"Current generation can't cope" with Total War says CA
Strategy series ruled out for current gen - but CA looks optimistic for the future.
The current generation of consoles aren't powerful enough to host the Total War series, says developer The Creative Assembly - but it's optimistic that the next generation will be able to, and the Horsham studio has a plan that could see its successful strategy series finally making the jump.
"We've probably always talked about [Total War on console]," studio director Mike Simpson told Eurogamer. "I've always said that there's no fundamental reason why that kind of game couldn't work, but there are various problems that have to be overcome. You can't just take Total War on PC and then port it over to console."
"The current generation of consoles just can't cope - they don't have enough memory, by a large factor. Those technical reasons are probably the only reasons. A lot of people think that UI's a problem, because no one's really done it well before. I don't think that's a fundamental thing - I just think it's simply that no one's really done it very well before. A lot of the games have been ports of PC games without too much thought having gone into it."
Notable strategy games on this generation of consoles have included Stormrise, developed by The Creative Assembly's Australian studio, as well as Eugen System's Ruse and Ensemble's Halo Wars.
"It's not a huge genre on console right now," said Simpson. "But I think that's likely to change, for all sorts of reasons. The next generation of consoles, whenever they appear, will be more powerful than the current generation."
Simpson also acknowledged that should Total War come to console it'll likely be a different proposition to the PC experience, which recently saw another well-received expansion.
"The way people play on console is different to the way that you play on PC," Simpson said. "You don't sit down for four or five hours at a time, generally. It's much smaller play sessions, but we do have some very clever ideas in the pipeline for things we could do to make that happen. That applies not just to console, though - that's more about broadening the appeal of the game in general."