LEFT: The campaign
map now has a day/
night cycle.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, 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
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 the
shape of the campaign.
REBEL ALLIANCE
“What we see in the first half of the
game is power groups emerging from
coa itions an a iances, says ra er,
“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, which
one dominates too much, so we try to
balance it of course.
“The biggest factor we 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.e peasant revo t was ruta y
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.
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 a Three 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
neighbors. 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 colors of water, wood, fire,
earth, and metal. Some elementsIt’s a chance to take the
events of history in a different
direction entirely.
W GAMES PREVIEW