Creative Assembly Makes a Complete Warrior for “Spartan”

by Louis Bedigian

“For the 160+ enemies, they're all thinking. They're looking around, they have certain motivations. They're all driven by AI.”

Bloodthirsty warriors seeking your flesh. They’d kill you first but they like it to be fresh. Surrounded by hundreds with nowhere to run, you fight forcefully until you’re backed into a wall by the hordes of enemies pouring in. They won’t stop, not for anything. It’s like the game has an unlimited supply of them.

Look! A Ballista! I’m saved!

Ten shots later it’s empty and the enemies still keep coming.

I use the environments to my advantage, burning bridges and blowing up structures whenever possible. An army would be nice – the enemy definitely has one. Mine was killed because I failed to protect them. Me, one man, one warrior, against hundreds of bloodthirsty warriors.

But there is hope. I am not just a warrior – I am the Total Warrior. And I will do whatever it takes to win this war. 

Spartan: Total Warrior brings a new kind of action gameplay to our consoles: strategy. You’ve gotta think before you hack and think harder before you slash. This is not a hack-n-slash game, however, not in the traditional sense. Sega held a conference call this week to celebrate Spartan’s anticipated release. And as Sega’s Martin Caplin (Localization Producer) will tell you, there is a lot more to the game than hacking and slashing.

Historically Fun

“[The Creative Assembly] really wanted to make a kick-ass game inspired by history, re-telling of history [laughs]. Of course The Creative Assembly’s other product, Total War, is super-ultra historically accurate, down to the name. With the console version they wanted to make it action-oriented, they wanted it to make you feel like a bad-ass. That was the emphasis to put myth and history in a blender and come up with something that’s cool and fun and inspired by but certainly not based on or reflecting reality at all.” 

I will destroy them! I will destroy them all!

Enemy-Driven AI

Martin Caplin: “For the 160+ enemies, they’re all thinking. They’re looking around, they have certain motivations. They’re all driven by AI. In other games where there are a lot of people on the screen it’s a trick. It’s not a simulation. Sure, [The Creative Assembly] had trouble, but they pulled it off very early in the development process. [Early on] we were seeing lots of characters.”

Working Creatively

Martin Caplin: “[The Creative Assembly is] pretty confident about what they’re doing. That’s nice in a developer, it’s also a challenge in a developer. Sometimes they insist on doing things you don’t want them to do, but that’s really the nature of game development. But we believe in them, so we have to give them the freedom to create their vision as best as possible. In doing that we still have to top that by making a game that’s playable. It was really easy to work with them. They had great ideas and accepted our ideas, and they killed themselves in the end to make sure it came out on time.”

Learning From Others

Martin Caplin: “We learned a lot, maybe not so much from Dynasty Warriors, but we did learn what we didn’t want to do from Dynasty Warriors, which was hack-n-slash, hacky-hacky-hack-hack. That gets boring after a while. We wanted to do something that was a little more innovative in gameplay that would challenge people in a way that was a little more old-school.

“We would have loved to have the bad-ass gameplay and tactical richness that we have with Spartan with the visual ridiculous, amazing-ness that is God of War. I love it, it’s great. We did as much as we could, and I think you’ll see in the next-gen version—“

He paused for a second, and then told us that he could not confirm or deny the existence of Total Warrior moving forward. I feel that, if he could have confirmed or denied the existence of a next-gen version, he would have told us that we can expect the most breathtaking visuals on the planet while fighting hundreds (maybe even thousands) of enemies as they rush into battle. 

Time for a meltdown.

Life After Spartan

Martin Caplin: "I'm working on some really exciting titles that I can't tell you about. I can say that I am working on Condemned. It's amazing to have the next-gen hardware at my desk. Your mind will be blown by the next-gen stuff from Sega.

“But that doesn’t mean we’re going to abandon the current gen. Sega really believes there are a lot of legs left in Xbox, GameCube and PlayStation 2. We’ve got great relationships with those companies, and we’re going to continue to release games, possibly even [additional] Total Warrior games, on those platforms.”

Total Questions. Complete Answers.

I know what a producer does, but what do you do as a localization producer?

Martin Caplin: A localization producer’s first responsibility is to make sure that the game comes out on time, in a territory different from the one it’s been developed in. For instance, in the case of Spartan, the team is The Creative Assembly, they are located in Britain. The producers at Sega Europe directly handle that. I work with them and the producer in Europe to give ‘em feedback about  what Americans like and how to make the game more appealing to this market. My job is to make sure that the language and all the standards of the first-party platforms: Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. And in general having an objective eye that’s even more removed from the process. A good developer really likes to have objective feedback from the publisher so they can improve the game.

I’m wondering if there were any fears of the difficulty. The game is quite difficult, were there any times that you thought you should tone certain things down?

MC: The difficulty with the gameplay was…what The Creative Assembly really wanted to do make the gameplay hard because this is a game first. It’s not like a pretty movie that you watch, it’s a game. At E3 we had the demos playing. I was playing it, and the Arena mode, they made it perfectly impossible. There multiple levels in the arena, but no one could get past two or three. I made it past five. The one time I did that, Tim Ansell, the President of The Creative Assembly, was standing there, looking at me playing, and he was like, “How did you do that?”

We made a game that we wanted to be challenging, and we actually toned down the difficulty. There are parts now looking back, getting feedback from reviewers, maybe it could’ve been easier. But if you finish this game, you will feel like you’ve accomplished something. Even the easy mode [has] some things that are pretty tough. 

I need a horse and a weak point location ASAP. Wait a sec, you mean this isn’t Shadow of the Colossus? I’m doomed!
 

Do you have any tips for the harder portions of the game (ex: where you have multiple tasks, like protecting a king while stopping the enemies from breaching the gate)?

MC: Use your Rage powers. Rage powers are the most bang for the least effort. You can use them over and over and over. And of course the shield is the thing that people are not expecting is very important to use because they’re used to just hack-n-slash. Well, we’ve been saying the whole time that Spartan is not a hack-n-slash game. Yes you stick people with your sword a lot. But you have to be tactical about how you use all of your abilities. So try backing up a little bit and knock some guys around with the shield, [get ‘em stunned] so you can take ‘em out. And you’ve gotta use your eyes. There’s 160+ guys on screen for a reason.

I noticed that the camera is a lot like a real-time strategy game. Was that the goal, to bring an RTS camera system to an action game?

MC: The camera, with any 3D game, is insanely difficult to get right. Because we were going to have so many people on screen, we wanted you to be able to get in close for the action, but [also] move all the way out for the sort of RTS view where you have all these people and can see what’s happening. It’s interesting that you noticed that. That’s something we worked hard at to optimize, and I think it works pretty good.

Thanks to everyone at Sega for having a wonderful conference call.