1 day ago
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Heir today, excommunicated tomorrow
While Creative Assembly will readily tell you that Total War: Medieval 3 is still years away from release, with the project currently only in pre-production, the team are being quite open with their plan for the long, long, long-awaited strategy game. A recent message from the game's creative director, for instance, goes into how you can mess around with inheritance planning for the whole kingdom of France.
As someone who is currently going through the process of creating a will and signing life insurance paperwork, I am delighted to turn this boring bureaucracy into a transferable skill to ensure my friends and family can keep sticking it to the British throughout my 12th century campaign.
More importantly, potentially even than that, is how these systems are an example of the replayability Creative Assembly is hoping to build into Total War: Medieval 3 and what they've learned from Crusader Kings 3.
The first way Creative Assembly is aiming to bring variation to our games is nothing new, it's something we've been seeing since the original Shogun: Total War (and, let's face it, every strategy game back to Dune II): different factions.
"Total War: Warhammer did a fantastic job providing very different mechanics and playstyles for different factions," Medieval 3's creative director Leif Walter said in a forum post. "The Empire plays fundamentally different to Tomb Kings. This is what our team calls horizontal replayability. It means that going through a game as the Kingdom of France from "bottom to top" (so through the entire game and timeline) would play very different from playing as the Kingdom of England."
As such, there will be different unit rosters from one faction to the next. "Factions still have access to some entirely unique units, whereas other units can be shared and "unlocked" across factions," Walter confirms.
And, naturally, with different factions having different starting positions, there will be variations between games as a simple result of geography and their starting alliances. Again, this is all familiar.
Where Medieval 3 starts to step into new ground is what Walter describes as vertical replayability. This is an area that sounds to be really taking a slice of pie from Crusader Kings's table. You'll now have the ability to change the systems and laws by which your faction abides. "We are building the game much more as 'flexible systems' ," Walter explains. "An example for this would be inheritance. Perhaps your realm starts with a classic monarchy and dynastic inheritance (i.e. the children of your faction leader can be the heir). As you go through your game, however, you may be able to change these inheritance laws and implement an elective monarchy not too dissimilar to the Holy Roman Empire's prince elector system."
In this way, you don't need to play as a new faction to explore the different systems on offer within Medieval 3, and you can make your campaign unique by trying to move a faction from one set of laws to another.
This is obviously bad news for feckless heirs who were hoping to inherit the throne by bent of simply being born before their more able younger sibling, but it's a boon for a populace that don't want to be ruled by a low-skilled oaf.
Walter doesn't go into more detail than I've shared but I'm excited by the possibilities this presents of radically shifting the way a faction functions and what systems you will need to play with to make it happen. After all, when Henry the VIII kicked off the Reformation, it had more impact than just activating the 'Marry new wife' tab in his UI. Hopefully, we'll see some of that internal politicking if you try to mix up the fundamentals of your faction.
Creative Assembly has always leant away from going full Paradox with their games, but a little more granularity with their grand strategy wouldn't go amiss.
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