Historian & Armor Expert Reacts to Total War: Warhammer 3

This is Toby Capwell,

historian

, author and

expert

on medieval and Renaissance weapons and

armor

. After our last Warhammer video with Toby, many of you wanted me to see more factions from Total War Warhammer 3, so today he's sharing his thoughts on a few. of the game's armies is like a unicycle with a lot of knives oh, like a hamster wheel basically yeah, yeah, that's oddly appropriate if you want to see Toby's thoughts on the rest of the game's factions, the wider Warhammer universes or any other content like Make sure to like the video, leave your opinion in the comments and of course subscribe now without further ado.

It's over. Toby the Emperor is watching over us, you can see right away with the design of this first faction, very obviously Chinese, but Chinese, where not only the reality of Chinese weapons,

armor

, architecture, art and design is there, but you also know that the belief system, the mythology, the decorative iconography, it's up to date and I mean immediately there are just screams of designers who really understand what good fantasy is. It got so extreme, uh, but it all seems really tangible, the Chinese had a lot of gunpowder weapons technology and flying lanterns and their reality was turned up to 11 and it's actually really fun to watch here, you're seeing something like that.

It's a bit of a fantastical construction with these big collars that appear, but there are plenty of examples on real human arms and armor of things like that, it's a good idea for your neck and throat to be protected, it's one of the most vulnerable areas of the human body. but at the same time you need to be able to move your neck, you need to be able to move your head, so how can you have good mobility and good protection? It's neck protection, it's really difficult, there are some fantastic elements to these soldiers, but everything they're doing seems perfectly believable and practical, these guys have some sort of handheld mortars or rocket launchers, there are stubby handheld rocket launchers like this that existed in 16th century Europe for example, it doesn't look any different, it's really interesting to see how a designer can really absorb a real historical cultural aesthetic, you know what the rules are, what the styles are, what the decorative techniques are of a real culture and then how we elaborate that into a fantasy, how we extend that and still.

Stay very grounded in reality, that's what makes the non-real elements believable. Repeat crossbows that look like competitive crossbows. Yes, they are real. The Chinese had those, the Twan shield and the rifles. It was something real. having to have a person operating some kind of ranged weapon that will take a while to reload and have them work closely with a shield bearer is a perfectly real thing, in my own work in Renaissance Europe you often see that with the crossbowmen that sometimes if the shields are very large there will be someone to carry the shield and someone to operate the crossbow, they are smaller, sometimes the crossbowmen can carry their own shield, set them up and then shoot, but having equipment like that, especially if the weapons are big. and cumbersome makes a lot of sense and there is certainly historical precedent for it, but right now we have a battle that is as unreal and fantastical as you can get and yet, because they have invested so much effort into the reality of the design, you just believe it. , you just accept the physical situation of this and they probably put a lot of thought into how these different factions would interact with each other if the size of the fighters is very different or if they are hungry for meat.

Of course, there's also the level of a fantasy where you have to see how crazy it can get, even at its craziest. Warhammer is strangely plausible, it has this physicality to it, you know, I normally don't like horns on helmets and spikes everywhere, that's a level of impracticality that normally irritates me, but in the case of Warhammer I I can't even explain why it doesn't bother me, it's like they are completely committed to what they are doing, you know, there are no half measures, everything is as far as it could go and a lot of fantasy, not that I don't have that commitment, they do some things here and there and they put some horns on it because they're supposed to have them, but it's like you're going to do it, do it and go all the way, it always feels like that, that's the kind of design aesthetic here, no matter where it takes you.

I like that the horses also have a spike on the front. Even sometimes it seems like chaos is just adding spikes, but every once in a while you think that Spike actually makes sense and royal horse armor in the 15th and 16th centuries sometimes not as much as we might think, but sometimes they had spikes. but spiked rains and spiked brides were actually where you could most reasonably find it. The difficulty is that with spikes on horses is that it is just as dangerous, if not more so, to the people handling those horses than anyone the horse might encounter on the enemy.

