Fall of the Samurai's new steamboats explode as you might expect when you consider the racks of torpedoes stored within those mighty hulls. The new steam ships and sturdy ironclads of the era are just a few of the powerful new weapons that standalone Shogun 2 expansion Fall of the Samurai brings to Japan. It's set 300 years after the events of Shogun 2, at a time of rapid modernisation triggered by the arrival of boisterous Western traders from America, Britain and France. The rising number of foreign troops and advanced technology would grow to infuriate the traditionalist samurai classes leading to unrest and eventually, full-scale uprising.

As leader of a pro-imperial or pro-shogunate faction, you'll have to deal with these rebellions, ideally by using the devastating new gatling guns. Plonk one on a hill in front of a unit of swordsmen, halve the game speed and you'll get something akin to the final scenes of The Last Samurai. A fitting way to crush one's enemies. Fall of the Samurai is due to drop on March 23, check out our Fall of the Samurai preview for a detailed overview.

Which are better, guns, or bows and arrows? Guns, of course, you might think, but then you have to consider the long reload times, their tendency to explode, their unreliability in wet conditions. These are some of the issues that Total War lead designer James Russell and the team at The Creative Assembly think about every day as they balance the clash of old and new weaponry in Fall of the Samurai.

"Bows can be better than guns in the hands of a skilled user" says Russell. "If you fire arrows more frequently than you a fire a gun it can be more lethal. It's not direct fire, you can fire above, and behind a rank of guns in front of you."

But then there's the cost of teaching men to wield a bow effectively. It can take years of training and strong arms to fire a bow effectively. A unit of marksmen can be taught to use guns in weeks. A big advantage. The improving technology and craftmanship also made guns a tempting option.

"This is the era where the guns start to become more effective than bows," Russell says. "The effective ranges start to become greater. This is the last hurrah of archery, guns are really taking over."

In Fall of the Samurai you can choose to embrace the new gunpowder weaponry being brought into Japan from the West, or you can fight for the Shogunate and try to save the Samurai, and find out once and for all whether bows can beat an army of gatling guns and rifles. The standalone expansion is out on March 23.

Lead designer of Shogun 2, James Russell, knows just how much fans love Total War. The series typically produces enormous games capable of generating epic storylines across decades of war. Even then, it's surprising just how much time players spend building their empires. Russell says that "the average" Total War campaigner "plays for about a hundred hours." That is a lot of war.

The process of managing your empire from the strategic view and then fighting hour-long battles can eat up a lot of time, but "the real crux of it," according to Russell, is that "Total War has great replayability."

"With Shogun 2, any of those clans could have won the day and become Shogun, so you can have a lot of playthroughs and a lot of different things can happen" he says. "What we want to do is really put the player in an immersive, very specific setting and say 'you write your own story'"

The upcoming, standalone Fall of the Samurai expansion looks to do just hat. The six new factions are split into two groups, pro-Shogunate traditionalists and imperialist sympathisers. All of them have their own self-interest at heart, but will be able to specialise in different aspects of war to take Japan for themselves, whether that means training expert samurai, or trading with the West for powerful new guns.

"We choose preiods that have a lot of depth, a lot of interest, a lot of things going on, a lot of factions vying for control" says Russell. The culture clash and technological battle that lies at the heart of Fall of the Samurai should provide plenty of the famous depth that keeps Total War players coming back for more, and will let us play with some powerful new toys at the same time.

For more on Fall of the Samurai, ceck out more from our interview with James Russell, when he talked to us about the difficulties balancing historical accuracy with fair mechanics, and revealed that Shogun 2 players will be able to fight with Fall of the Samurai players online. You'll find much more in the six page Fall of the Samurai preview in the latest issue of PC gamer UK.

 
Shogun 2: Total War’s standalone expansion will let you play online with existing Shogun 2 players, even if they haven't bought it. Whether you’ve discovered Fall of the Samurai’s trains, gatling guns and cannons or not, you’ll still be able to compete online with swords and muskets.

“One of the things that we made sure of with Fall of the Samurai is that we didn't split the online community”, says James Russell, Lead Designer on the series. Players without Fall of the Samurai can play against people with the expansion. That's really important to us. We want to make sure that people who buy the new game can play against the guys playing Shogun 2.

James stressed that maintaining context during the online battles is still a priority for Creative Assembly.

“Total War - particularly the campaign side - is a very unique, thoughtful, deep experience that we want to maintain. We definitely want to keep Total War as an immersive experience even though we want to create multiplayer battles that you can get in and out of quickly, and have fun if you’ve only got half and hour.”

"We have lots of plans to make multiplayer into a more compelling experience,” continued Jamie.

Shogun 2: Total War was the most multiplayer-focused game in the franchise so far, bringing a co-op campaign and fully-featured online component to the franchise. Yesterday we also chatted to James Russell about how the team juggle historical accuracy with a need for balance and sensible mechanics.

For more on Rise of the Samurai, watch part one of our exclusive interview or read Tim Stone’s in-depth feature in PC Gamer issue 236.

 
"We've got a huge pile of options we'd love to set the game in," says James Russell, Lead Designer of the Total War series. And we can't wait to see them happen. With three games in Steam's top 20 most played, it seems PC Gamers can't get enough of Creative Assembly's franchise. Probably because it's consistently great. Watch the video above for more from the closest thing Creative Assembly have to their own general.

