TGS: Warriors Legends of Troy Media

Koei showed off Warriors: Legends of Troy at the Tokyo Game Show, a title set during the Trojan War. What begins as a truce between two cities escalates into a full-scale war, with two great armies clashing over the fate of a single woman as the conflict threatens to shake the foundations of Olympus.

Players can fight as either the Trojans or the Greeks, with two distinct storylines offering the war from opposing perspectives. Combat lets players grapple with and throw opponents, pick up and use a range of short- and long-range weapons, charge with shields, and dodge incoming attacks, across large-scale battles against legions of soldiers. Online multiplayer supports both cooperative and competitive play for up to four people. Playable characters include Hektor, commander-in-chief of the Trojan forces; his younger brother Paris; Achilles, son of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus; and Odysseus, ruler of Ithaca.

Warriors: Legends of Troy was announced for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with a release planned for sometime in 2010, accompanied by a trailer and new screenshots shown at the event.

Warriors: Legends of Troy marked something of a departure for Koei’s action lineup, which has built its reputation largely around East Asian historical settings — Dynasty Warriors drawing on China’s Three Kingdoms period and Samurai Warriors on Japan’s Sengoku era. Moving the same one-against-many combat design associated with those series to Greek mythology gave the studio a chance to apply an established formula to a setting and cast that Western audiences would likely recognise more readily than the historical Chinese and Japanese figures populating its other franchises.

The conflict dramatised in the game draws on the Trojan War as told in Homer’s Iliad, one of the oldest and most enduring stories in Western literature. In the myth, the abduction or elopement of Helen with the Trojan prince Paris drew the assembled kingdoms of Greece into a lengthy siege of Troy, pitting legendary figures such as Achilles, Hektor and Odysseus against one another on opposing sides of the city’s walls. Framing the two announced campaigns around the Trojan and Greek perspectives lets the game’s story mode retell those events from either side of the conflict, rather than settling on a single hero’s point of view.

Like other games bearing the Warriors name, Legends of Troy was built to put large numbers of enemy soldiers on screen at once, with the announced grapple-and-throw mechanics and mix of short- and long-range weapons giving players ways to break up the crowd-clearing combat beyond simple button-mashing. The addition of four-player online support, split between cooperative and competitive modes, extended a design focus the wider Warriors series has increasingly leaned on to keep its large-scale battles appealing beyond a single-player audience.