On the other hand, I have found some examples in medieval inventories of armor painted red and gold in the 14th century. It probably didn't look exactly like this, but King Richard II of England had tournament armor that is mentioned in accounts of the war. Royal costumes. He says it was painted red with gold stars. I like this too because you know the average AG. What you often encounter when you study the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as I do is that you constantly encounter situations that are both. Inspiringly beautiful and also horribly horrible, you know, and really beautiful things and really awful things have this strange way of coexisting in extreme worlds and and and they're realizing that here too, I mean, with these guys.

They're kind of glamorous and pretty at the same time, you know, they're wearing people's skulls. In fact, I've seen real shields that are those kind of dimensions that actually have viewing, you know, viewing ports in them that have, you know, there are little windows cut into them that you can see through them when you carry them and then also you know how to aim the gun. Here is the mirror of Sigal, God, so that you can see his beautiful face. Oh, sure, it has to have mirrors. Everyone, and that was possible historically, people often think that really highly polished steel surfaces must be a modern thing, but historically it was possible to get a mirror finish on iron and steel and there actually were armor that was polished that way, It is quite expensive. and it's very time consuming, this is another thing that struck me about Warhammer, whatever iteration you end up in, is that it always seems to me that the worst possible situation is to be an ordinary human being in these circumstances, soldiers ordinary ones that have nothing special. about them, but like you don't want to be them, ooh, there's a gentleman, he's not doing well.

I like this idea of ​​a personal, individual combat between night champions in the middle of a larger battle, that's something that actually happened and you know a high percentage of Knights concerned about their reputation and their prowess. I could try to find someone and arrange for individual combat on the battlefield. Emperor Maximilian personally killed several French champions in his first wars against the French in the 19th century. The 1480s dwarves' ideas about dwarves are now well solidified and modern culture thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies and such. Something interesting about the dwarves because they are very identified with stone masonry, fortifications and mining, there is a sense of architecture becoming kind. almost like part of their bodies and their armor and weapons look more architectural than elsewhere.

I see naked people fighting and blue tattoos and I think about those selections. There were quite a few different ancient peoples in the Bronze Age. and before, who fought basically naked, the PS is famous for supposedly painting themselves, but if you imagine in a culture where almost everyone involved in the military process wears armor and all the protective equipment they can afford or organize, appear Nudes would be a statement. wow helicopters midget gunships yes these are gyrocopters what do they do? They have cannons or can launch bombs. What drives these things? You wouldn't have explained, you would have to ask the D.

You have to ask someone else, yeah, ask the dwarves, it reminds me of something you said, I think the last time we recorded, why are they on the ground? Shouldn't they drop bombs or something? What good is air power if you have the potential to launch it? bombs in the anime in a battle like this, yeah why wouldn't you do that right? There is a lot going on at once here over a fairly large area. Are there only two players left or is it me against him uh? against an AI opponent, but you have to manage all these other battles at the same time, you have to manage every unit on the map, it's interesting to see how it starts to spread and how they've taken over enough area to give an idea of ​​what can happen in a large scale battle, a really large battle can split up and become several smaller battles, which is often difficult to understand from historical accounts, but when you study medieval battles from archaeology, where it is possible that a Sometimes you find that you know there is actually a good amount of space between different parts of the action.

The Battle of Bosworth is a famous English version where Richard III was famous for going down in flames with his heavy cavalry and then elsewhere. From the battlefield, the Duke of Norfolk is fighting the Earl of Oxford and when you read the accounts it all happens as if it were a single battle, but when you look at the archeology you know that those two parts of that battle were separated by a kilometer or more . from each other and they're actually two battles that take place separately, it's very difficult to manage them together when you don't have radios and drones and stuff, you only know what you know on your part of the battlefield, I guess, when you're playing.

