Total War: Warhammer's Greenskin Campaign Detailed
Welcome to the Old World
The Total War: Warhammer [official site] campaign map is lovely. Creative Assembly have released a 16 minute long "Greenskins Campaign Walkthrough" that shows the strategic side of the game in detail for the first time. Auto-resolving battles as he goes, the narrator takes us on a quick tour of the portions of the Warhammer Fantasy world that will be included in the initial release (the game is the first part in a trilogy that will combine to make one enormous map). I'm particularly taken by the mighty bridges that dwarven engineers have built to span mountain ranges, as well as the concept of 'fightiness'.
As well as a first look at the map, the video gives an overview of the interface. Clean and legible tech and building trees are shown, and there are some brief insights into the different tech models for each of the four playable races. There's also a quick look at the RPG style upgrade tree for Lords, who can level up across three separate skillsets. Campaign skills, battle skills and character skills. The latter improve the Lord's personal combat abilities, while battle skills affect the troops fighting under their command.
Along with those skill trees, Lords have their own quests, which allow them to unlock unique gear and mounts, and lead to handcrafted battles, like the historical scenarios in previous Total War games. These are incorporated into the main campaign, however.
During the video, we also learn that greenskins have a "fightiness" rating. If you don't give them any enemies to fight, their fightiness will rise and they'll start killing one another. Fightiness is probably the orcish equivalent of diplomacy.
Over at Eurogamer, there are a couple of quotes from Creative Assembly regarding the negative response to the Chaos faction DLC/preorder reveal. There's a more in-depth explanation CA creative director Mike Simpson on the Total War dev blog.
We thought we'd done well. Maybe there is a better solution - we're listening to all suggestions for the future. Maybe pre-orders are becoming so toxic they will stop working altogether. You'd hope not though, as it quite simply means those incentives will end up just being paid DLC after launch.
Pre-orders create buzz, improve sales and give the whole studio confidence in what we’re doing. They genuinely let us give you something for nothing, and you can't lose – if you aren’t happy with the final game, you should explore your refund rights. Even if you don’t pre-order, you get Chaos as an Ai opponent.
Read the full post here.