Blood? Gore?

[Megas Methuselah]

Blood and gore is for shooter games and the like. I believe Nelson hit the spot with his post.

[Mailman653]

I think something similar to what was seen in MTW2 is appropriate, especially after a melee brawl. As for cannons, again....something along the lines of MTW2, maybe a puff of red from the initial impact, but that's it.

If you want blood and body parts flying around, play Red Orchestra.

[Megas Methuselah]

Yeah, M2TW was/is suitable.

[PBI]

I seem to recall reading a similar question put to CA, I believe way back in the run up to Rome. If I recall their reasons for not adding realistic blood and gore to the game went along the lines:

*It would require a lot of extra processing power without really adding anything tactically.
*It would raise the age rating and thus lose them potential customers.

Which is pretty much what people have said here.

I would tend to agree that the M2TW level of gore is sufficient; it is graphically simple and not too explicit, but still nicely gives the sense of your troops having been in a really messy and grueling melee scrap.

Welcome to the Org, therifleman, I'm sorry we all seem to have poured cold water on your first post! I would agree with you on the cannonballs though, it does look quite ridiculous in M2TW when a cannonball rips through a unit and the men all calmly fall down one after the other as though they are synchronized swimmers. I believe ETW is going to address this, CA have said they are using ragdoll physics so soldiers hit by cannonballs should get thrown around in a suitably sickening manner.

[Pantsalot]

I believe I recall them mentioning that they were adding a new feature
which would allow what you are requesting, they said that now limbs could
be blown away by cannon fire & blood would be better. Though watching
the land battles trailer I couldn't see any blood, though that may be because
they disabled it for censorship reasons.

[Owen Glyndwr]

Meh, I think it would be pretty cool. However first thought went to: if they added that, would my computer be able to handle that? To which my brain immediately answered hell no!

In all actuality, I'd be happy simply to have the M2 level. I liked it because I was able to tell how close my general (not the mention the enemy's ) was damaged, and when I should get them the hell out. However, hopefully that won't matter too much because that era seemed to be slightly more 1-hit KO.

[Caliburn]

Gore in Total War games... I don't think it's necessary.

Already the games depict battles pretty gruesomely at times. For example, in M1 the "Butcher button" during battles is pretty gruesome.

Light cavalry riding down fleeing enemies (albeit they're "captured"... To be executed later!)... Even bloodless corpses littering the battlefields are still corpses.

I don't think seeing tiny musketeers go splat is that important. The sound scape is at times pretty disgusting, even though after playing hundreds of battles it's hard to notice. Especially in M1, with random screams of pain, anger and fear, I was shocked when I first started playing.

Funny thing, though... The more details there are on the battlefield, the more clinical it appears. Those sprite men have always given me a better feeling of controlling living forces, unlike those highly detailed clone armies of Rome kind of sliding at each other at warp speed.