You get to backtrack, but I like how they've given you a sense of different parts of the action happening over a fairly large area. What are they throwing? The stone has a passenger, well, throwing an enemy, yes, them. I have historically tied a goblin to stone, there are examples of siege engines being used for their psychological effect by throwing severed heads and dead animals and things like that. I've never heard of tying people to the projectile, that's new. your loyalty be your armor here is the Kislev Bo faction, they really go everywhere yes, this is the faction that is in the snowy eastern region of an old world occupied by humans, the ax muskets are an interesting idea, it is a fantastic answer to a real world problem that was really challenging and caused a lot of problems for a long time with the introduction of gunpowder weapons in the armies of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

These are weapons that explode once and then take a while to reload and are not super. accurate, so you need a lot of them for mass shooting to get any kind of devastating effect, but the problem with that is of course what your musketeers do at close range, how they protect themselves, especially from cavalry, initially the answer was that you use The Musketeers in concert with Pikeman and the Pikeman's long spear protect the musketeers and give them the kind of mobile fortification security they need to reload and fire again, etc., but that means his men are highly specialized , the Pikeman can't do anything other than By holding his spear, the musketeer can't do anything other than fire once every two minutes and is unavailable, not manpower efficient, which really What's needed is a way for musketeers to be able to defend themselves at close range and it seems obvious when you know it, but the bayonet was the answer to that, but it took quite a while to evolve to the point where it was actually a practical advancement.

It seems that our kind of fantasy Russian soldiers here have taken a different attitude and made sure. They have a two-handed ax built into their musket, but that's the ability of these physical objects to tell the story and to give the sense that the culture you're dealing with here has a history. and it has evolved culturally and technologically over time physical objects, weapons, armor, clothing, all of that has the power to express all of that visually, that's why you know it's so important for video game designers to know what they're doing with these things. If they do it right, it can be incredibly effective at visual storytelling, like our winged hussars, yes, that's real.

The Polish winged hussars of the 17th century had wings like that, but they were not on bears, they did not ride bears, no. There are many nice references here to the real polished cavalry armor of the 17th century, when there was a renaissance of sorts, a conscious revival of armored cavalry and the use of plate armor long after it had fallen into disuse and been revived. In the 17th century you see many of these motifs, such as the raised scales and things on the plates. There is a fabulous collection of polished wing gopher armor in the museumof the Warsaw army and there is not much written about it in English. linguistic literature only because it has only really begun to be studied comparatively recently, but it is something I would like to work on more.

It's something really interesting. Polish tars are also characterized by having such spherical IAL guards on their spears. What was the purpose of the wings? I think there is some debate. about that, but it actually looks amazing, you know, it's an example from reality where looking cool and having the right visual impact when you charge down the hill towards your enemies is an important psychological effect, okay, bear cars, ice magical cavalry beneath them or something. Yeah, because they're war sleds, right, um, right, there's a lot of ice motifs for this faction. This is Katarina, the ice witch leader of the shadow faction of Narnia.

She's not going to offer you anything. What is Turkish delight? Yes, disgusting. Disgusting things, you know, looking at this, you know what I would like. I'd love to see what her library looks like. Do these designers have a company library somewhere? Because if they do they probably got a lot of the right books, rat people who The weapon they have is very similar to a real weapon called a manhunter appropriate enough for a rat to wield a manhunter, but that's real, it's Really, it's a spring-loaded weapon that captures someone around the neck, but that's it. That's a good case where, you know, the world order is reversed and the rats get the men, instead of the other way around, a very medieval idea.

In fact, these guys have whips or something. A good number of ancient Greek slingshots are lead slingshots that have been found in archaeological digs and very often have insulting messages written on them, as if getting hit in the head with a lead slingshot wasn't bad enough. , here we get into something. of the strange scavenger machinery, this is basically their equivalent to cavalry, they make strange machines to charge at the enemy, instead it's like a unicycle with a lot of knives, oh, like a hamster wheel, basically, yeah yeah , that's strangely appropriate, there are the shield-bearing weapon teams. warlock again, yeah yeah, nice because Jezelle was a real long guy, yeah yeah, it's more typically some kind of Afghan long gun, oh I love the whole reloading sequence, that's nice, we hadn't seen that before.

