julius Caesar's accounts of his Gaul campaign. The basic elements of war are universal, particularly when dealing with the three basic army units that were used until the gun came to dominate the battlefield. The basis of SHOGUN TOTAL WAR is very similar - DON'T send spearmen towards arrowfire - they'll be cut down before they arrive. DON'T send cavalry towards spearmen - they'll be impaled when they arrive (horses and men will be slaughtered). DON'T set-up archers against cavalry - the cavalry will cut them up when they arrive in close range. So it's like a game of paper, scissors, stone. Simple right? Wrong. You've got to imagine playing this game against an enemy who is trying to outmatch you and then add in the complications caused by weather, terrain, honour, experience, morale, manoeuvres, fatigue and more.

2. What type of gameplay can we expect from the battlefield strategic portion of the game? Will it be turn-based or RTS?

It's completely real-time, and you need to be relatively alert to handle the demands of commanding an army of four or five thousand men. I mean, you don't want to be just piling troops in blindly - the tank rush tactics that other games rewarded will fail miserably in SHOGUN TOTAL WAR. It's much more demanding than that, you've got to use hills and valleys to your advantage, take note of bridge positions and defensible terrain, use roads to move troops more quickly and make other true-to-life decisions. The experience of your troops and the honour of the player as a general are also important factors. SHOGUN TOTAL WAR is a simulation of the Samurai warfare era in Japan, when great generals like Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Toyatami Hideyoshi studied Sun Tzu and considered warfare as an art to be mastered. Our game will reflect this by allowing the player to battle his enemies using real tactics but also expressing his or her own personality.

3. Beyond the battlefield portion of the game, what other strategic elements will there be?

Again, we have aimed to be true to life. For a general commanding an army, whether that be Tokugawa or Alexander The Great, decisions could be split in two - there are quick calculations that need to be made on the battlefield (which I call Tactics) and long terms plans that are put in place long before the battle but which effect the outcome (which I call Strategy). In our game we have split these two processes but they remain interdependent as in real life. For example, long before you arrive on the battlefield you need to decide whether to invest heavily in training horse for cavalry or to stick with footsoldiers (which are cheaper) - that's a strategy decision. Once you turn up on the battlefield you may regret the strategic decision you made or you may be glad - but either way you have to devise a tactic to make the best of the army that you have got on the day.

So while the battle takes place on one of the fifty historic battlegrounds (one in each region of Japan) in four different seasons - the general is continuously planning a long term campaign. Do I invest in more expensive but better troop types, should I become a Christian in order to get those muskets that the Portuguese traders are offering me, should I invade the mountainous region to the north or the flat plains to the South, should I accept the peace treaty being offered by the Tokugawa clan, should I assassinate my neighbouring clan leader, should I send a spy ahead of my army, how do I know if I have a spy in my camp? All these are vital questions for the Daimyo (regional clan leader) to answer and they and he must make his decisions while studying a stratgic map of Japan before executing his decisions. This part of the game is turn based, once the player clicks on the "New Season" button the decisions are put into effect and battles may be fought, enemies assassinated or peace treaties offered etcetera. We thought a combination of turn based strategy and real time tactics would best emulate the experience of being a general who deals with both the logistics and the nitty-gritty of warfare. It's worth remembering that throughout history not all generals have been good at both aspects and there will be options in the game to deal with one part only.

In terms of exactly what will be in there - I don't want to give away too much at this stage. But suffice to say, there will be plenty to do. You can assassinate various targets to cripple an enemy army or his whole society, you can choose to become Christian or stay Buddhist (this is historically accurate - the Portuguese landed off the coast in 1543 and offered guns to all who would accept their relegion instead of the tradition Shinto Buddhism of Japan), you can kill yourself if your honour is too low, you can nominate a successor (who would be your "extra life" in the game), you can offer peace treaties and have to respond to treaties offered to you, you can break treaties even in the middle of a battle (some of the most important battles were decided when one clan changed sides about halfway through - eg. The Battle Of Sekigahara), you can use Geisha to charm your rivals, spies to inform your decisions, experienced soldiers to lead battle or stay at base and train raw recruits and much much more. 

4. Will there be a strict plot driven story-line or will it be open ended?

The game is open ended, basically anybody can win. Although at the start of the game some Daimyo will have more advantages than others (this is the "difficulty setting"). It will be interesting to see how Japanese gamers react to the idea of a game than offers them the chance to chance the course of history of their own nation. For one thing, a Christian daimyo could win thus changing the country quite a bit. Each of the events that happen in the game are portrayed to the player using FMV so for example when you send a ninja to your neighbour you can watch him sneaking into the castle, taking out the gaurds and then slicing off your enemies head. Or getting caught. That will be a tense moment. Especially because your ninja will have cost you a great deal to develop and train. When the Portuguese arrive - and later the Dutch - you will see one of your representatives coming to visit your throne room to make his petition. Through these FMV you get the true historic timeline, we have been working with the leading authrority on Samurai in Europe and the only guy to have books about the Sengoku Jidai (Age of the Country at War) translated back into Japanese. His name is Dr. Stephen Turnbull and he is our historic consultant - you can visit his website at http://freespace.virgin.net/stephen.turnbull/publications.htm. So we have combined a historic timeline and, cinematic storytelling with an open ended game design in a pretty cool way.

5. What excites you the most about Shogun?

The idea of inflicting my personal style of warfare on my friends in a good multiplayer game - and kicking their butts. I've been reading Sun Tzu's Art Of War and I think I've got it down. I like the idea of having variable and flexible tactics - as Sun Pin said (grandson of Sun Tzu) "Trees that are strong will break, the strong and great dwell below, the pliant and weak dwe ll above - for this reason armies that are strong will not be victorious". I've been testing the gameplay lately and while the AI is not finished it is obvious that you have to learn to play against it in different ways depending on whether you are attacking or defending, depending on the terrain, the morale of your troops and other considerations. This is a good sign, and part of what most excites me is the epic huge battles that are going to take place towards the end of the single player game - when you've got enough rice to feed 5000 men and you're suddenly commanding a massive army. Now that will be fun. But at the moment, the AI keeps beating the hell out of me - which I'm told is a good sign (because it's easier to dumb the AI down if we need to, than to beef it up).

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