Total War Remains The King Of Strategy Games – Here’s How It’s Endured For 25 Years

As long as video games have existed, there have been strategy games. Players are endlessly fascinated with diplomacy, socioeconomics, and conflict, especially from the historical standpoint offered by franchises like Civilization and Age of Empires. And while strategy games have fluctuated in popularity over the decades, there’s one series that’s endured through it all: Total War.

The grand strategy series has immersed players in historical settings, like Ancient China, as well as the dark and disturbing fantasy worlds of Warhammer. The key to its success is a formula that’s distinct from anything else out there and nearly impossible to replicate. With Sega set to unveil the future of the Total War franchise on December 4, Inverse talked to longtime game director Pawel Wojs about why the series has had an enduring legacy, even as it’s had to adapt to the industry’s shifting landscape.

“I think what underpins our success is the pillars of scale, immersion, and authenticity. The tenants that we develop all our games by, and that level of authenticity we instill. It provides an experience that, for me, is unmatched,” Wojs tells Inverse, “It doesn’t feel like a game. It feels like it’s beyond entertainment, engaging in ways very few strategy games can be.”

The Total War games are traditionally split into two halves, what Wojs calls the “magic formula.” The first is a “grand strategy” section where you navigate a world map and take turns alongside your enemies, engaging in diplomacy, subterfuge, and careful planning. The second half of the formula is the massive real-time battles, where you command hundreds or even thousands of troops at a time.

The goal in each Total War game is to dominate the opposition by any means possible, and the staggering scope of the series’ campaigns means a single one can last anywhere from 60 to hours. This setup, in Woj's mind, is what has allowed Total War to flourish. It’s also why we’ve never seen games that diverge from that formula into real-time strategy.

“Straying too far in one direction, you might lose sight of what Total War is,” Wojs says. “We’ve toyed with the idea of doing different things, and we always will as we develop different threads and titles. You may have some that are slightly more battle-focused, or some that are more campaign-focused. But that balance is still integral to what Total War is.”

But even with that established blueprint, strategy games occupy a unique place in the modern gaming landscape, where people often don’t sit down to play a game for hours at a time, free from other distractions.

“I watched a video recently about what’s happening to strategy in relation to the newer generation’s attention span. Strategy games need a certain level of cerebral investment, and the payoff isn’t immediate, but requires time for that payoff to come through, hours into the experience,” Wojs says. “I think it’s still quite a healthy space, but it’s one that has to adapt to the wider spectrum of platforms, as well as attention spans and that requirement for dopamine. It’s an interesting challenge looking into the future.”

Wojs has worked on Total War at developer Creative Assembly for over 20 years, starting with art for Medieval II: Total War. Two decades is a long time in gaming, and you can count the number of strategy series that have continuously released new titles in that span on one hand. A major emphasis for Creative Assembly has been evolving the Total War formula, a delicate balancing act of providing for the diehard fans while still attracting new ones.

“It’s a never-ending challenge. There’s a legacy we have with Total War on a features level, what’s expected to be in any title. Then there’s the stuff that’s expected based on the historical time period we choose, right?” Wojs says.

Capturing that idea includes building up a massive list of “potential features” across the series, whether it’s the relationship mechanics of Three Kingdoms or the Crusades in Medieval II. With so many different games, the team has built a treasure chest of ideas and mechanics they can dive into with each new game, picking and choosing elements that might fit. Veteran fans, of course, have a laundry list of things they’d like in each game, but rookies need to be accounted for, too.

“New players are coming in with every release, so we need to make sure that they feel welcome. And that’s where the onboarding comes in,” Wojs says. “If I think back to Medieval II compared to how we develop games now, it’s very different. We’re engaging with player research and the internal content lab at Sega, constantly checking that we’re delivering a player experience that matches up to our vision.”

No aspect of each game is more important to that vision than the history it’s based on. And for a series that’s gone everywhere from ancient Rome to the Napoleonic era and Feudal Japan, you’d be surprised where ideas can come from. Three Kingdoms, for example, came about because the team watched the film Red Cliff, then started planning a game a week later because the team knew it had to work with that time period.

Once the setting is determined, an absurd amount of work goes into researching and depicting things correctly, something that’s also changed astronomically over the years.

“Back [when I joined], we didn’t really have access to Google in the office,” Wojs says. “The boss was concerned about the amount of time that could be spent surfing the web. There was one machine with internet access, and everyone had to use that one. But we had books. Fast forward to now, we obviously have the internet and have worked with various universities and museums. We have a fully-fledged historian as a senior designer. He discovered history through Total War and because of that studied it at the Tower of London, where we met and recruited him as a designer.”

Every Total War game now has its own research budget, which the team spends on purchasing a wealth of history books and consulting historical and cultural experts. Consultants have become vitally important for the pieces of history that don’t quite have hard answers, like real historical figures whose fate remains unknown.

But there’s more to Total War’s history than just getting the facts right, as it all needs to be packaged and disseminated in a way that feels exciting. Technological advancements have, of course, allowed the studio to create things in far greater detail, including battles. But there’s another key component.

“There are a few tenants we’ve worked by since Attila. The modern lens is something we live by, we try to stray away from that dusty textbook representation of a period,” Wojs says. “Three Kingdoms, for example, rather than having some kind of easy bamboo UI, we went for a more ephemeral ink on water, something that felt modern and unique.”

Wojs challenges his team to create a distinct visual style for each game, so that you can look at a single screenshot and know which Total War game it’s from. Each game needs to pop visually, and while Creative Assembly has tackled a variety of ancient time periods with this ethos in mind, there’s one particular challenge the series still hasn’t touched: modern warfare. Total War hasn’t moved past the early 19th century, and that’s an intentional choice.

“The full spectrum of history is at our fingertips, and we went as far as Empire Napoleon, and even further with Fall of the Samurai. There are obviously technological challenges that we experience with more modern warfare, in moving away from more traditional kinds of combat to more ranged, squad-based combat,” Wojs says. “We also have to consider authenticity and immersion. We have to look at where we are in the world, and what we choose to do as a result. We have to pick and choose our periods carefully. There’s a certain distance between now and ancient history where you can suspend your disbelief.”

So while we may not be seeing D-Day or Gettysburg in the series, Creative Assembly has found a way to shake things up by leaning into fantasy. The Total War: Warhammer trilogy has proven phenomenally successful by letting players command legions of skeletons, orcs, and fiery dragons. But underneath the facade is the same winning Total War formula that, once again, has kept bringing players back for more.

“The Warhammer games have broadened our audience for sure. They’ve allowed us to play with concepts that we couldn’t feature in a historical title. Honestly, the historical teams are often jealous of the dynamics and unit variety a fantasy title can have,” Wojs says. “It gives us an opportunity to experiment with systems and mechanics we can’t feature on the historical side. Then that allows us to adapt those systems to the gameplay we want in historical titles. So it’s not just broadening the audience, but the content.”

And while Warhammer is the only non-historical series featured in Total War so far, Wojs says there’s a handful of IPs they’ve pursued over the years. They haven’t landed any yet, but that doesn’t mean another Total War adaptation won’t happen in the future, and the fact that Warhammer already works so well is proof of how malleable the Total War experience can be.

“Any epic that features conflict, diplomacy, and politics is a great fit. Total War is the ultimate kind of time machine, or fantasy transportation machine,” Wojs says. “You can go and travel into any setting, because Total War gives you the context for the world and its geopolitical systems, then that 3D battle world experience. It’s the perfect engine to transport you anywhere, be it literature, cinema, or history.”