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EXCLUSIVE: Creative Assembly provide detail on new Napoleon expansion
Speaking to Creative Assemblers Kieran Brigden and James Russell, Tim asked for the specifics: how will guerilla warfare work? What are the British trying to do? Will Sean Bean be reprising his role as Sharpe? And where might the next DLC take Napoleon? Read on to find out:
Tim Edwards: What's the Peninsula campaign about?
James Russell: It's a detailed Peninsula war campaign, so it's dealing with Wellington's invasion of Spain and Portugal to defeat Napoleon's armies in around 1811 and is to do with capturing and liberating the Spanish regions from the French.
Tim Edwards: So in this you're not playing as Napoleon, you're playing as Wellington?
James Russell: You can play as the French, Spanish or the British, but Napoleon himself doesn't really go to the Peninsula, so it's General Massena and people like that.
Tim Edwards: Are Portugal included in the game
James Russell: Portugal are in the game. Militarily, they're very much tied up with the British army. They were trained and fielded by British generals. So, the way it works is: they are a faction in their own right, you can't play as Portugal but if you play as the British you have a whole range of Portuguese troops
Tim Edwards: What are the kind of challenges you're facing if you're playing as the British? What are the tactical and military decisions you'll be making at the start of the campaign?
James Russell: One of the things we wanted to do, one of the things we try and do with any of the major bits of DLC is to make the game feel and play differently from the main product and one of the things that's different and special about the Peninsula War is that, in many ways, it was the first Guerilla war, right? So we've created a lot of features around that to portray the more Guerilla fighting there was at the time, compared to some of the major wars of the Napoleonic age in the rest of Europe. So we've got new features like Guerilla "Guerillera" units and Guerilla agents. The British experience feels different because as well as fielding Guerilla agents they're supplied from Britain so they have to do their major recruiting in ports, whereas when the British drive into the interior they can only recruit Spanish partisan type units, not their regular major British troops, they have to come from the ports so it feels quite different.
Also, your finances, if you're playing as Britain. Most of the money doesn't come from taxation of local Spanish regions in the interior, it mainly comes from supply, basically supplies from Britain so you have to keep your trade routes, your supply lines open across the sea. As reflects the starting position, the starting date in 1811, Britain start off holed up in southern Portugal and Gibraltar, trying to expel the French out of Portugal and begin the conquest of mainland Spain. The ultimate goal for the British is to drive the French back into France. Another thing that's different, another focus of the British is that they can liberate Spanish regions, rather than forming individual protectorate regions, when you conquer Spanish regions you can liberate it, which gives it back to Spain and what effectively happens then is that you get rewarded with a couple of units of Guerillas and a Guerilla leader, effectively partisans joining your cause.
Another thing we've done with this is we've co-opted the religion system so instead we have an alignment system to reflect that in this kind of Guerilla warfare you battle for the hearts and minds of the populace, so each region has a particular alignment in terms of pro-French or anti-French feeling and that's a really important part of the game in terms of making sure you can hold down the regions. It's a particular problem if you're playing as the French, then you really have an issue with your unpopularity among the people so we have got new agent types like the Provocateurs who can incite rebellion in enemy regions, they can try and convert the region to your own cause whether that be pro-French or anti-French, so that kind of fits into the historical situation that there was, and the whole conflict in the hearts and minds of the people in Spain. People there were fearfully patriotic and anti-French but there was also an element of the population that was sympathetic to some of the ideals of the French revolution. So, in other words, less aligned with the church and anti-French patriotism.
Tim Edwards: So that's quite a detailed change on the strategic map. If you're using a lot of Guerilla units in the battles, do they have a specific way they should be used? If you're facing down traditional armies in the battle maps then how do you use the Guerilla tactics, how does that play out?
James Russell: If you're got Guerilla units, you can deploy them outside of your deployment zone and a lot closer to the French, the idea being that you can start behind them, or off to the side and basically surprise them which is a model of the kind of things the Guerillas got up to and it's quite an effective and fun little gameplay element we've added.
James Russell: It makes a big difference to the battles when you have a large number of Guerilla units because you can deploy them anywhere on the battlefield outside of your enemy deployment area. The other way we've reflected this is with the Guerilla agents, the "Guerillero" agents on the campaign map. They can effectively perform an action on an enemy army, which is a harass action. So that stops the army in its tracks and actually damages some of the units, so that represents an ambush by a small partisan band where they ambush the army, take pot shots, try and kill as many people and melt away in the hills.
Tim Edwards: Have you got a hit list for further Napoleon campaigns?
Kieran Bridgen: The answer is 'potentially' but obviously we can't comment on that right now, but potentially yeah. As you said, there's a very rich Napoleonic history to draw from if we want to include any other mini campaigns.
