Total War: Pharaoh takes the series back to vanilla history

It’s some time in the 1200s BCE, a big wooden horse and/or earthquake is cracking open the gates of Troy and a thousand ships are crossing the Aegean – and, about 1500 kilometres away, another legendary ancient civilisation is on the edge of crumbling, too. While Ancient Greece was in full Odyssey mode, Ancient Egypt was heading towards the collapse of its New Kingdom, and with it the Bronze Age.

Total War: Pharaoh previewDeveloper: Creative Assembly SofiaPublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 2023 on PC.

This is the realm of Total War: Pharaoh, the follow-up from the Total War: Troy studio, which Creative Assembly Sofia announced just last month with a release window of some time later in 2023. Here’s the setup: old boy Pharaoh Menerptah’s grip on his rule is weakening. New challengers are jostling for power. Plus the Sea Peoples are attacking in waves, law and order’s breaking down, and the weather’s getting a bit funky, too.

Why Egypt? As director Todor Nikolov put it to me, “because Egypt is quite popular, and was never represented in a Total War title.” Usually Egypt was shown in the middle or later historical periods, he explained, such as the Ptolemaic era where “Greeks were all over Egypt” already. The Bronze Age was chosen this time because, “first of all, by that time, it’s the New Kingdom of Egypt, and it has grown to be an empire that extends far away from the banks of the Nile.”

“In distant lands, in addition to that there are other great empires like the Hittite Empire… and the late Bronze Age also ended with a collapse. That was a violent period where, you know, there were civil wars and external invaders and disasters and whatnot… the very setting is quite fitting for the purposes of a Total War title. You need an arena where a conflict can take place.”