Age of Ensemble, Part 3: The Closing Chapters
12/18/2008 7:34 PM | 9 Comments | Page 2 of 5
According to Greg Street, the Home City was such a central idea that it had to be reworked over and over. He says there were about 40 variations on the city, and Shelley remembers an early design of
Age 3 being more similar to a board game -- it more about accumulating points than exterminating your enemy. Though both are very happy with how the Home City turned out, Dave Pottinger is more critical of the final iteration.
"It was a really cool idea, but not integrated well. We didn't have the balls to change the game to make it work. We should have made it a bigger part of the campaign and built the entire game around it."
Even within Ensemble, there is debate over how well the Home City concept was implemented.
The pressure to make the game more innovative had some missteps. A heavily promoted combat model, making deeper use of formations, artificial intelligence scripts and line of fire, was never finished in spite of up-to-the-end work by Pottinger and Street. "We wanted to have something amazing to show people all at once," says Street, "so they would evaluate the design fairly rather than nitpick at every step along the way. It was a noble cause, but not the Ensemble way, and was doomed to failure. The combat feature was coming together very well, and I still think it was a mistake not to ship with it. But it came together late, without the support of the entire team. And Ensemble was not a place to ram even a good design down the throats of a team that wasn't behind it."
In spite of widespread satisfaction, everyone I spoke to expressed some ambivalence about
Age 3's step toward greater complexity. Once you throw in the two expansion packs and on-map native tribes,
Age 3 has hundreds of units. "Is a ninja infantry or counter-infantry?" asks Pottinger. And the story-based campaign, though a point of pride for Street, did a poor job of introducing players to all that was going on.
Expansions added Native American and Asian nations, transforming the base game.
For critic Tom Chick,
whose review of Age of Empires III provoked a public scolding from Shelley, this complexity is part of the game's charm. "I'm thinking of the way natives work, the explorer mechanic, how navies and artillery are balanced and, most of all, their economic model, which went well beyond food/wood/coin. There was experience, Home Cities, trade, factories and native dancers in the
WarChiefs expansion. There was the weird Ottoman system with the mosques and those damn Dutch with their banks. If you couldn't master Ensemble's economic model, you couldn't play
Age of
Empires III. And it was a lovely economic model to learn to master. You will never see [Electronic Arts Los Angeles] or Relic try something like that."
Plus, the goal of making the best-looking RTS ever was achieved.
Age of Empires III won plaudits for its reflective water, gorgeous unit design and convincing forests. Just like earlier Age games, it was a smash hit that would pop up on bestseller lists with every expansion and price drop. It's unlikely that anyone thought it would be the last Age game that Ensemble would ever make.
