As a college student, I had to leave my gaming habits largely behind when I left home. However, on weekends or particularly sparse weeknights, I sometimes find the itch to exercise my mental stamina and muscle reflexes grows too great to ignore, and I am confronted with the gamer's quandary of having to play using a passable but not optimal laptop. As a result, I have dived head first into the strategy game genre for the past few years - games which tend to be a little lighter on graphical intensity and heavier on creativity. One such series which has risen to take a prominent role in my spare time is Total War, a real-time strategy series developed by Creative Assembly and published through Sega.
The Total War games have an unusually lengthy history for a game series - and while each individual game has many distinguishing qualities, they all follow a similar premise: You (the player) control a nation during a specific historical period and manage its politics, develop its economy, and muster its armies. When armies clash, the results are not calculated automatically by the computer based on the strength of each side (although this option, called "auto-resolve", is usually also available) - rather, you are shown a physical battlefield filled with enormous 'units' of your soldiers. Each unit has potentially hundreds of individual men, although all men within the same unit are grouped together and follow orders in unison, however an army may consist of upwards of twenty different units. Considering that two armies from each side of the battle may fight alongside one another, there are very often times in which literally thousands of individual soldiers are rendered in glorious 3D detail and you are able to watch them duke it out in historically-accurate engagements.
Each game in the series applies this mechanic in differing periods - from Shogun II's exploration of feudal Japan to Attila's jaunt through the last days of the Roman Empire, discovering this series has led to many a history geek like myself devouring every bit of content I can get my hands on. However, this is where the largest problem facing the series at the moment begins to emerge: In short, because Total War is a series without a direct competitor, its developers and publishers have been able to get away with increasingly predatory business practices and lazy design trends such as the creation of expensive downloadable content for the game, cutting content from the game to be resold, and increasingly declining to take design risks in favor of repackaging simple, safe mechanics again and again.
That is essentially my thesis on why the Total War PC game series is destined to fail unless drastic changes are made to it's trajectory. As a (fairly new but genuine) fan of the series and the specific historical gameplay it offers, I have quite a lot to say about this: In fact, this article "The Lonely Throne" will be released in several parts over several weeks, as I would like to be as careful as possible in laying out a lengthy case with plenty of examples as to why I hold the views I do. I hope anybody who has even a passing interest in this series, gaming design culture in general, or even economics (there's a bit of that at work here) gives these articles a read!
