Craig Laycock
Craig (also known as CraigTW) is the Community Manager for Total War, so he gets to look after Total War’s Twitter, Facebook, Forum, web site and just about everything else Total War related! In addition to these noble duties, you might have seen him talking to the press when he went to Australia and New Zealand expounding the virtues of Shogun 2. He managed to bribe his way to a first class honours degree in that most noble of disciplines: journalism. After a stint in insurance communications (remarkably less fun than it sounds), he blagged his way into The Creative Assembly in 2008, working first in QA and then in marketing, fulfilling a long-held dream to work on Total War games along the way.
He travels a lot and counts Japan, the USA, Egypt, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand among the countries crossed off in his little book of travel. He would very much like to return to Asia, with a return visit to Japan in his mind, as well as visits to Hong Kong and China.
Fact fans might like to know that Craig appeared on University Challenge way back in 2002. His university lost, but to the eventual semi-finalists – and Craig answered a question about Marmite correctly to mass applause. He’s still really proud of that moment.
Posts by CraigTW
TEd Battle Map Editor Revealed!
So, in the first episode of Rally Point, we mentioned that something new was coming from The Creative Assembly – something you’d not seen before – and we said we’d talk about it on May 18th. Well, we’ve decided to bring forward that announcement to give the community some time to digest what we’re doing [...]
[Read More]Dragon War Battle Pack: Foes will tremble!
Today we’ll be launching the Dragon War Battle Pack, a complete suite of historical battles for the award-winning Total War: SHOGUN 2. The Dragon War Battle Pack consists of six consecutively-played legendary battles from the Boshin War, depicting the campaign of Saigo Takamori. Previously only available in the “Fall of the Samurai” expansion, they can [...]
[Read More]Total War Battles: Interview with Renaud Charpentier
Here at The Creative Assembly, we’ve always embraced new ideas and innovations. With the original Shogun: Total War, we combined campaign gameplay with real-time battles to create a whole new genre. Ever-mindful of that spirit of adventure, we’ve just released Total War Battles: SHOGUN – a brand new tactical handheld game designed to bring a [...]
[Read More]FAO Modders: Changes to ESF/Save format
Hello modders! For Fall of the Samurai, we’ve made a number of changes to the savegame and startpos formats (chiefly compression) in order to optimise them and reduce their size. An unfortunate side effect of this that we’ve identified is that community-generated modding tools to read these files will no longer function. We’re really keen [...]
[Read More]Fall of the Samurai: And the press say…
Hi all, So, as you may be aware, myself (CraigTW) and Studio Communications Manager Al Bickham have been flying around the world over the past couple of weeks chatting to journalists and letting them get hands-on with Fall of the Samurai for themselves. Some of the press coverage is now starting to hit for that, [...]
[Read More]Shogun 2: bringing home the awards
We’re delighted to say that Total War: Shogun 2 has brought home a raft of prestigious awards in the end-of-year round-ups, which the team here at CA are absolutely ecstatic about. Here’s the full run down of what we’ve won just in the past few days. *** PC Gamer “Game of the Year” Awards, [...]
[Read More]Fall of the Samurai box art revealed
We’ve revealed the box art for Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai! We want to know what you think of it. Let us know in the comments. **** The end of the Samurai era, the dawn of an empire. Fall of the Samurai is the standalone expansion to the award winning [...]
[Read More]Blood, guts and no shortage of gore: it’s the Blood Pack DLC!
For our next bit of Shogun 2 DLC, we’ve decided to do something a little bit different… We’ve often said before that blood is something we’d like to do if we feel the setting’s right and it’s appropriate. That’s always been hindered by a key hurdle: inserting blood and gore into our games would raise [...]
[Read More]Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai announced!
Well, we said we’d have some news coming “soon”, and here it is! We’re delighted to announce a brand new standalone expansion for Total War: Shogun 2. Fall of the Samurai is a huge piece of new content and it’s coming March 2012. The scale of this expansion is significantly larger than anything we’ve produced [...]
[Read More]Ultimate Total War Fan Competition – The Shogun Joysticks!
It’s that time of year again – the Golden Joysticks have come around, and this year we’re thrilled to say we’ve been nominated in two major categories! We’re up for Best Strategy Game and Ultimate Game of the Year, both incredible accolades that we’re amazingly proud of. If you’re keen for us to win, you [...]
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