Age of Ensemble, Part 2: Perfecting the Formula
12/17/2008 4:51 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 5
As powerful as defenses were, nothing in the game could stand up to a mass of trebuchets, a once-obscure siege weapon that no game had used before. It is a tribute to Ensemble's influence that the trebuchet is now everywhere in games using a medieval theme. Shelley finds this both amusing and rewarding. "Little things like that, we take pride in. We actually set out to make a game we wanted to play, and were probably a little naïve. Microsoft loved the fact that [their] game ... made history alive. There are kids that now know what a trebuchet is because of our game."
Queuing multiple units of different types was a big advance.
For Tom Chick, Crispy Gamer's real-time strategy columnist, the history stuff isn't as important. "Ultimately, that was a superficial contribution to the genre. Their real contribution was much more subtle, important and unappreciated. Although it earned them criticism, Ensemble wasn't afraid to be complex. In and of itself, this isn't necessarily a good thing, but with Ensemble, there was a lot of inspired design deep in that complexity."
The complexity helped to mask a game that Dave Pottinger admits is full of imperfections, the sort of thing that would be impossible to get away with today. "We love [playing] our games at a population cap of 50 or 75, so we were pissed off when people online wanted to play at 100 or 125. For us, that ruined the game. Nowadays we plan for that. I think we tend to overbalance our games now [for the hardcore audience].
Age II shipped with tons and tons of problems and, in the end, they're not a big deal.
"It took us a long time to figure out that the answer to balance is not 'nerfing.' If something is overpowered, [many designers] fix that by weakening it. It's much, much harder to look at it and say 'Everything else is underpowered. Let's fix everything else.'"
The big buy
Age of Empires II followed the same basic plan, but was much deeper.
The overwhelming success of
Age of Kings was enough to persuade Microsoft that Ensemble was a developer not only worth publishing, but worth owning. For Sandy Petersen, the 2001 buyout was a reason to celebrate. "A lot of us cheered because our worthless Ensemble stock was now useful Microsoft stock."
The resources were a great blessing for Shelley and Goodman. "We could spend the money to make
Age of Empires III. We set the goal to make the best-looking RTS in the world, and Microsoft was willing to let us do that."
Unavoidably, some adjustments would have to be made. "In the short run," Shelley says, "it didn't change much. We had to do performance reviews and rank our employees. Tony is a really kind person, so we probably held on to some employees longer than other companies would have. Microsoft helped us weed those people out.
"When we joined Microsoft, I had to sign a personal employment agreement, and I'd never done anything like that. I was encouraged to get legal assistance and ended up spending a lot of money on an attorney. I thought this was nuts, since I knew Stuart Moulder and Ed Fries really well. But the attorney told me, 'Yeah, that sounds great, but they may not be there forever.' And that was prophetic."
