opinion: On 2 September, Troy: A Total War Saga will be released on Steam along with new, large DLC. The DLC has real monster units in tow and that’s exactly what the game has been lacking from the beginning.
“The Truth Behind the Myth”. This slogan has clung to Troy: A Total War Saga as closely as Achill to his brother-in-arms Patroklos since its announcement. During all the events I attended before the release and in every developer interview, this credo was quoted over and over again. Troy was not meant to be a second Warhammer. Even if the poetic template is teeming with divine activity and mythological creatures.
And now – now this iron rule suddenly becomes brittle. Almost ceremoniously, Epic exclusivity ends on 2 September and Troy lands on Steam. At the same time, the team is releasing an extensive DLC, christened Mythos.
Why Mythos? Because the team is simply dropping the truth behind it. It all sounds like a huge and extremely varied DLC. But I can’t help but point out: Actually, Troy should never have been anything else. Truth behind the myth? This was already rubbish in the summer of 2020.
What the new DLC has on board
For the record. Troy: A Total War Saga, much like Three Kingdoms, is a Total War that attempts to combine history with fiction. The developers took the Battle of Troy as a model for their campaign. It’s a pity, however, that there are hardly any serious historical sources on this war between the Trojans and the Greeks. The best view of the events is provided by Homer’s Illiad – and nowadays we would call that epic fantasy.
For Troy, they wanted to try to put this epic into a realistic cuirass. Thus minotaurs became great men with bull helmets while cyclops wore the skeletonised skull of a dwarf elephant. Divine workings provided subtle buffs. In the Mythos DLC, that changes.
Here, veritable monsters make their entrance and they seem (unsurprisingly) to be based on the creature models from the two Warhammer games. Mythos lets us add flying griffins and massive hydras to our armies. There are real centaurs and even the three-headed Kerberos ventures out of Tartarus.
Apparently there will even be magic like in Warhammer, in the form of divine power. So summoning a tidal wave in the name of Poseidon or hurling a thunderbolt at enemies with Zeus’ help is within the realm of possibility. You can see all this in the still trailer – somehow:
Why not like this?
This is exactly what I think Troy needed from the beginning. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a history nerd at heart and even studied it. I didn’t find Total War with Warhammer, I found it with historical pieces like Rome and Medieval. While I celebrate Total War: Warhammer, never in the future would I prefer only fictional series installments. A new Medieval could even benefit from games like Troy.
But when a fictional scenario so obviously has more to offer, as in Battle for Troy, then these strengths should be played to the full. The developers themselves have repeatedly emphasised that the rather static warfare of early antiquity is not an enrichment in terms of gameplay. That’s why they wanted to provide variety with centaurs or cyclops. But then they weren’t real monsters at all.
Centaurs in Troy
Centaurs in Mythos
I respect the attempt. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy Troy as much as I did. In the test, after all, there was a 79. But over all this there was always the whiff of wasted potential. In the Illiad, Achilles fights a river, dammit! A pseudo-realistic version of Troy has already given me Brad Pitt. I just longed for a PC version that took Homer at his word!
Total War opened a new door with Warhammer and benefited from it, especially in real-time battles. And I think Creative Assembly must not ignore this achievement in the future, especially after Warhammer 3. Above all, such high-yield settings as Greek mythology must not be given away. Or rather, sold long after release for an additional 25 euros.