Gatling guns making noise. Gunners, that wasn't my Pun, that's what they called it, right? They're hand-cranked? Yes, huh. Weird triangular shields too, that's an interesting reminder, although you know that sometimes, out of any kind of practicality or human authenticity, you consciously do something you don't know how to do. Real human culture liked it, you know. Shields shaped like an equilateral triangle may have a design benefit that implies practicality has its uses when you want something to look consciously extraterrestrial non-human. It is more difficult to identify. Harder to understand. I would never say doing things is impractical.

In fantasy design it is always a bad thing, sometimes it really does serve exactly the purpose, but it must be done intelligently and consciously. Sometimes you do impractical things that you don't realize are impractical, but I think in Warhammer they know that. exactly what they are doing, these are vampires, yes, the vampire counts are a holy faction of undead vampires, right, vampires are like Lords and Nobles, so they become Knights, mhm, while the infantry standard just rises, Dead skeletons and zombies, right, right, oh, I see. Look, the vampires, do you know that they retain their independence, while the bases are under the control of the vampires?

There's a lot of very old metal in this faction mhm mhm, a lot of them have spent a lot of time underground, right?, and they all have sides, it's true, some of them use sides, but a lot of them have swords, yes. Renaissance fighting books, martial arts manuals often refer to fighting with scythes, there were techniques to fight with sithes, although no, not on horseback because they resurrected the dead. They still have the same clothes they had when they died mhm, but a lot of it is early 16th century German style, which is interesting because the Lan in the early 16th century had this sort of fatalistic, gruesome culture.

A lot of the art that is inspired by them or that comes out of that culture often shows reanimated corpses and the specter of death seducing a woman and all these kinds of motifs again, it's very consistent in taking the kind of artistic motifs that mythology , the belief system and then literally literalizing everything, whether it's Europe, China, Poland, wherever they do it across the board very consistently and it leads in all kinds of unexpected directions. I was thinking it's fun to see these two fighting where you have a human army that looks a lot like a 16th century Renaissance army, but then the supernatural faction is stylistically consistent, it's like that army is made up of the dead from the other side, everything has this kind of internal consistency, that is, I'm still a little surprised that they manage to retain that as far as they do with their ideas, that everything still holds together and obeys the rules that they have established.

It has a really strong kind of conceptual structure. I don't know if they have a design rule book somewhere or if they're just a very consistent view. This just goes to show that fantasy isn't just about doing random things. in fact, there is as much work that goes into good fantasy as there is into making something that is historically authentic, even more so in some ways because first you have to establish what the historical authenticity is and then you have to decide where you're going with it. I hate that argument that it's a fantasy, you can do whatever you want, you know, because it's a little vague, you know, but it should still be a consistent, plausible internal environment that has some kind of rules and laws and style and culture, and you know. that you should work pretty hard to get there and not just feel like you have the right to ignore anything you know.

I guess one thing is easy to lose. The clue as to when you're critical of these things is the fact that they're also supposed to be fun, but it's nice to see that hard work and good design can also be fun and that's something I've come across a lot of in industry is this prevailing assumption that if we pay too much attention to reality or history, if we do our homework, and if what we do is historically authentic, then by definition it will be boring and uninteresting. The idea that historical accuracy is the same as boring is a shame, because look what you can come up with when you take historical reality into account.

I mean, obviously, here they are, they go much further. that, but they wouldn't have gotten here without that, you know, the Historical Foundation, all of this comes from their knowledge of real history, real art, real mythology, thank you very much for watching. Remember to comment below what other games you would like to see. watch the show and of course subscribe for more content like this and beyond.