To understand how we are currently utilising the music requires a little bit of an explanation about how the game is structured. In addition to this, the system had to represent the vast scale and action of the game, enhancing and leading the player’s emotional engagement, building excitement during the battles and underscoring events in the campaign, creating an identifiable interactive and dynamic musical score. Creatively, our goal was to bring alive this multicultural world, a world brimming with differing schools of magic, monsters, and characters, yet interwoven with pseudo-Medieval elements following Warhammer’s lore representing the four highly unique cultures: High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen, and Skaven. The live ensemble recordings were produced in Budapest through early-mid 2017 and consumed a total of 47.5 hours of orchestra time and 21 hours with the choir to complete the sessions. We produced almost 4 hours of large scale orchestral and choral based music for the project (excluding alternative mixes). The development of the music for Total War: Warhammer 2, inclusive of design, production, and implementation took around 6 months to complete. This title combines the addictive turn-based campaign of epic empire-building with vast and explosive real-time battles, all set in the vivid and incredible world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. In this article, we’ll be discussing the most recent incarnation of our system and how we construct the music via examples from our 2017 Total War: WARHAMMER 2 release. The move to Wwise was an easy decision for us, not only due to the benefits for the sound design, dialogue, and coding portions of our products, but with the fully-fledged music system and the opportunities proposed, we had the chance to really focus on what we wanted to be able to do with the music in the game.

The scores of Total War have always had some level of interactivity, although the pre-Wwise based products prior to 2012 were of a simpler design and production process. It has a long history stretching back almost two decades, over which time the game has been set in Medieval Europe, Feudal Japan, Ancient Rome, 17 th Century Europe, the Dark Ages, and more recently in the fantasy universe of Warhammer with the production of a trilogy and much accompanying DLC. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Total War series of video games, Total War is a turn-based strategy game that also features colossal real-time battles.

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