Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Creative Assembly reveals free-to-play MOBA-style Total War: Arena game

Where history's greatest commanders and their armies do battle.

Total War house Creative Assembly has announced a new game called Total War: Arena. It's a free-to-play online MOBA-style spin-off.

In it you "pitch history's greatest commanders and their armies against each other in massive team-based battles", announced the announcement.

Arena is entirely online and mixes RTS and MOBA gameplay. It's in development at Creative Assembly's UK HQ, is presumably a PC game and you can sign up to help with the closed beta now.

Beyond that, though, we know nothing, just like Jon Snow.

Creative Assembly's first foray into F2P gaming tallies with what the Total War father Mike Simpson told me last summer: that five years from then, "We'll have a whole bunch of new games out there; we will have explored lots of areas we've not been in before ... we might have expanded out in some interesting directions."

Creative Assembly exploring the free-to-play MOBA scene follows Creative Assembly exploring touch-screen iOS and Android gaming with Total War: Battles, which turned out to be really good - and that bodes well for Arena.