쇼군2 토탈워 (IGN/PCGAMER)Shogun II: Total War Campaign Preview

[RoastBullet]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1119498p1.html

Shogun II: Total War Campaign Preview

Deception, marriage, and seppuku – these are just a few of your tools as an aspiring ruler of Japan.

 

The Total War franchise is known for its huge, beautiful battlefields, and our recent looks at Shogun II: Total War have shown that this game doesn't buck this trend. What we hadn't seen until now, though, was the other half of the experience – the just-as-important campaign mode. So much of being a leader in feudal Japan revolved around your family's honor, how you maintained relationships with your fellow noblemen, and, inevitably, what you did to make sure you had a leg up on your opponents when conflict was unavoidable. This has not escaped the team at Creative Assembly, as Shogun II has an intricate political and familial system that looks to be as fun, if not more so, than the act of playing out the battles themselves. 

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For those who've somehow missed out on the Total War series over the years, allow me to give you a brief breakdown. The campaign of Shogun II takes place on a huge, detailed map of Japan, with players taking control of one of nine playable clans in an attempt to unite Japan under their rule. Players engage in both military and political warfare with clans, going into large, real-time battles when they come to blows. It's essentially two games in one: an intense RTS, combined with a slower, turn-based game of political manipulation.

Real-time warfare is extremely important to Shogun II (and you can read more about that in our previous coverage ), but more discreet conflict is carried out in the campaign map via Agents. Agents are essentially actors you can send out into rival clans to hurt them in very specific ways. Outside of Generals, who I'll delve into more detail about later, players can use Geishas, Ninjas, Metsuke, and Monks. Ninjas and Geishas are assassins, and players can use them to take out enemy generals.

The really cool part of attempting assassination in Shogun II is that it triggers a cut-scene that adapts itself based on the skill of the agent involved. For instance a crappy ninja might trip over a sleeping soldier, while a more skilled ninja might avoid this but might be too noisy and wake the general up. These sequences were also in the original game, but Shogun II is slated to have significantly more ways for it to work out, keeping players guessing until the scene's conclusion.

http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/76283/shogun-ii-total-war/images/shogun-ii-total-war-20100909044701569.html?page=mediaFull

If assassination is a little too bold for your clan, you can try and lure away enemy generals on the campaign map via Metsuke. These secret police will infiltrate an enemy army and attempt to lure away the general, with success yielding both the general and some of the army (depending on his men's loyalty to him). To combat Metsuke, Clans can produce Monks, who meet Metsuke and chastise them for being too worldly in hopes of convincing them to give up their sinful ways. Agents give players powerful tools to battle against one another off the battlefield, making the turn-based parts of the game much more intense than they might otherwise be.

While Agents are important, Generals are the backbone of a clan. Generals aren't simply a unit you produce who have generic traits, but a character that you can level up and build into a unique battlefield commander. Generals have talent trees with numerous branches that will give them better abilities in battle. Most importantly, choosing one path on a talent tree permanently locks out the other option, making specialization extremely important. Their loyalty to your clan affects the loyalty of the units they command, and a rogue General can become a thorn in your side if he decides he's tired of being under your control.

Once a General goes rogue he's basically lost to you, but to keep his forces your command there are a couple of preventative measures that can be taken. Generals can be married into your clan, giving them a familial bond that grants higher loyalty (marriage is also useful for inter-clan relations). If you have no relatives that are ripe for the picking, you can also ask your General to commit ritual suicide, otherwise known as seppuku. Seppuku is a double edge sword, however, because it could prevent a General from going rogue (and give you a bonus to your honor), but it might also backfire and make them go rogue on the spot.

Unexplored areas appear covered by fog.

Politics are super important, but battles are inevitable. To better represent how war was conducted in Japan, Creative Assembly has implemented a new feature: naval warfare. No, you won't be using massive sail boats (and you certainly won't be firing cannons at one another), but you will be rowing large boats full of troops at one another in order to defend or take a beach head. Naval battles are fought either via two ships meeting and troops fighting it out, or by archers shooting at incoming ships with things like flame arrows. This gives players a more realistic set of options when it comes to invasion, as naval battles were fairly common since Japan is, after all, an island.

The combat portions of the game are every bit as pretty as you'd expect from a company who has years of experience making intricate, large scale warfare on the PC, but the campaign development is also coming along well. Hopefully Shogun II's turn-based campaign gets the limelight it deserves, as casual onlookers often only see the high-resolution pictures of battlefields and assume it's simply a RTS. At least you, reader, now know better, and have some insight on just how awesome the political portions of the game are starting to look.

