Total War: Pharaoh Preview – Can you survive the Bronze Age Collapse?
thesixthaxis.comWhile we’ve seen Total War games start to indulge in a little bit of fantasy in recent times – Warhammer, of course, was full fantasy, while Three Kingdoms was drawn from a fictionalised historical record – the series’ legacy and most popular entries have been rooted in reality. That’s the goal that Creative Assembly Sofia set out with when creating Total War: Pharaoh, to represent a pivotal period within Ancient Egypt’s history and the tail end of the Bronze Age.
Around 1200 BC, the New Kingdom era was coming to a close, the third great golden age for Ancient Egypt, and some two millennia since the nation’s First Dynasty. As Pharaoh Mernephta takes his final breaths, it leads to a power struggle between his rightful heir, Seti, his sister Tausret who wants the throne for herself, rival king Amenmesse, and an upcoming wonder kid in Rameses.
Game Director Todor Nikolov explained the choice of this setting, “One of the most important ones is that Egypt is awesome and very widely popular, and it was not represented in a Total War game in sufficient depth. Later periods of Egyptian history were represented in Rome 2, but we wanted to go back into the past and, along with Ancient Egypt, reveal more about the Bronze Age.”
“What’s really important about this period is that this stable environment fell apart and got destroyed in a period known as the Bronze Age Collapse. It was an end of the world scenario where there were external invaders, civil wars and strife, rebellions and severing of trade connections.”
Egypt’s decline during this time comes in part from this internal squabbling – there were several back-to-back civil wars – with economic difficulties that saw tombs being raided and workers striking amidst the impact of
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