Hyperbole is an indulgence dabbled in by game reviewers so frequently that at times it becomes difficult to divine the enthusiasm from the insight: Every year, enough games are touted as “genre-defining” and as “the new benchmark” that we’re fast approaching the day when we take their usage with a grain of salt. Many of us may already do so. In very real terms, such expressions are becoming so diluted that they now teeter on the precipice of cliché.

Think on it briefly and it begs more professionally existential questions: Are we boot-licking hired-geeks over-stimulated on free games, press passes and cocktails? Beanbag-owning hacks regurgitating press releases between the load screens of unreleased titles? Are we the self-appointed and occasionally self-righteous champions of a community, furiously shaking our wiimotes at The Man? Do we use too many hyphens?

Small wonder sardonically ruthless critiques from the likes of Zero Punctuation and Penny Arcade are so wildly popular.

The truth is that it’s in our own interest to guard against the rampant overuse of hyperbole. After all, what happens on those occasions when something truly unique and worthy lands on our desks? To what phrases do we turn to when we need to tell readers that “this product is a cut above the rest” after we’ve dried up our rhetorical repertoire on tomorrow’s bargain bin fodder?

So it is with a printed page of navel-gazing caveats under his belt that this writer begs supplication before a jaded and cynical audience as he describes the Creative Assembly’s Total War series as one that has been a benchmark production. The series is not without its flaws – no game is – nor is it the very last word in the real-time strategy category. But Total War’s story is one of green-eyed envy turned radical innovation, of iterative improvement and polish. That is something worthy of our regard.

It’s also story that covers five titles, five expansions and centuries of bloody conflict – and it starts in 1997.

At a glance, UK-based Creative Assembly’s breakout divergence into the RTS genre appeared to be poorly informed: In 1997, the studio’s catalogue ran from creating PC ports of sports games to developing titles for the EA Sports franchise. They were an unknown quantity to few but industry buffs and sports gamers paying close attention during credit sequences.

Moreover, the RTS genre was very much a known quantity, one populated by series such as Dune, Command & Conquer and Warcraft: wildly popular titles wherein players built and bled on the same 2D fantasy maps, level by level. In fact, Creative Assembly founder Tim Ansell has never romanticised Total War’s conceptual origins. His account is of increasing disenchantment working on sports titles destined to sell little more 100,000 copies while pig-in-makeup Command & Conquer clones effortlessly jaunted past the half-million mark. In short, Ansell looked at the gaming community’s ravenous appetite for RTS titles and raising his hand said, “me too”.

Shogun: Total War

Thus was Shogun: Total War envisioned: a low-budget, top-down RTS cash-cow for a minnow developer.

But two developments in PC gaming by 1999 radically reshaped the Creative Assembly’s vision for Shogun: Total War into something much more ambitious. The first was the maturation of the RTS market. While Blizzard saw perennial success with 1998’s StarCraft, gamers were becoming increasingly sceptical of the base-builder glut. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun rightly received a lukewarm reception. Quick turnaround clones simply weren’t flying off the shelves as they had the year before. Players were once bitten, twice shy.

The second was the introduction of 3D graphics to the mass market. In 1997, 3dfx launched the Voodoo chip. By 1999 Nvidia and ATI had joined the party with their TNT and Rage product lines. Total War’s developers were initially reserved about the feasibility of 3D landscapes but once their viability was proven, the Creative Assembly enthusiastically returned to the drawing board.

But the camera tilt from the top-down 2D view to what would become Total War’s iconic “general’s” view came with a hefty investment burden. Shogun had gone from a low budget, low risk project to an expensive and as yet unproven re-imagining of a genre that was in mild decline.

Its newly-determined focus on realism saw the number of Samurai on the battlefield multiply from hundreds to thousands. Units were now variously fearful, weary, steady or impetuous depending on how the battle was progressing. Most importantly, tactical application of the terrain became pivotal: Height conveyed range, foliage provided cover, bridges created chokepoints. A dynamic weather engine occluded player and AI visibility, froze rivers and dampened gun-powder. Military historian Stephen Turnbull was brought in to help apply the principles of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to AI mechanics.

From the conceptual outset, Shogun had intended to handle combat and resources in two different formats. The game’s Risk-style campaign map was to be a self-contained space in which players could manage recruitment, construction and matters of governance. Figures representing armies and agents would be negotiated around a map divided into provinces until they came into conflict with one another. Now, the map was to add a strategic overlay and provide narrative context to the game’s main attraction.

Shogun: Total War was released on the PC in June 2000 to widespread acclaim.

Set during the Sengoku jidai, a period of political upheaval in feudal Japan, players took control of one of seven aspiring Daimyo bent on claiming the Shogunate – the hereditary title of supreme military ruler of Japan. Shogun’s two interrelated components worked together smoothly – each dramatically shaping events on the other. Sure enough, the game’s 3D battlefields, populated by thousands of multifaceted sprites, were duly heralded as an innovative advancement for the RTS genre.

As a rule, a game is in a good place when community commentary runs to “what if” rather than “no, because” (in a manner of speaking). But for all its functionality and relevance, the campaign map never felt fully realised.

Shinobi, the game’s espionage units, could be moved but not given orders – whether they incited rebellion or conveyed intelligence was left to chance. And apparently the Creative Assembly also brought in a zookeeper to help apply the mating principles of captive panda to Daiymo AI: The arbitrary natural death of your heirless warlord could undo weeks of work in an infuriating moment. Then and now, “game over” screens are better reserved for player error.

On the battlefield, the tactical benefit of 3D terrain was occasionally extreme. Each province had a single battlefield and attack and defence positions were finite: A unit of just-recruited-off-the-paddy archers could bring an advancing horde of seasoned warriors to its knees with the right amount of elevation. Bridges had the same effect. A handful of maps were death traps.

On the whole however, Shogun was a masterstroke. Realism and scale proved to be welcome additions to mainstream real-time strategy – a genre that cast a wide net, but one in which it was widely believed that to have mass appeal, a game should sugar-coat it’s offering with otherworldly environs, spectacular scenarios and the occasional scantily-clad femme.

Almost immediately after completing Shogun’s Mongol Invasion expansion, the Creative Assembly began working on a sequel entitled Crusader: Total War. Delving into Japanese history was an inspired point of difference for the studio’s first RTS outing. It’s possible that European history may have sat easier with prospective audiences but on the other hand the record of western conflict has been parsed over so many times that the game could have risked being lost in the clutter.

Suffice to say, it’s interesting to speculate on what impact setting the first game in medieval Europe might have had on the game’s reception.

Nonetheless, with a freshly-clocked track record behind them and an enthusiastic audience to draw upon, “new and different” became a matter of less urgency: Crusader, it seemed, need only elaborate.