Age of Ensemble, Part 3: The Closing Chapters
12/18/2008 7:34 PM | 9 Comments | Page 1 of 5
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this feature.
New worlds
By the time
Age of Mythology came out, there was a sense that the franchise, and genre in general, was getting played out. "There were several prominent articles back then about how the RTS genre was basically done," recalls Greg Street, the lead designer on
Age of Empires III.
Age III upped the ante where graphics were concerned, making the lush tropics come alive.
"Everything that could be done had been done -- or so the argument went. At the same time, we had people at Ensemble Studios who had been working on essentially the same game for 10 years and were starting to burn out."
However, with Ensemble's expertise in real-time strategy, there seemed to be little appetite at Microsoft, or in-house, for a radical new look at the genre. So Street took the team's resistance as a challenge, and challenged them in return to make "the best-looking game ever."
"[This] proved strong motivation for the programmers and artists, obviously, but also for design. We wanted the cannon knocking down troops to actually be a real part of gameplay, and not just graphical embellishment. We wanted to have long-range siege weapons. We wanted to have train tracks that looked real, not the kind of mess ... that players can spam out whenever they want.
The floating numbers are experience points, which are credited towards your next shipment from the Home City.
"We knew there were a lot of opportunities for awesome graphics: herds of bison, pirate ships firing broadsides at a galleon, musketeers firing volleys in formations, mortars shelling one of those star-shaped Vauban fortresses, Sioux on horseback, beaver lodges, early locomotives and the European capital cities themselves."
The real challenge for the team was to make the graphical and design innovations they had in mind work with their reluctance to trim features.
"Part of the team -- and the customer base! -- was extremely wedded to the
Age of Kings gameplay. In their minds,
Age 3 should have just been
Age 2 with a graphical update, and ... 'Do we really need cannons, because we kind of liked them trebuchets?'
Artillery is the master of the battlefield, provided you can protect it.
"We had a hard time pruning old features to make room for the new ones, because someone on the team ended up being in love with every one of those features. "We
have to have Wonders. We
have to have opening gates. We
have to have berry bushes. We have to have converting monks. I see the same discussions happening on
StarCraft II. This is a franchise issue, not an Age of Empires issue."
The big feature that Ensemble tried to sell gamers and the gaming media was the Home City, an intercontinental Santa Claus that would parcel out goodies as the player gained experience. As you leveled up your city, you had more payout options available to you.
"That was an idea we borrowed from role-playing games," says Shelley. "Your city is your character and you can shape it over play. A lot of our [proposed] innovations didn't take root, but we stuck with the Home City."
