Can The Creative Assembly give us a playable console RTS?

Mike Bantick
Thursday, 12 February 2009 02:39

Opinion and Analysis

There is a storm on the horizon, and this one is controlled by The Creative Assembly, developers in good standing with fans of Real Time Strategy games.  The makers of the Total War series are set to launch a new game entitled Stormrise, for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.  To give console players a fighting chance, they are trying out a new control mechanism known as Whip Select.

We all thought that the First Person Shooter game would struggle to take off using a console game-pad style controller.  And admittedly, having grown up with mouse and keyboard, it does take one some time to adjust.

But now days, it is rare for a FPS to hit the market purely designed for the PC hardware.

In a similar way, the god like control required to manage an entire army in a real time strategy game has longed required the ability to manage units on and off(on mini map) screen, quickly and efficiently.

This is what keyboard and mouse achieve, and no better example of what can be achieved is showcased in the Total War series of games.  From Shogun to Rome and Medieval, The Creative Assembly have shown aplomb in bringing historical battles on a grand scale to the PC screen.

Of course it has been tried on the console game-pad platform.  Electronic Arts in particular have been keen, with Battle For Middle Earth and Command & Conquer 3 making the cross over. 

And then there have been attempts at innovating the control mechanism, with Tom Clancey’s End War providing the option of voice command in what amounted to RTS Lite on the consoles.

Well now we have The Creative Assembly folks bending their PC experience to a new franchise.  While one development team works hard on giving us Empire: Total War, another team is cranking out Stormrise .

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