Age of Ensemble, Part 2: Perfecting the Formula
12/17/2008 4:51 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 5
Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this feature.
The sequel
"I think
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings was our best game," says Bruce Shelley. Dave Pottinger agrees, as does Tony Goodman. In fact, if sales were a reliable indicator of quality, the gaming world's judgment would probably be the same. Two million copies were shipped on release, and they, too, quickly sold out. "People still play it online," says Shelley. "When Microsoft wanted to take down the servers, we stepped in to provide them because of demand."
Goodman credits the success to a team that was "hitting on all cylinders."
The campaigns were still roughly historical, though Braveheart has no gold-mining scenes.
"It was our focus. We had our 2-D engine. We had all these features that we didn't get to put in
Age of Empires.
Age II was an evolved
Age I. We still had our purist mentality about what was fun about the game." He argues that some of this purity has been missing in subsequent Ensemble games. "People who play their own products sometimes become hardcore and lose the ability to see what's fun and simple. With
Age II, we were still in that stage where what was simple was still fun for us."
Designer Sandy Petersen is especially proud of how
Age of Kings made defensive strategies (which he acknowledges were not universally popular) viable. "You could garrison units you were building in your barracks so that they weren't killed one-by-one when you were under attack. Town centers and castles, though they could be used offensively -- and often were -- enabled you to wall in and protect yourself, something you couldn't do in other games. This made games longer. In other games, you would worry about an early attack. In
Age II you can say 'Let them come.'"
Age of Empires II had larger armies, larger buildings and larger maps.
Brian Reynolds of Big Huge Games sees
Age of Kings as especially significant in RTS history. "It had a surprisingly realistic sense of scale between people and buildings, and at the same time evolved RTS gameplay in a direction which seemed richer than what was going on in the genre at the time. Other than the anomaly of
StarCraft, we weren't seeing a lot of gameplay innovation in RTSes, and here was a game full of it." Reynolds cites
Age of Kings as his inspiration to make real-time strategy games, and BHG's
Rise of Nations is an obvious descendant.
"
Age of Kings was the first major RTS to have units march in formation," says Greg Street, the lead designer on the expansion
Age of Empires II: The Conquerors. "It was a huge innovation. Not only did it look great, but it changed the way you played the game. You could actually keep your troops together. You could actually defend siege weapons or mountain passes."
And, though it clearly followed
Age of Empires in having over a dozen slightly different factions, it gave each side a unique unit and, in
Conquerors, a unique technology. The distinctions between sides were not as stark as in Blizzard's
StarCraft, which was the paradigm of wholly different factions in an RTS. But they were a chance for Ensemble to integrate their own understanding of what made each culture different, especially in its military arm. And they got to introduce one of the most significant superweapons in gaming history -- the trebuchet.
