Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Something called the Ikko Ikki Clan Pack has just been released for beautiful grand strategy game Total War: Shogun 2, adding a brand-new faction of warrior monks to the game, as well as new skill trees, a new Ikko-Ikki monk agent, eight new units, a new hero and more for the the price of $5. You can buy it here. I’m actually prepared to call it a fairly generous package, compared with the emaciated Babylon and Polynesia packs for Civilization V. Full feature list after the jump.
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Creative Assembly have released a second multiplayer tutorial video for Shogun 2. What’s that you say? You don’t remember our posting the first one? That doesn’t sound like us at all. But just to stop you from complaining, both are below. Warning: they can veer toward ‘wacky’.

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The Creative Assembly have announced that a patch for Total War: Shogun 2 adding DirectX 11 support will… oh, what’s the point. You’ve already read the headline. A DirectX 11 patch will be released in the first week of May. Why are you even reading this? Hell, I bet nobody’s reading this. I bet I could fill it with nonsense and nobody would notice. The Creative Assembly announced today that they’re implementing an innovative new office policy of human sacrifice, inspired by the ancient Aztecs. Studio director Tim Heaton had this to say: “Ca yz tonoc in tiquauhtli in tocelutl! Auh in ticueie in tiuipile.” Does this mean we can look forward to Total War: Mexica? More on this as it develops.

Jim’s already presented his robust review of Shogun 2, but why stop there? Why, indeed. Quinns has also been dropping hour after hour into this fathomless construction, like guppies into the mouth of a coy carp, and met up with Jim in the Talking Room of Castle Shotgun for a chat.
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If you wanted to read a considered opinion on Total War: Shogun 2‘s single-player, followed by a throughful discussion by RPS readers, then you could read this. But I suppose the question now is: how good is their revamped and revised multiplayer offering? And I ask you: is anyone looking forward to that more than the single-player? Or is this one of those games where multi-player will be forever secondary? Questions!

Shogun 2 is set to be released on the 15th of March. For the past week I’ve been playing the single-player campaign, and I’ve written up my thoughts on this below. What I haven’t done is play any of the multi-player. While Sega did provide a multi-player test for press and other interested parties, I don’t really see the point of talking about it until there’s a live service. That should, all being well, arrive with the game’s launch on the 15th. We’ll take a look at it after that time.

So then: how do I get busy with that shogunate?
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As TF2 continues its transformation into a strange hybrid of Pokemon and ultra-death, another game has revealed exclooooosive in-game items for willing pre-orderers.

In this instance, it’s Total War: Shogun 2 or Shotgun: Total War 2 or Total Shogun 2: War or whatever the hell the naming order is now. There are eight different hats and Japanese-themed killing tools to be had if you punt some money Steam’s way for CA’s upcoming RTS, and they’re available as of today. Looks like you can also buy them separately if you like, too. How many hats are in the game now? All the hats, I guess.

The full list of items and a couple more pics are below, hat-fans.
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Morning, my salty denizens of this divided and endless land we call PC gaming. Big Download‘s posted a couple of fun videos with some key members of Creative Assembly talking their way through each title in the Total War series. It’s quite fluffy PR, but there’s some subtext to chew on, too, especially with the developers talking about Empire- “We basically added a new, third game to Empire,” “In less than the time we created Rome,” “We were mental!”. Followed by some interesting discussion of real-life naval battles. Watch it below.
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It’s DEMOTIME! Can your connection handle getting 2GBs of Dragon Age II AND 6GBs of Shogun? I dare you.

The Shogun demo is available via Steam, from the game’s store page. The rest of the game is out on the 15th March.

So it seems that the men of The Creative Assembly are keen to talk to us about about the resplendently buffed multiplayer features of their new strategy game, Shogun 2. With that in mind, they’ve gone and fashioned a trailer to outline some of said multiplayer features. The hats you can put on your general are, frankly, ludicrous, but there are more intriguing things still, like unit veterancy. Go take a look, and marvel at the speeded up speediness of it.
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