LEFT: The campaign
map now has a day/
night cycle.My time with the campaign runs
out. I could have spent ten hours
trying to undo the mess I’d made, but
I came away realising I’d made too
many mistakes. For most players, I
think the start of aThree Kingdoms
campaign is going to be completely
baffling. There are so many warlords
and characters to understand, and
though the information you need is
right there on character screens, it
takes effort to process it all and get a
sense of where you stand with your
neighbours. The game gives you
some starting missions to provide
focus, but I can see myself having to
play a few abortive campaigns before
I really start to get a sense of how
heroes’ personalities play into the
game’s sandbox.
There’s so much more I’ve yet to
properly explore. The Wu Xing
philosophy of five elements runs
through the entire game. Every hero
and building upgrade matches the
colours of water, wood, fire, earth and
metal. Some elements are
complimentary, others work against
each other. The designers use
champions and strategists as an
example. Red, fiery champions are
destructive forces on the battlefield,
but they are doused by the draining
abilities of a blue water strategist.
The effect is subtle – these heroes of
Chinese legend aren’t Pokémon, afterIT’S A CHANCE TO TAKE
THE EVENTS OF HISTORY
IN A DIFFERENT
DIRECTION ENTIRELY
of my empire. Four: senior figures in my administration,
Guo Si and Li Jue, hate Lü Bu and have decided to defect
and form their own faction. Five: a civil war has broken
out and is tearing my territory in two. Oh, and the yellow
turban rebellion is there, too, burning things down and
causing a fuss.
I have a feeling Cao Cao may be one of the more
powerful warlords in the game, as he should be. Creative
Assembly has a fun way of testing the balance between
warlords. As you’re reading this, there’s a chance that
some computers deep inside Creative Assembly HQ are
waging war against themselves. The developers call it
‘autotesting’. The AI battles itself, and CA harvests the
data to make balance tweaks and check that the shape of
the campaign is to their liking.
REBEL ALLIANCE
“What we see in the first half of the game is power groups
emerging from coalitions and alliances,” says Graber, “and
these power groups are usually at war with each other. In
the later stages of the game you
have multiple emperors
facing each other; self-
proclaimed emperors trying to
beat each other. That’s the boss fight,
in a sense.”
It turns out I’ve only seen the
chaotic opening stages of a Three
Kingdoms campaign. The really big
fights happen later on, once huge
power blocs have formed. Though
it’s a true sandbox, Creative
Assembly hopes that campaigns will
tend to result in three huge factions
led by wannabe emperors.
“There’s a lot of data we can look
through and see how different
factions perform,” Graber explains,
“which one’s the strongest at the
moment, which one dominates
too much, so we try to balance it
of course.
“The biggest factor that we
obviously can’t take into account in
that specific testing scenario is the
player. The player can take out our
strongest faction in the autotest
straight away in the game and
suddenly the game the player will
have is completely different to what
we’re seeing in testing.”
I ask the team if the yellow
turban rebellion ever wins.
Everybody laughs. The peasant
revolt was brutally suppressed
in the years leading up to Three
Kingdom’s 190 AD start date.
Now it’s a preorder bonus
faction in a videogame in 2019.
History is hard on the losers.