Today The Creative Assembly and Sega announced a new project called "Total War Saga,"which will be a series of historical spin-off Total War games bridging us over to the next big title after Warhammer II.

The first game of the series will be directed by Jack Lusted, that the Total War community knows well, since he used to be a fan and modder before moving on to work with the studio.

The games won't spawn hundreds of years like mainline games of the series, but will be more like spin-offs focused on specific moments of history, and the developer explained that will be similar to the Fall of the Samurai spin-off of Total War: Shogun II. Incidentally, this massively pleases me, as Fall of the Samurai remains one of my favorite.

These games will basically be iterations on previous games, based on the existing engine, but showcasing a pivotal moment or conflict. The fact that the focus will be narrower doesn't mean that they will be short (Fall of the Samurai surely wasn't), and they will still be epic sandboxes in which a lot happens in a shorter time frame. If Fall of the Samurai is an indication, each turn will cover less time, instead of a season or a full year like in mainline titles.

To be more precise, the first Total War Saga game will have a map as big as Attila gameplay-wise, and a campaign will last just as long, but the scale will be different, with the map covering a much smaller area in actual miles. It will be another spiritual follow-up to Total War: Rome II, like Total War: Attila, moving the time period forward in pretty much the same way. It will be fully revealed over the next few months.

The first Total War Saga will come before the next mainline historical game, which will be a "huge" game set in a period the studio has not visited yet, developed by a much larger team.