Ensemble Studios' latest in its established strategy series comes under scrutiny as we chat with lead designer Greg Street
15:24 So, you've got an established series that's garnered critical acclaim, secured a huge fan-base and become one of the most prominent franchises in its genre, but how do you go about trumping your own hand and improving on what's gone before? The answer to that question for Ensemble Studios, creator of the popular 'Age' strategy series, is Age of Empires III, a title that's "a classic RTS with some new twists" and that "has enough new features, including some amazing graphics, to hook in even the most jaded RTS player," as the developer succinctly puts it.
We recently caught up with Age of Empires III lead designer Greg Street to find out what else we should expect from the hotly anticipated sequel. Read part one of our interview below...
Well, we suppose a good place to start would be if you could give us a brief overview of Age of Empires III and tell us where it all began?
Greg Street: Our previous game, Age of Mythology, was a good diversion for us. It let us try some more over-the-top special effects and some outlandish monstrous type units rather than the historical soldiers we had done up until now. We are pleased with how the fans received AOM, but there was this sense throughout the office that it was time to get back to our roots and do the next Age of Empires game.
AOE3 picks up shortly after the events in Age of Kings. The European countries in particular have started sailing across the ocean in an attempt to establish colonies in (or at least drain the resources out of) the New World. Your job is to lead one of these countries to prominence, competing against your rivals for control of these new continents.
This is a classic RTS with some new twists. That is, you'll still gather resources, train soldiers, and fight the enemy. But the game has enough new features, including some amazing graphics, to hook in even the most jaded RTS player.
In a previous interview, you said that one of the reasons for choosing AoE III's time period was that, despite military technical advancement, combat fundamentals of the period weren't too dissimilar to those portrayed in Age of Kings. Is this then all about keeping things familiar for fans on the series, rather than say leaping forward to an era like World War II?
Greg Street: That's a good way to put it. There are some big changes to military strategy in this time period (the 1500s-1800s), most notably the huge role that artillery came to play on the battlefield and the importance of marching and fighting in formation. But players still get to control familiar units like cavalry and even crossbows. If and when we ever do a game set in a more modern time period, we feel that we'd have to change the way combat works dramatically. It seems silly to have even 50 infantry take on a tank, battleship or bomber and be able to win. That crosses the line for a lot of people.
In what ways are you developing on and extending core AoE gameplay in AoE III, and how is your experience with previous Age games affecting Age of Empires III?
Greg Street: In some ways, we have gotten too experienced at doing RTS games. What I mean is that it's easy for us to shoot down new ideas because we know how RTS games play and what it takes to be both fun and fair. Age of Kings was (and still is) an enormously popular game, so we constantly evaluate whether we've moved a feature too far out there and potentially lost some of what made AOK so much fun. But here are a few things we've learned that we're emphasizing in AOE3:
We want to get players to interact with each other early. It's easy in an RTS game to promote strategies where everyone is essentially playing a solo game for 20 minutes, and then comes out of their town for a single big fight that determines the game. We don't think that's as much fun.
We know that RTS games are very sensitive to what happens in the first few minutes of the game. Losing even a single villager early can force some players to resign because they feel too far behind. So while you want players to interact early, you don't want them clobbering each other inside of 60 seconds.
We've learned that our fans like interesting decisions. Some RTS games are all about executing a set of opening moves or a build order, almost in the same way that guys who get really good at fighting games just memorize what buttons to mash in what order. While that kind of game can be fun, our fans want to out-think their opponents and not just out-click them.
We have of course seen the screenshots and read about the new engine and the impact physics has on gameplay. How important is it for you to deliver a game that's as viscerally pleasing and eye-catching as it is strategically and mentally challenging?
Greg Street:The painful truth is that RTS games don't demo well. It's hard to produce a screenshot that can sum up the epic nature of a good RTS. It's hard to give someone a three-minute demo at E3 and get them to understand why your RTS is fun. Really, to understand an RTS you have to play it for awhile. So Ensemble Studios has always used our graphics as a hook. If we can get someone to pay attention to the way our game looks, hopefully that will entice them to spend some time playing it. After they play it, we're pretty confident they'll become a fan.
In the original Age of Empires, the bright and sunny world attracted a lot of new players - heck, it attracted me. In Age of Kings, it was the castles and the way soldiers marched in formation. In Age of Mythology, it was the meteors falling, and minotaurs head-butting soldiers. In Age of Empires III, we use the lighting effects, the reflections of the water, and the way cannonballs bounce off the ground to lure players in. The strategy and the challenge of an RTS are arguably still more important to the success of the game, but nobody's ever going to experience them unless they notice the game on a shelf, in a magazine or on the Internet somewhere. Graphics reel them in. Gameplay gets them coming back.
In terms of missions and campaigns, how is AoE III structured, and what modes are you including outside what we expect to be the main single-player campaign mode?
Greg Street: We have one campaign story, more like the campaign from AOM than AOK. While the AOK time period had some great characters like William Wallace and Genghis Khan, we didn't feel like the "heroes" from the AOE3 time period were as interesting (though several of them still make cameos in the story). Besides, the AOM campaign with its emphasis on characters and plot twists was well received, and so we wanted to do it again.
Structurally, the AOE3 story is told over the course of three generations. We figured that made more sense than trying to explain why a single character could survive for 100+ years. But there are some characters who show up in more than one act, and the events early in the story affect what happens later, so it still feels like a single campaign.
We always like letting players try out a diversity of civilizations in our campaigns, so what we did this time around was make up three new civilizations (one for each act) that let us combine some of the characteristics of the civilizations in the random map games. For example, the US civilization appears only in the campaign, and shares a lot in common with the British civ (as you might expect), but has some unique twists as well.
In addition to the campaign, we are devoting a lot of effort to the single-player random map skirmish-style game. You'll be able to earn levels for your Home City in single-player mode. We are working to make our computer opponents fun to play against. The British opponent looks and acts differently from the Spanish opponent. We talk about the AI more in terms of its personality now rather than how effective or ineffective it is at beating you. And of course we have a robust multiplayer component as always.
Of the eight civilisations in the game, so far you've announced the Spanish, British and French. Are you willing to throw us a bone and reveal other nations and their particular strengths in the game?
Greg Street: By the time you read this, we will have announced the Dutch, Portuguese and Germans as well. That leaves two unannounced civilizations. We're not ready to divulge them yet, but soon. All of our civilizations play more differently than their equivalents in AOK. Most civilizations have some twist to their economy.
The Dutch, for example, have fewer Settlers than other civilizations, but they can build Banks to help power their economy. The British can produce Settlers more quickly than other civilizations, and they are also the best at raising Sheep. Because of the Home City feature, you can customize your civilization to a remarkable degree. The British have strong heavy infantry and cavalry. You can choose to emphasize those traits in your Home City, or you can try to make the British more well-rounded by improving other types of units.
That's part one over, but keep eyes peeled for part two of our interview with Greg later in the week in which he dishes the dirt on AoE III's 'killer feature', combat, unit diversity, what the future holds for the 'Age' series as a whole and more!
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Demnach werden die Homcitys wohl doch nicht hochleveln im Multiplayer.
