Wargaming Alliance and Creative Assembly announced that the Total War ARENA open beta will launch later this month. The Total War ARENA open beta marks an important milestone for Total War ARENA.
Total War ARENA was announced in 2016 as part of a special publishing arrangement between SEGA, Wargaming and Creative Assembly. It entered closed alpha testing in 2017 and has been in closed beta since September 2017.
Total War ARENA is the first free-to-play title in the Total War franchise. It features huge 10 v 10 multiplayer battles where each player controls hundreds of units at a time.
Total War ARENA – Introducing Carthage
Alongside the announcement of the Total War ARENA open beta, Wargaming Alliance and Creative Assembly announced that the faction of Carthage will join the game.
Carthage is led by two of history’s most fearsome leaders; Hannibal Barca and Hasdrubal Barca. Hannibal is most famous for crossing the Alps with his elephants. Those same elephants are featured units in the Carthage army.
Hannibal and Carthage join the Romans, Greeks and Barbarians as playable factions in the Total War ARENA open beta. Ambushing the enemy with heavy infantry and the formidable War Elephants is how Carthage shines.
Wargaming and Creative Assembly
Wargaming and Creative Assembly’s partnership is incredibly important to both companies. When speaking with Al King from Wargaming and Josh Williams from Creative Assembly, the power of the partnership and mutual respect was palpable.
Al King – Wargaming
We [Wargaming] are known for tanks, planes, and ships. We’re still completing the global rollout of those three. So, there’s still quite a lot of work to do, but inevitably, when you have been successful and you’re thinking about where your growth might come from in the future, you start thinking about a third party publishing strategy.
We created the Wargaming Alliance brand with this wonderful free for all sort of proposition. Thinking about who would be a really good partner and looking for a fit in terms of the kind of games that make sense in our portfolio. Anything with war in the title makes the grade.
Our audience tends to skew older than a lot of games companies and our players tend to have an affinity with either the military, engineering and in this case history. Total War was a good fit in terms of both subject matter, genre, and audience type.
In fact, Creative Assembly was the one who picked up the phone first. There was a bond through a passion for programming and gaming.
Josh Williams – Creative Assembly
Wargaming was great to work with it had learned all about the free-to-play and multiplayer environments.Wargaming also learned how to do that in a really good way.
We released a patch in September and found an issue with it. Two days later we released a hot fix for it. That’s something that Total War waits to do. We do these big content patches, but now we are able to just fix things to kind of get in there really quickly. It’s all about being a service rather than being a big release. Wargaming really helps in that regard.
Total War ARENA open beta
The Total War ARENA open beta will be held from February 22. The Total War ARENA servers will be taken offline on February 19 at 9PM AEDT to prepare for the open beta.
To join the Total War ARENA open beta players need to head to the official website.
Those who join the battle will be able to command either the Greek, Roman, Barbarian or Carthaginian faction and fight with up to 19 other players online.
Total War ARENA is a free-to-play, historical multiplayer battle game. It will be in open beta for PC from February 22, 2018.
