TOTAL SUCCESS Taking a much beloved franchise like Warhammer is always going to be tricky, even for an established RTS master. Seth Barton heads to Horsham to chat with Creative Assembly about the ongoing success of Total War: Warhammer
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t’s hard to think of a better pairing than Games Workshop and Creative Assembly. The former has dominated the world of miniature wargaming for decades, while the latter has created one of the best-loved series of strategic warfare games for 18 years now. We catch up with Al Bickham, development communications manager for the Total War team, who tells us about how miniatures don’t just become 3D models, how the codebase got a little off-kilter between the first and second game, and how the company’s PCs have really taken to playing themselves at the game. You have lots of artists and so does Workshop – is the style guide the same or are you simply reproducing their work? To some extent yes, because our guide for the models are the miniatures themselves. When we first embarked on Warhammer, Games Workshop sent us two of everything in the current Warhammer catalogue! We had the equivalent of a Games Workshop store in the office. An artist, a 3D modeller, can jump into Max and completely replicate a model. And it looks absolutely stunning and beautiful but when you try and make it move… all the miniature does is stand like that with his spear, but imagine him turning his head... everything clips through everything, so we have jiggle things around and redesign things. You’re saying some things are less spiky – that’s heresy! Yes, but some things are more spiky. A lot of those miniatures look so dynamic in model form because they’re in a dramatic pose, launching forward to attack or defending themselves. To bring that to life, you have to figure out how that figure is going to move.
Take the Wyvern, which is essentially a dragon with wings for arms. So how does it locomote across the ground? The best match we could find in nature was a bat’s elbow-like walking. So they look really bat-like in the game when they move because we had to find some sort of analogue. But not all creatures have an analogue? True, take the Hell Pit Abomination, a Skaven creation. Its just made of meat and wheels and spikes, and pumping machinery. Our animators said that people turn that bit and that goes up and down, and it’s great, it looks authentic. We had so much feedback from Games Workshop throughout the process, we sent them assets, animated models to review, and we get these replies that ‘people are losing their shit here’ because they’ve seen this stuff come to life in this way. And that’s when the studio knows we’re doing the right thing. You had some teething issues when you launched Mortal Empires... Yes, Mortal Empires is essentially Warhammer One (WH1) and Warhammer Two (WH2) smashed together and we had some problems merging the dev branches. To explain: WH1 launches and WH2 starts pre-production, so you branch the code and create a new development branch for WH2. Meanwhile, WH1 is here getting new DLC and it gets new branches for the new DLC, and that then merges into the main WH1 branch. It goes on sale, gets piped to Steam, and carries on developing. Gets another branch for another DLC, and so on. Meanwhile, WH2 is moving off on its own little development tangent over here, and getting all its new stuff added to it.
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