Total War Battles Coming To Mobile Devices

The Creative Assembly, creator of the Total War strategy series, is expanding into mobile gaming. They announced that they're working on a new sub-series called Total War Battles that's specifically designed for mobile devices.

"Total War Battles is a distinct new direction," said Rob Bartholomew, Brand Director at The Creative Assembly. "For the last 12 months our Digital team has been extensively prototyping technology and making sense of exactly what a Total War game on mobile would look and feel like."

The Total War series started in 2000 with Shogun: Total War. These games feature turn-based empire management, with players building up their economy, raising armies, and engaging in diplomacy. Once your armies clash with enemies, though, you can step onto the battlefield and control them in real-time. Creative Assembly stresses that the mobile Total War will be a bit different than the series norm, though.

"This isn’t the traditional Total War you might expect," said Renaud Charpentier, lead designer on the Total War Digital team. "We are working on a title that is specifically tailored to the play styles and control methods of mobile platforms. We want to deliver a game that plays to the strengths of handheld RTS mechanics, and perfectly adapts to a host of different platforms. We’re developing in Unity to help us achieve stunning visuals, gameplay and audio on all our target devices."

A full campaign for a Total War game on the PC can take dozens of hours. Because mobile devices are suited to much smaller gaming sessions - like a twenty-minute subway ride - the game will probably have a faster pace. The name Battles makes me think that these mobile games will focus more on the real-time strategy side of Total War.

Creative Assembly says they'll announce the first game in the Total War Battles series "in the very near future." GDC is taking place in San Francisco next week so I suspect that's when they'll unveil the game. The company's website indicates that they'll be in attendance.