Tv Show Based On Total War Was Tricking Us All Along: 'it's Kind Of...

It's taken a long time for TV adaptations of videogames to get, you know, actually good. Now we've got The Last of Us, Arcane and Fallout all showing off. Back in 2005, though, we just had Time Commanders.

BBC's Time Commanders was an exciting prospect for any strategy nerd who could drag themselves away from their wars to watch people fighting them on TV. It used the Rome: Total War engine—back before Creative Assembly flipped the game titles—to create massive battles for contestants to conduct, not from their PCs, but by giving orders and acting like generals.

It was cheesy and slow, but at the time it was incredibly exciting to see a small corner of gaming standing in this prime-time spotlight. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was all a big ol' lie.

"That was developed at a point when Rome was not finished," Scott Pitkethly, Creative Assembly's battle architect, tells us. "And I remember being told, 'Oh, we've got this great contract to do this thing. It's going to be really great for the company.' Which, you know, it was. But how are we going to make this work? We're not ready for this!"

Rather than the show taking a PvP approach, contestants fought an AI opponent, playing as Rome against Hannibal's Carthaginians, for example. But that's the first lie.

Pitkethly recalls: "Obviously we wanted the AI to play historically—I'm going to go behind the curtain a bit here and ruin it—but there literally were humans that had been told by the historians, 'This is what Hannibal would have done in this situation,' moving their troops."

The AI opponent was actually a human opponent, effectively following a historical script. "So we literally had devs behind the curtain, multiplayer, playing against the contestants," says game director Pawel Wojs. But that wasn't the only assistance humans were providing.

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"We had to put little cheat codes in," Pitkethly adds, "because the contestants might make a poor strategic move, or a really good strategic move." The show's creators wanted the battles to have a coherent narrative, which would have been harder to do if the battle fell apart in five minutes because the contestants didn't have a clue what they were doing. "So we had to have all of these cheat codes so we could actually make the game unfold in the way they wanted it."

So we had to have all of these cheat codes so we could actually make the game

Source: PC Gamer