Standalone Shogun 2 expansion, Fall of the Samurai, is due in March. It's going to be noisy, bloody and brutal. We're talking cannons, gatling guns, repeating rifles and spears: all being used against squishy human/horse flesh. The expansion will be set during a time of modernisation that marked Japan's transition into an industrial state 300 years after Shogun 2's campaign.

For more on Shogun 2's latest expansion, check back tomorrow or pick up a copy of PC Gamer 236, where you can read Tim Stone's in-depth feature.

The Samurai are doomed. That's according to the latest batch of Total War: Shogun 2 screenshots, which show off lots of new imperial weaponry. Cannons, gatling guns and muskets will make defending the Shogunate a very tough task. Fall of the Samurai's new weaponry has to be dramatic, mind, "mild decline of the Samurai" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. We'll get to fight with the expansion's new land and naval units on March 23.

You'll find plenty more in our big preview in the latest issue of PC Gamer UK. Meanwhile, see samurai being blown apart and roasted in the new grabs below, which also feature some of Fall of the Samurai's new Agents.

Fall of the Samurai is a great big standalone expansion for Total War: Shogun 2 that will pit the samurai classes against imperial forces that threaten the power of the Shogunate. The influx of colonial forces and new technology leads to an internal struggle between pro-imperial forces and traditionalists. The result? WAR! Katanas will meet muskets on the battlefields of Japan.

There will be six new factions to play with, 39 new land units, 10 new naval units, an expanded campaign map, three new agents, port sieges and new technology, including railways. It's available to pre-order now on Steam and the SEGA store for £24.99 / $29.99

Pre-ordering on Steam will grant you the Tsu faction, described as astute strategists and master ninjas. The SEGA store pre-order comes with the Obama faction, who have nothing to do with the incumbent US administration. They're described as an authoritarian people "who are unsurpassed in controlling people and trade."

The official Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai pre-order page also lists a limited edition as "coming soon." That'll contain the Saga faction, who can quickly adopt the fresh technology brought into Japan by Imperial forces. Fall of the Samurai is due out in March.

We didn’t see this coming. Stupid, I know. But when we got our hands on an early build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I was certain it would be the game of 2011. Skyrim would be great, but it would just be Oblivion with a bit more snow. So now that it’s here, why does it feel like so much more than that?

For so many reasons – but I’ll pick four. The first is that character progression is so much more exciting, an element we’ve talked more about in our selection for RPG of the year.

That’s a fundamental change, but in other places, differences of degree are just as important. The biggest of those is just how much stuff they’ve packed into this world. A ten minute stroll in Oblivion might pass one cave and an Elven ruin – both uncannily similar to the last ones you raided. The same journey in Skyrim can lead you up a rocky mountain path, past the door to a dripping abandoned mine, under a spectacular waterfall, past rebel guards escorting an imperial prisoner, through an icecrusted underground pass, into a steampunk Dwarven ruin, through a battle between an Elder Dragon and the guards of a local village, and ultimately to an ancient Nordic dungeon that ends in a wall of Dragontongue glyphs that grant you the power to breathe jets of ice.



It doesn’t feel like a grudging reaction to a few fan complaints about monotonous dungeons, it feels like Bethesda genuinely understood how to make a richer environment. They went so many extra miles in fleshing this world out with substantial and interesting adventures that Skyrim feels like a different kind of place to Cyrodiil.

Then there’s the landscape. Mountains have a natural drama to them that gently rolling hills never did. Skyrim is the spectacular skyline other games paint on their backgrounds to suggest a wilder, bigger world than they can really give you. This time it’s really there: you can scramble up its twisting paths, tumble down its icy slopes, explore every frosted forest.

It’s so much more than just a fantasy postcard generator: this crinkled country is always hiding the next adventure behind a cloudsmudged summit or a heart-stopping drop. Not being able to see what’s over the next ridge – or where the game world ends – gives Skyrim a sense of limitless promise.



Lastly, it’s just one leap closer to the perfect open world game that the Elder Scrolls series keeps shooting for. When I first heard about Morrowind, I kept thinking there must be something wrong with it. It’s third person, right? Or the combat’s turn based? Or I’m really controlling a party? Or I can’t actually go anywhere? It can’t actually be like an FPS in a gorgeous fantasy world, utterly unrestricted and rich with story. That’s just ridiculous.

But it was, and every time Bethesda jump a bit closer to achieving that dream game, that incredible feeling of freedom hits me again. Every time they give us a new world to explore that way, my brain buzzes at the possibilities. Skyrim makes such huge improvements to the magic, the stealth, the characters and the landscape that they all feel real again, and the immersion is complete.

It won’t stay fresh forever. But when Bethesda release a game that makes Skyrim feel clunky and barren, we’re all in quite a lot of trouble.

Check out our Skyrim review for more.

Highly recommended: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Total War: Shogun 2, League of Legends, Minecraft, Limbo.

We elevate the Total War games beyond simply being good strategy games because we believe they’re story-engines: that not only do they offer deep and difficult decisions about how to paint the map your colour, but they also entertain you with your own genius.

Shogun 2 is a spectacular return to form. Partly, it’s the period: a time in Japanese history when heroes and villains rise and fall. Partly, it’s the technology: there’s little in PC gaming that can match the drama of a full speed cavalry charge. But mostly, it’s because the game creates interesting drama. The time when you had to rush an army home to fend off a betrayal from your neighbour clan. The time when you hid an army and engineered an ambush. The time when your veteran clan leader dismounted, and held the line while thousands of peasants rolled into the front gate. That time when… you’ve got the stories. You remember.

Highly recommended: Frozen Synapse and Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.