So the background is very broad, you can come up with lots of sort of interesting scenarios within it. Because it's designed to be almost infinitely flexible.

'It means there's a huge amount that you can then do with that. 'It was being built up in the 90s as a world where Games Workshop could throw in every fantasy trope you could possibly imagine and shove it into one world,' he explains. The messiness was baked-into its DNA when Games Workshop created it. If you were wondering, this is just the kind of person who devotes his teenage years to taking a game engine that's as creaky and tumbledown as the Byzantine Empire and turning it into a Warhammer game.įor Baillie, what sets Warhammer Fantasy apart is that it's a complete mess. In other words, Baillie aspires to be an expert on how ancient and medieval civilizations did math. I'm quite into quantitative methods and that kind of stuff.' He explain it like this: 'I'm sort of this odd mishmash, because I'm sort of specializing in the Classical bits of history - which tend to be the preserve of language-based people - but what I do is a lot more mathematically based history. His historical interest is narrow and specialized even by the standards of Classical and medieval studies. Somehow, in the midst of a busy career of passion projects, he's also found time to to excel at academics: he's currently finishing his degree in history at Cambridge, where he focuses on Byzantine and Eastern Mediterranean medieval history.īut of course he's not just a history major. He's an inveterate game modder and aspiring board game designer, as well as the founder of .uk, a forum where strategy fans and history buffs collide. Warhammer: A Call to Arms creator James Baillie is a nerd polymath. It is a sprawling, ambitious, and scarcely-coherent effort to bring every ounce of Warhammer fantasy lore to life as a Total War game - and in doing so it captures the spirit of the old Warhammer fantasy universe better than official games might ever dare. But if you look past the dated graphics, you'll find that A Call to Arms might just be the most faithful adaptation Warhammer fantasy will ever receive on PC. Powered by an obsolete engine even when the final version was released a couple years back, and soon overshadowed by the news the Sega had acquired the rights to make a Warhammer fantasy game on PC, A Call to Arms could be seen as a classically quixotic modding effort.

Over the course of five years, a high school student and a handful of volunteers tortured and twisted the aging Rome: Total War engine into becoming a full-fledged Warhammer game. Until Total War: Warhammer comes along from Creative Assembly, the most ambitious and comprehensive Warhammer fantasy strategy game is a colossal mod for Rome: Total War called Warhammer: Total War - A Call to Arms.

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