Night combat in Total War: Three Kingdoms.
Night combat in Total War: Three Kingdoms. Sun Ren gets ambushed.
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How Creative Assembly conceived the art for Total War: Three Kingdoms

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

With Total War: Three Kingdoms, the Creative Assembly studio of Sega is branching away from pure history, moving into the realm of legend and myth. While the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the battle for control of ancient China has historical roots, it also has a lot of mythical elements like leaders with superhuman powers in battle.

That setting gave an interesting challenge to Pawel Wojs, art director for the game. I played the latest build of Three Kingdoms, which comes out in the spring of 2019, at a preview event. The demo depicted a night ambush that showed off a different kind of combat and landscape than past Total War games. And then I interviewed Wojs about the approach to art.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.