Tim Edwards: He seems like quite an interesting chap to base a game around.
James Russell: I think we quite enjoyed doing the smaller scale campaigns within Napoleon like Italy and Egypt, and Spain was a very natural addition, I think and one that offers, as Kieran says, an opportunity for a different feel.
Tim Edwards: When you're designing this stuff, how do you prototype it? How do you know the mechanics are going to work before you go ahead and build the game?
James Russell: Well, that's an interesting question. What we try to do with the DLC is, we made a separate map and that had been in progress for quite some time. We choose the campaign, we choose what characters there are, what we need to portray and we look at the features, the key features that we need to add that makes that campaign special. For instance, I talked about the Guerilla related feel. And then what we try and do is, rather than create a whole parallel set of systems, we try to use the existing systems that we refine and mould, we use them in a different way. So, for instance, we take the recruitment system that we've got and we change it so that it creates a different feel, so transferring the recruitment permissions to the ports is an example of that. Co-opting the religion system to reflect the political alignment system. We know we've got existing, reliable systems, but we want to use them in a different way, effectively. Because, obviously, every new system has lots of impact.
Tim Edwards: Your content production seems o be a lot more fluid since the advent of Steam. You're not building great big expansions any more.
Kieran Bridgen: That's a very good point. Some of that is due to the changing nature of the market and the nature, as well, of the way games are played. You tend to find now that you offer a kind of universe, or an experience, and that's your initial offering. That's your big, boxed title, as you were, and then you go on to expand that, though you don't do it quite the same traditional method, which is to box those expansions, although obviously in some cases you do. Yeah, it's more a case of which way the market has developed, and the way in which those delivery systems have developed. With Steam being a multiplayer platform, it makes sense to offer DLC, especially those that are available in multiplayer, maps and things like that, through that exact same service. It's different to having an individual distribution, digitally, and then a multiplayer platform. It's the same thing. So, in that sense it's because of the way the market has changed.
Napoleon as a product, as well, is a unique one, in that we regard it as a standalone, character driven version of Total War. It's not in the sense of the Total War tent pole releases, it doesn't fit cleanly in that category, so when you come to treating its DLC it's a bit of a special case in its own right.
Tim Edwards: You made a lot of play for some big multiplayer features on Napoleon. There was the co-op campaign and the drop-in battles. The last time I played Napoleon I ended up hanging around for around 2 hours. Are there any kind of improvements for multiplayer on the way?>
Kieran Bridgen: Multiplayer code comes with an update with the Peninsula campaign as well and it's important to note, obviously, that whether or not you buy the Peninsula campaign you'll get given this update regardless. The update will come as part of it, but then of course you get the extra content if you buy the campaign.
The updates included on the multiplayer side allow us to do stuff like opening up the regional servers, which means you get a much wider variety of games to choose from so when you're sitting in a queue waiting for a game in exactly the scenario you described you'll have a larger pool of games to drop into, or have drop into yours. We've made a number of changes on the multiplayer side to bring down the wait times, increase the stability and offer a greater variety of opponents to people who are waiting to play. There's no massive headline feature there other than, like I said, opening up the regional differences between the servers.
To be specific, what I'm saying there is, let's say you've got a Steam server in Northern Europe that you're connected to, and there's a whole load of guys in Eastern Europe who are connected to their Steam Server but we don't open the game up across both. We've now done that so that pool is much, much bigger and your wait times are therefore much lower, and in tandem we've also introduced a bit more multiplayer stability so that even if you are connecting across several region servers , you should still find that your latencies are good, provided their connection is good, and your performance is stable. So yeah, there have been a number of fixes gone into that.
Tim Edwards: Are you able to track how people are doing with Napoleon, through their achievements and things like that? Does Steam expose some of that stuff for you?
Kieran Bridgen: Yes it does, I can answer from one perspective of that. Yes it does, it allows us to see the way the game's being played and some of the things people are doing, and then it's obviously for the design guys to give you an idea of how that informs our next product or our next DLC or something like that.
James Russell: Yeah, we do look closely at that. There's a lot of achievements and we look at the different rates and the cross-rates between the different sets of achievements that people have gained. You know, I think we can do a lot more with that than we are doing, we're hoping to improve that. It's really key for us to understand how people are playing the game and the different ways in which people are playing the game and the areas in which they're spending most of their time and effort.
The Peninsular Campaign will be released in June, 2010 and is available for pre-purchase on steam for £5.99.
"Teste alte, perdio! ...Quelle sono pallottole, non merda." (Lepic, colonello dei granatieri a cavallo della Guardia - Eylau 1807)
"Un ussaro che a trent'anni non è ancora morto è un vigliacco!" (Lasalle, generale della cavalleria leggera dell'esercito francese)