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PCGAMER : Shogun 2: Total War campaign impressions

 I recently met with Creative Assembly at their Horsham studio, where I tried my hardest not to dribble over the shoulder of one of their staffers as he walked me through the basics of Shogun 2: Total War.  You can read my overall impressions in the next issue of PC Gamer, but I thought it’d be nice to throw up some details of what I saw on the day.

The demo came in three sections: the campaign map, a battle sequence, and some naval combat. So let’s cap them in order.

First up, the campaign map is really big. While it’s only set over a single country, the scale is different to previous Total War games – in a sense, it’s zoomed in, so the actual area of the map is pretty massive, and seemed comparable to, say, Napoleon.

Much of that map was undiscovered country. The graphical representation of this is lovely, with broad charcoal strokes on linen describing mountains and woods in fancy fashion, to give you a vague idea of the terrain. The landscape you’ve already discovered is, in complete contrast, 3D and very much alive. Waterfalls steam over cliffs, cherry blossom futters across the landscape from copses of trees, and Mount Fuji stands proud and immutable.

The CA staffer demonstrated a couple of the Hero units on the campaign map, the first being a glamorous Geisha girl. He ordered her to shmooze her way into an enemy army’s encampment where she failed to assassinate the army’s general. Fatal error. The second attempt, using a ninja hero character, was successful. Both attempts came with neat little animated movies to illustrate the execution of the orders.

These cheeky tactics pay off big-style when battle commences in earnest, as all of that general’s levelled-up bonus-conferring abilities are lost to the army as his 2IC takes the reins. We also got a glimpse of the ninja’s skill-tree, which enable him to become a specialist in certain activities. This is something that Heroes and Generals both get.

We then jumped into a full battle, which was tremendously atmospheric. It was night-time and the rain was hammering down. If you haven’t seen it already, get on CA’s walkthrough vid – it was the same battle. What’s lost in the compressed video is the tremendous visual fidelity and sense of location and atmosphere. The rain changes direction constantly with the wind, sets up pools of mist in the low ground, and literally pours off buildings. There’s some lovely shader-work in there which creates wet-state effects for the troops, so their armour properly glistens when the rain comes down. For the ebb-and-flow of the battle, I’ll let the video do the talking.

The final sequence we saw involved a little naval action. Warships of the Edo period didn’t sail, so there’s not a shred of canvas in sight. Instead, they were oar-powered coast-hugging behemoths, described as ‘floating castles’ packed with archers and melee troops. They’d rain arrows on opposing craft before grappling in for massive boarding actions. In many ways, they were like parcelled-up extensions of land combat, and in Shogun 2, they’re ultimately more agile than the sail-powered ships of the west, as they don’t rely on the whims of the wind.

A quick scan inland showed us a castle, Edo-period style. Here’s a really big change from previous Total War games, as Japanese castles are largely alien compared to the western designs we’re familiar with. Of tiered design and literally hewn out of mountain-tops, with all the implied might of geology behind them, there’s absolutely no point in luzzing rocks at them from trebuchets (although fire-pots will shake up the inhabitants some). These sieges aren’t about knocking down walls, they’re about clever infiltration tactics. And in certain situations, I was told, the defenders might ‘invite’ enemy forces into these castles, perhaps by presenting a weak facing, before springing the trap. I have no idea how this is going to pan out in the final count, but it sounds thrilling – like Thermopylae up a mountainside? I can’t wait to find out.

[CSman]

전국시대니 당연 축성개념이 등장해야죠 .. 본성 말구 주변의 작은 지성개념이면 좋겠습니다..!!

[???!!!!!]

헐..캠페인맵 완전 바꿧네

[eerrr]

아 롬 2를 달라~~~

[CSman]

흐흐 일본으로만 스케일을 축소했으니 아무래도 전략맵이 엄청 넓어진듯?ㅋㅋ

[(TheGodfather)]

조..조선과 명을 달라!

[CSman]

ㅋㅋㅋㅋ 외교적인 변화도 많았으면 좋겠네요! 전국시대상황에 맞게..

[야나기]

하늘이 생긴것 빼곤 캠페인맵이 나토,엠토랑 비슷하네요. 도시만 클릭해서 관리하는 미토2가 좋았었는데..;

[Royal Eyelander]

철포가 나올 것인가? 철포가 나온다면 오다가 했던 거처럼 사격이 가능하게 될까? 전 그게 더 궁금

[BigDaddy]

캠페인 맵이 넘 맘에드네요

[쿄쿄쿵]

스샷이 계속 추가되네요. 캠페인맵 상당히 괜찮은듯. 근데 사양압박이 캠페인맵에서도 느껴지겠네요 ㄷㄷ

[시저Ⅵ]

웬지 삼국지 가 생각나는군.