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

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6. What can people expect from the single player experience?

As I hinted already, you can expect an important decision right at the start - which Daimyo are you going to be. There are eight clans to choose from and all of them have different land under control, different levels of wealth and sons or heirs (extra lives). So you may want to do a little reading before you pick - the manual will give you a whole pile of interesting background information, historic facts and clan information, we expect it to be a good and vital read. After you've made that decision you will take control of your clan on the strategic map, you'll probably want to have a good look around first and then build some basic defensive structures. Then maybe train up some units before you plan which neighboring territory to attack. You can expect some peace treaties to come your way, and you'll have to accept or decline. Basically you will start with some relatively simple operations and begin developing your technologies so that later you have some highly specialist troops available (eg. Ninja). The idea is that you learn the game as you go, so the first few battles will probably involve less than 250 men but be a good place to start figuring out how the terrain effects arrowfire or horse fatigue. The different AI controlled Daimyo will lead their clans in different ways some may be untrustworthy and dishonorable by breaking treaties often, some may love to use spies and assassins some may just invade everywhere all at once, some may be very defensive. All these aspects of their character you can see coming out as the game progresses and you'll have to learn to deal with them and maybe even work with them. This will continue until the unsuccessful Daimyo are swallowed by the victorious and eventually only two colours remain on the map of Japan. And then you have one more enemy to vanquish because there is no opportunity for some kind of liberal coalition government. The Samurai were not like that.

7. What features will we see in the multiplayer part of Shogun?

You can expect to be able to take on your friends and beat them up, outwit them and lead you army to greatness. You will definitely have the opportunity to be one of six leaders of different armies that turn up one battlefield - without or without treaties between them. There will also be some kind of league or measurement of your success and prowess relative to other players around the world. We are planning some interesting and innovative stuff, but I don't want to say more until our current experiments in certain technologies and ways of passing information between computers across the Internet has concluded.

8. When can we expect a demo to be released? The full version?

We're aiming to release a demo this Fall. Probably October, but it isn't simply a marketing decision that we can make easily - we're dependent on some other decisions to be made by the lead programmer and the director of development. Some elements of what we're going to do are clear - but again, there are some experiments that need to be completed and some elements of the code that need to come together. There are no major issues standing in our way so certainly there will be a demo out for some time before the final game is released, and we will encourage gamers to feedback their thoughts to us after they've played the demo. If they find it too difficult, too easy, too slow, too fast or whatever - we'll want time to tweak it.

9. What is being done to insure that the AI is a challenge?

The AI is already a challenge. As I said before, it's kicking my butt everyday! The most important thing is that the AI for our game is very well read. We fed over 200 rules of combat from Sun Tzu's Art Of War straight into the game. That means the AI is working on rules that are basically 2000 years old! Now that's some pretty good testing time. Sun Tzu could have been a programmer because he thought in a highly analytical way for example he said "If you outnumber your enemy 10 to 1 surround them, 5 to 1 divide them, 2 to 1 engage them". That's the kind of advice that is numerate enough for a computer to understand and put into practice. So your enemy AI will be operating with the rules of Sun Tzu.

We also developed individual AI which is incredibly important if you want to have upto 5000 men on the battlefield behaving sensibly. A general cannot give individual orders to every individual guy (the player gives orders to the unit leader) so you have to have individuals behaving realistically. With the individual AI we gave them they know where they are on the battlefield, where the enemy is (if they are within visual contact range), whether they face an uphill march or a downhill sprint (and this effects morale also) and they can even see how many of their own colour surround them or how many of the enemy are all around. If they're surrounded by the enemy - don' t be surprised if the individual Samurai makes an "executive decision" and decides to just run away! And also, the individuals get more experience and get better after each battle they survive so you really want to have the experienced guys survive the battles. They also learn your tactics so that the same trick won't work every time.

10. Are you impressed with the number of fan created web sites that have sprung up months before the game is due to be released? In wake of the anticipation of this title, what is being done to insure that the game is released bug free?

I've been very interested in the fansites and really impressed at their quality as well as the quantity of them that are springing up around the world. Some of the people running the sites have been very vocal in their support and I do daily deal with email from these guys and I field their questions and pass on their concerns to the development team. We really really want to make a game that pleases our fans. Which brings me onto bugs, many great PC games have been ruined by bugs over the last year, some even being recalled from store shelves. Only in the last few months has this got the attention it deserves and it has always been a major personal pet peeve. I think the most important thing we're doing to help SHOGUN TOTAL WAR be bug free is that we're testing it NOW - about six months before it is on sale we're already testing it. We're trying to run it on as many different machines as possible around the office and get the obvious and major bugs all sorted. Then it will go forward to ELECTRONIC ARTS who are one of the best in the world at testing and have great experience in this area. I think trying to release a game bug free is a major challenge because there are so many different configurations of PC out there that just getting it setup to work on all of them is huge problem, I mean, testing a game on all possible PCs has become completely impossible, but with SHOGUN TOTAL WAR in every respect we're aiming very very high.