The announcement of Total War: Arena, a free-to-play multiplayer spin-off of the hugely popular series, where players worldwide get to pitch their strategic skills against each other in teams up to 10 players each, was met with a mixed response. On one hand, some heartily applaud this sound business thinking and are looking forward to the competitive aspect of the game. On the other, some see it as Creative Assembly selling out, a nightmare for its hardcore fans. Fortunately, these fears may indeed be assuaged with the recent interview Lead Designer James Russel did with Edge.

They state that they are doing so to attract more people to not only the series, but also to get more people who play Total War games to engage in its multiplayer aspect (taking into account the multitudes of people who play Total War just for its single-player campaign). We've seen previous attempts of this in Shogun 2's avatar multiplayer mode, which was moderately successful. Doing so would then result in a "great multiplayer experience" due to a larger player pool. Worryingly though, although they have stated that there won't be any "pay-to-win" scenarios in Arena, they have also stated that they will sell accelerators that "let you level-up your character faster so you get to high-level content more quickly." Hmm... suspicious? Well, we'll find out this game's true colours soon enough. Head on over to the site to find out more and sign up for the closed Beta.