Creative Assembly wil SteamOS ondersteunen

Creative Assembly, ontwikkelaar van Total War: Rome II, wil SteamOS graag ondersteunen. De ontwikkelaar stelt dat de Steamcontroller en Rome II een goede match zou zijn. Een port naar SteamOS ligt dan ook voor de hand.

“There’s absolutely no reason why not. It’s not something that’s ever particularly worried us,” zo zegt Total War-director Rob Bartholomew over de mogelijke port. “We port to Mac already, so we’re kind of used to porting Total War to other OSes – or at least our partners at Feral who do that Mac work for us, that’s certainly something we’re very familiar with."

“We’ve certainly got no worries about Linux as a platform, and as you know, we’ve appeared on the SteamOS page, and our intention is absolutely to support the OS.”

Bartholomew liet verder weten dat de studio een goede samenwerking heeft met Valve.

“If we ever did have any problems with that we’d certainly solve it with them,” aldus Bartholomew. “We’d obviously want to make sure that if we released a version of Rome II for SteamOS specifically, that it worked really nicely with the infrastructure that they’ve got planned for that.”

De vraag blijft natuurlijk wel hoeveel tijd de studio bijvoorbeeld over heeft om de oudere Total War-games te porten naar SteamOS. Bartholomew stelt dat Creative Assembly eerst het succes van Total War: Rome II op SteamOS af zal wachten voordat andere games naar SteamOS geport worden. Toch zijn die games nog steeds erg populair: in 2012 werden nog twee miljoen 'oude' Total War-games verkocht.

“I think the great thing about Steam for us as a distribution platform and certainly for the older games in our back catalogue [is that] they’re not in the budget racks in Games anymore,” zo zei Bartholomew. “Well, they probably are in the UK but certainly in a number of other territories I’m sure they aren’t."

“We’ve always strived to be at the front of technological advancement and Medieval II is still a damn fine game by modern standards, and it’s still one of my favourites and I play a great deal even today - so it has that level of popularity.”

Hoewel de details dus nog niet duidelijk zijn, is Creative Assembly wel enthousiast over de mogelijkheden van SteamOS.

“Sure, Total War’s going to be a bit more desktop based than your Call of Duty or any other first person shooter out there [that] is going to appeal more to the kind of person who wants to sit down, but it’s great to have that extra avenue. I went from a sceptic at the start of our visit to Steam to thinking they’d definitely got something, and something like Rome II is not out of its depth at all in that kind of environment.” zo besloot de director van de Total War-serie.