Those units have now been "remodelled, retextured," and likewise where the original only had a single soldier variant for each unit, Massey said, the remaster has now added the kind of variation you'd expect from the modern Total War games. All the units across all three games have been updated". The result, basically, is "access to modern image processing techniques, visual effects - we now support Ultra HD resolutions, ultrawide screens, and pretty much every asset in the game has been reworked in one way or another. The remaster is based on the original engine, "with some modifications, and improvements", as Massey put it, but with an "entirely rewritten renderer". There's an emphasis on filling the later game with "less grind, more fun", and Massey mentioned the team has "tried to do an entire rebalancing of the factions and units", too.Īside from that, Smith highlighted the efforts made to add "quite a huge amount of uplift on the visuals". There's been a fairly thorough pass on balance, too, by the sounds of things: players often found there was "a bit too much squalor" in the late game, according to Smith, so that's been tweaked to "improve the logic" there and give you better tools for controlling it. There are also modern tools coming though, like tactical maps in the 3D battles and heat maps in the campaign, and a whopping 16 newly playable factions on top of the original 22. The user experience in general has been improved, so you can view and sort proper lists of settlements by things like population growth, meaning less time spent "clicking around" finding things, and there's a new "agent hub and quick agent panel" so you don't have to go looking for individual diplomats or spies that are available. Shortcuts and commands have been updated, as there were "certain limitations" with the original. A lot of time has been spent making sure that it "feels like a modern game", as Smith put it, "so you can jump straight from Three Kingdoms into Rome Remastered." The big point they both stressed was that this is very much a "remaster, not a remake" - most of the changes or new things are experiential, above all. Rome: Total War is a proper classic for strategy fans, of course - Feral's managing director, David Stephen, referred to the process as "a bit like recutting the crown jewels", which sounds somewhat nervewracking, but we spoke to Tom Massey and Edwin Smith, the team's head of production and head of design respectively, to get a bit more detail on what to expect from the remaster, and it sounds extensive.
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Watch on YouTube Total War: Rome Remastered announce trailerįeral Interactive has plenty of history with Total War, taking on the mobile ports of the original Rome as well as handling the Mac and Linux versions of the many others in the series for some time now.