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奥菲莉娅回忆中的修女
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Deception, marriage, and seppuku – these are just a few of your tools as an aspiring ruler of Japan.
The Total War franchise is known for its huge, beautiful battlefields, and our recent looks at Shogun II: Total War have shown that this game doesn't buck this trend. What we hadn't seen until now, though, was the other half of the experience – the just-as-important campaign mode. So much of being a leader in feudal Japan revolved around your family's honor, how you maintained relationships with your fellow noblemen, and, inevitably, what you did to make sure you had a leg up on your opponents when conflict was unavoidable. This has not escaped the team at Creative Assembly, as Shogun II has an intricate political and familial system that looks to be as fun, if not more so, than the act of playing out the battles themselves.
For those who've somehow missed out on the Total War series over the years, allow me to give you a brief breakdown. The campaign of Shogun II takes place on a huge, detailed map of Japan, with players taking control of one of nine playable clans in an attempt to unite Japan under their rule. Players engage in both military and political warfare with clans, going into large, real-time battles when they come to blows. It's essentially two games in one: an intense RTS, combined with a slower, turn-based game of political manipulation.
Real-time warfare is extremely important to Shogun II (and you can read more about that in our previous coverage ), but more discreet conflict is carried out in the campaign map via Agents. Agents are essentially actors you can send out into rival clans to hurt them in very specific ways. Outside of Generals, who I'll delve into more detail about later, players can use Geishas, Ninjas, Metsuke, and Monks. Ninjas and Geishas are assassins, and players can use them to take out enemy generals.
The really cool part of attempting assassination in Shogun II is that it triggers a cut-scene that adapts itself based on the skill of the agent involved. For instance a crappy ninja might trip over a sleeping soldier, while a more skilled ninja might avoid this but might be too noisy and wake the general up. These sequences were also in the original game, but Shogun II is slated to have significantly more ways for it to work out, keeping players guessing until the scene's conclusion.
If assassination is a little too bold for your clan, you can try and lure away enemy generals on the campaign map via Metsuke. These secret police will infiltrate an enemy army and attempt to lure away the general, with success yielding both the general and some of the army (depending on his men's loyalty to him). To combat Metsuke, Clans can produce Monks, who meet Metsuke and chastise them for being too worldly in hopes of convincing them to give up their sinful ways. Agents give players powerful tools to battle against one another off the battlefield, making the turn-based parts of the game much more intense than they might otherwise be.
While Agents are important, Generals are the backbone of a clan. Generals aren't simply a unit you produce who have generic traits, but a character that you can level up and build into a unique battlefield commander. Generals have talent trees with numerous branches that will give them better abilities in battle. Most importantly, choosing one path on a talent tree permanently locks out the other option, making specialization extremely important. Their loyalty to your clan affects the loyalty of the units they command, and a rogue General can become a thorn in your side if he decides he's tired of being under your control.
Once a General goes rogue he's basically lost to you, but to keep his forces your command there are a couple of preventative measures that can be taken. Generals can be married into your clan, giving them a familial bond that grants higher loyalty (marriage is also useful for inter-clan relations). If you have no relatives that are ripe for the picking, you can also ask your General to commit ritual suicide, otherwise known as seppuku. Seppuku is a double edge sword, however, because it could prevent a General from going rogue (and give you a bonus to your honor), but it might also backfire and make them go rogue on the spot.
Unexplored areas appear covered by fog.
Politics are super important, but battles are inevitable. To better represent how war was conducted in Japan, Creative Assembly has implemented a new feature: naval warfare. No, you won't be using massive sail boats (and you certainly won't be firing cannons at one another), but you will be rowing large boats full of troops at one another in order to defend or take a beach head. Naval battles are fought either via two ships meeting and troops fighting it out, or by archers shooting at incoming ships with things like flame arrows. This gives players a more realistic set of options when it comes to invasion, as naval battles were fairly common since Japan is, after all, an island.
The combat portions of the game are every bit as pretty as you'd expect from a company who has years of experience making intricate, large scale warfare on the PC, but the campaign development is also coming along well. Hopefully Shogun II's turn-based campaign gets the limelight it deserves, as casual onlookers often only see the high-resolution pictures of battlefields and assume it's simply a RTS. At least you, reader, now know better, and have some insight on just how awesome the political portions of the game are starting to look. |
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发表于 2010-9-10 11:32:34
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