Total War Saga Spin-off Series Announced
Creative Assembly have just announced Total War Saga, a spin-off series to complement the main games by revisiting historical periods at a smaller scale, with more detail. There’s no release date for the first one yet, but it’s going to be out before the next historical TW game launches.
The Saga games will be standalone, “focusing on exciting pivotal moments in history”, instead of covering entire eras. So, something like Fall of the Samurai, Napoleon or Alexander, perhaps? Hopefully not something like Total War Battles. Anything but that.
It’s not going to be any different from Total War proper in gameplay terms – it’s just going to be more condensed. The idea is to put players in what the game director Jack Lusted calls “table flip moments”, where several decisions make considerable impact on the geopolitical landscape, then let them make their own choices. Of course, they’re not telling which events the first Sage game will focus on, but they do keep mentioning Fall of The Samurai a whole lot. Here’s how Lusted describes them:
Fall of the Samurai is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about here. It was a standalone spin-off from Total War: SHOGUN 2, focussed on the pivotal event of the Boshin War. A concentrated Total War game which puts you right in the middle of a really dynamic moment of history, where the outcome could have gone in a huge number of different directions.If you liked Fall of the Samurai, and the kind of gameplay we delivered with it, then you’re going to enjoy what we’ve got planned for our first Saga title. But it’s important to say that it isn’t our next major historical release. It is an iteration on a previous game, built on something we’ve already released.
If that sounds interesting, check out the full blog post. Now it’s only a matter of time before Activision/King comes knocking with a lawsuit in hand – can’t have people using the word “saga” willy-nilly.