Total War's developers are making a third-person melee action game

Creative Assembly have a mixed history when it comes to games that don’t have “Total War” in the title, but that’s not stopping them from trying. The studio announced today that alongside future Total War games, the recently announced Hyenas, and another unannounced project, they also have a fourth game now in development. It’s an action game and they’re recruiting staff “with experience working on third-person titles using the Unreal 5 engine.”

CA announced the project in a post on their website, much as they did with the other unannounced project back in May. This new action game is being developed by Creative Assembly Sofia, the studio based on Bulgaria’s capital which opened in 2017 and developed A Total War Saga: Troy in 2020. The Sofia studio will continue to work on Total War projects alongside a new team.

There is currently no other official information on the game, and this is obviously an announcement designed to facilitate the recruitment of a team. It could be extremely early days, and the project could take years and years or never come to fruition.

You may be able to infer a few extra details from various job postings on the Creative Assembly site. For example, they’re looking for a senior combat designer with understanding of “3rd person melee combat” to join the “Battle Design Team”. They’re also looking for a lead concept artist to help design the game’s “vast fictional world”, which perhaps suggests it’s not got a historical real-world setting. But honestly, who knows.

In June, Creative Assembly announced Hyenas, a scifi team-based shooter that currently looks like it’s going to arrive three years late to a genre party. Outside of endless Total War games, they also developed (over many years and false-starts) the fantastic first-person horror Alien: Isolation, strategy spin-off Halo Wars 2, and back in 2005, third-person historical hack-and-slash Spartan: Total Warrior.