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Total War: Medieval 3 was officially revealed during the series’ 25th anniversary showcase, and Game Director Pawel Wojs has shared more details about what pre-production means for the third entry in the grand strategy series, alongside where its development process is currently at.
Although Medieval 3 has, for a long time, one of the most requested Total War sequels, the reveal of it being in “early pre-production” left some fans feeling like the game was announced too early, without anything concrete to show.
What Pre-Production Means for Total War: Medieval 3
“So what is ‘pre-pro,’ pre-production follows our concepting phase and leads to production down the line. The concepting phase is where we work to define the high-level vision for the game, investigate feasibility, and work on some early mock-ups and create prototypes. As you’ve seen we have a vision and we do have some prototypes and mock ups. You’ve already seen a few bits of the concept art,” Wojs explains in a post from Total War: Medieval 3’s dedicated forum section.
“Pre-production is where we focus on planning and foundational work prior to full scale development when we begin production. During this phase we aim to lock down the Game design documentation as well as the Art and Style guides, ensure we have all of the tools and pipelines in place to start production.”
This portion of the development process also involves scaling up the team working on Medieval 3 “to a healthier size with all relevant disciplines currently working on it, and put together a plan to effectively develop the game,” as well as prototyping “anything we feel requires proving out in this way, like sieges, our campaign map and the new systems built in our new Warcore engine.”
One of the main concerns of fans disappointed by the title’s early announcement revolved around the game basically existing only on paper at this stage. According to Wojs, the team is very much working with bits of an actual game.
“Where possible we do this in engine and begin iterating as rapidly as possible – So we do have a playable MED III, we have a campaign and battles, naturally, all with blockout ‘Graybox’ assets. I say ‘Graybox’ because none of it is actually ‘Gray’ – for the sake of the development experience we make our Graybox assets colourful and more representative of the intent, but at this stage there is no where close to final art in the game.”
He concludes that “this is all very much about the ‘HOW?’. How can we make this game? A good example is the buildings we want to populate our settlements with. How will we author these buildings? How can we break the intended buildings down into parts to create efficient kits and allow us to have even more variety? This phase is a lot less about making pretty buildings, but rather determining how we will make them, and how many we need.”
It’s worth noting that Wojs’ post bears little mention of the “early” part of pre-production that was mentioned during Medieval 3’s reveal and which likely contributed to irking some of the fans looking forward to it.
Whether or not the clarifications here will prove reassuring enough for the skeptics remains to be seen. Creative Assembly’s historical team has a livestream scheduled for Thursday, December 11, during which it plans on sharing more details about pre-production as well as “how the campaign is shaping up.”
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