Total War Too Taxing For Anything But The PC

To many, grand scale strategy games are seemingly incompatible with anything but the PC. There have been console equivalents to games such as those in the Total War franchise, but none have come close to competing with the keyboard and mouse in terms of deep and intuitive controls. Yet this is not what will keep games like Total War: Rome II from invading the consoles, it is the lack of power.

Mike Simpson, studio director of The Creative Assembly, revealed as much when speaking to Eurogamer:

“Total War on console, the reason it’s not there has never been about control. There has never been a control reason not to have the game on console – that’s not the problem. It’s a difficult design problem, trying to figure out how to control a game like that with a pad, but even that is a solvable problem – it just requires some clever design.”

“We couldn’t fit a Total War battlefield, with 10,000 guys, into any of the consoles. It just doesn’t work. You can’t fit a gallon into a pint pot, it doesn’t go. That’s clearly been the main constraint.”

Future technologies may bridge this gap and relieve some of these constraints, and Simpson went on to mentioned that they would reform their strategy if that time ever comes:

“Now, it may be that at some point in the future, some of those constraints disappear, and at that point, then yeah, some possibilities open up. I’m not saying that we’ll actually go down those routes – it depends how things turn out. They’re not there at the moment – those routes don’t exist. They may, or may not, turn up in the future.”

As an avid PC gamer, and someone who would probably (attempt to) fight off a few lions in order to play Total War: Rome II when it releases next year, I am rather unaffected by this particular plight. However, I would love to see what innovations would arise from a team such as The Creative Assembly addressing the issue of limited controls, and what this may mean for gaming regardless of what platform you play.