- Now over the past 10 years
we've been working with Sega and Creative Assembly
as they've continued pushing
the envelope of gaming experiences.
In their Total War franchise we've worked together
to deliver faster load times, richer environments,
and jaw dropping advanced physics driven effects.
Sega and Creative Assembly wanted to ensure their games
scaled across a wide range of PCs.
And today we're going to see what they've accomplished
for gamers on our platforms.
(dramatic music) (man yelling)
(sword slicing) (man yelling)
(dramatic music)
(weapon slicing)
I would like to introduce Tim Heaton,
Sega Europe's Chief Studio Officer,
working with Creative Assembly Limited,
the British video game developer who's responsible for
the Total War franchise.
Tim! It's great to see you again.
So, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
- Hi, Roger. It's really nice to see you.
Thanks for inviting me.
- So I'm really excited to talk to you
particularly about the Total War franchise.
How has it evolved over the years
and how does the team keep it so fresh and relevant?
- As you know, the game is made up of two elements:
huge real time battles and a turn-based campaign.
Both of those modes allow us
a huge amount of scope to innovate.
We've always pushed at the technical boundaries
with Total War.
Remember 21 years ago
we were just discovering three dimensions.
And the beauty of a longer running franchise
is you can have a huge long list of things you want to do,
and if you can't do them this time
because you're held back with the technology,
you can do them when the technology catches up.
- I remember your team describing to me the tremendous
research that you had to put into Three Kingdoms to ensure
everything was historically accurate.
Can you describe some of the unique challenges involved with
creating games that are so deeply connected to history?
- Yeah, I think one of the core principles
across all the games that Creative Assembly make
is authenticity.
That attention to detail
goes across everything that they do.
But [indistinct] itself is made up upon three pillars:
quality, scale, and authenticity.
And with Three Kingdoms, for example,
we start off working with academic experts
in the field of the Han Dynasty.
Professors who are famous in their fields.
We form initial ideas around the expert knowledge
then we go and test with our users.
We tested in China, we tested in Asia,
we tested across the world.
We're looking to find both what our users expect
from a Three Kingdoms game,
but also the gameplay that they want to see too.
- How did Total War: Three Kingdoms Dynasty mode
utilize the latest hardware?
- Yeah, we made the Dynasty mode in conjunction
with you at Intel.
It was loads of fun to implement.
We took our heroes, we gave them super human abilities.
We then send in wave after wave of enemy
and those waves build and build and build.
It challenges the PC technology hugely.
We put more and more units on the battlefield.
And it really works for CPU.
I think people think because they can see it on the screen
it's GPU intensive,
It isn't, it's CPU intensive.
And as a standalone mode,
the Dynasty mode doesn't really have upper limits.
So we really pushed our code to the,
absolutely to the breaking point.
It's kind of experimental.
- This deep collaboration we've had with your team,
gosh, since 2009, we've learned so much from that too.
A lot of these insights go into our products and how do we
build the next generation of platforms?
And we've really seen our partnership with you
as one of the most exciting collaborations we have
and we're huge fans of your team.
- Yeah, we first worked that closely together
on Total War: Napoleon.
We've had a close relationship ever since.
It's all become an important part
of our development process.
Intel challenged us think about about the current and
upcoming technology in new ways.
It's a very regular occurrence to have Intel engineers
onsite in Horsham and in Sofia.
And it's not only about advice.
There were times when we've used Intel's code,
where we've used your tools,
we've done optimizing and debugging together.
We share our confidential upcoming roadmaps as well,
so we can see into the future, we create white papers
in conjunction with our engineering team and your team.
Because we know each other so well,
there's this level of trust, level of understanding,
that really makes Intel,
after 11 years of being close together,
a really special partner for us.
- Yeah, we've been really excited by the level of experience
that's provided by your games
on our thin and light platforms.
And with Troy, a Total War Saga,
you went to great lengths to make a truly immersive world.
- So, Troy is obviously set in the Mediterranean.
We really want it to get the environments right for it.
With Intel's help we have grass swaying in the breeze,
getting tramped down, ripples and splashes on the water.
Doing that is actually, counter-intuitively,
a CPU workload, not GPU.
And we ended up with it looking really great,
really convincing.
Getting the world as immersive as possible
is so important for Total War.
- You know, it's important to make sure
that the games run on all the platforms.
It's important to get the performance optimizations
and all of that, but, you know, Tim,
sometimes it's important just to do
some crazy fun experiments, as you know.
Which is how I describe what we did with your team
on Total War: Warhammer 2.
We basically created a boss battle for a gamer CPU.
Can you talk a little bit about the extra content we added
to the game, specifically Laboratory mode,
and why it resonated so well with the fans?
- Yeah. The Laboratory mode is absolutely my favorite.
So Total War fans are always asking what if questions.
What if we could increase the army size?
What if the explosions were bigger?
Even what if the force of gravity was a bit less?
So Warhammer 2's Laboratory mode
gives players a sandbox to play in
so that they could answer those questions for themselves.
With 16 variables, stretching your PC to the limit.
It's totally up to the player how they wanted to do it.
It looks fantastic. It's great fun.
Check out the videos on YouTube.
And it was a fantastic technical exercise for us too.
More research and development.
We learned an awful lot,
which will inform these huge battles in the future.
There was no limit to what we could do.
You could dial things up
until you crushed the system, actually.
And we made, you know, we made it explicit
that this was an experimental mode,
but such an exciting thing to do.
- Well, Tim, we are all looking forward
to Total War: Warhammer 3.
So what do you think gamers are going to get excited about
when it releases?
- Yeah, we announced Warhammer 3 in February of this year.
Within a few weeks 4 million people have watched the
announce trailer.
You know, it takes place in the realm of chaos.
It really takes all the things we've learned
through Total War in the past 21 years,
it's going to be the biggest,
most exciting strategy game we've ever made.
- It's always great to talk with you.
We've really loved pushing the envelope with you on the
Total War franchise and our team has the deepest
respect and appreciation for you and what your team does.
- Thank you, Roger.
We feel very close to Intel and I really appreciate that.
So thanks very much and see you soon.
(dramatic music)