Total War: Warhammer is getting a Battle Map Editor this month and for some reason its name is Terry
Nice to meet you, Terry.
Total War: Warhammer developer Creative Assembly has announced it will release a Battle Map Editor tool before the end of February.
The tool, which for some reason is called "Terry", is currently available for beta testing through Steam. Although Terry will be available on Windows 7 and 8 as well, only a Windows 10 build is available for testing purposes. Hit up the Total War: Warhammer forums for instructions on how to opt in.
Here's what you can do with Terry, the Total War: Warhammer Battle Map Editor I can't stop imagining as an earnest-looking bald man in a tweed suit and bowtie:
- Land battle map editing for custom and multiplayer battle.
- Full suite of environment models, props, SFX and VFX for map creation.
- A.I. hints, deployment editing, no-go regions, terraforming, texture terrain painting, vegetation terrain painting and more.
- Customizable layout and layering within the tools for easy organization and navigation.
- Easy one click export that creates a .pack file for you map, allowing you to toggle it on and off in the Total War Launcher as you wish.
- Live map transfer in multiplayer. Simply host a game with a custom map and other players will download it automatically without the need to subscribe on the workshop. The maps will be deleted after the battle (unless subscribed to in the workshop or manually placed in the game data folder)
- Share maps via steam workshop and subscribe to your favourites. Having maps enabled will not affect your ability to join multiplayer games.
You may notice that Terry, for all his I mean its, its virtues is not able to produce custom campaigns for Total War: Warhammer. Unfortunately, no such tool is forthcoming.
"Unfortunately we can’t release a Campaign Map Editing tool for Total War: Warhammer, as it doesn’t exist," the Creative Assembly said.
"The way we build the campaign map at CA is through a series of processes involving a mix of tech we make and 3rd party tools we don’t own the right to distribute, within a development version of the game. This is the best way for us to create our games, and we don’t use an all-in-one editor that you might be thinking of.
"While it is theoretically possible to create an editor like this, it wouldn’t benefit our development process, would take us a long time and delay the next Total War releasing and would mean that we’d be making an editor and not a game, which is what we would much rather do."
Fair enough, and although Terry has limitations there's certainly potential for creative Total War: Warhammer modders to produce interesting work regardless.
Check out the video for more details on Terry, whom which I reiterate is not a person but the Total War: Warhammer Battle Map Editor. Terry definitely doesn't wear red shoes. Why can't I stop thinking about this?