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Exclusive: AOEIII Q&A Feature
Derek dela Fuente
14/02/2005
Greg Street, Ensemble Studios Lead Designer, presents us with an extensive look...
PC Gamers will be pleased to know that the award-winning, real-time-strategy series, Age of Empire, returns with lots more features and added realism. Having already sold in excess of 16 million units worldwide, the third instalment will take gamers to another level with advanced battle physics and unparalleled visual detail, along with captivating gameplay.
The new game picks up where Age of Empires II: Age of Kings left off, placing gamers in the position of a European power determined to explore, colonize and conquer the New World. This time period features stunning scenes, from towering European cathedrals to courageous tribes of Native Americans, and spectacular combat with Industrial Age units like rifled infantry, cavalry and tall ships bristling with cannons that will enthral fans of this franchise.
Age of Empires III (AOEIII) will also excite strategy gamers with new game-play elements, including the concept of a āHome Cityā, new civilizations, units, technologies and an immersive new single-player campaign that will span three generations.
Our man on the spot, Derek dela Fuente, spoke with Greg Street, Lead Designer at Ensemble Studios, about the Age of Empires brand and what we can look forward to with AOEIII.
TVG: The first AOE title appeared in 1997. What are some of the facets and features you see for its success, what members of the team who worked on the first product are still working on the game and how important has this been? Also have the goals and vision of the AOE brand changed?
GS: We started AOEIII by each of us trying to define what an āAge of Empires gameā meant. We all came up with a slightly different list, but there were some key components we identified: a sunny and inviting world, an attention to detail, an interesting first fifteen minutes, an expanding tree of decision making, and economic depth that eventually gives way to combat with large armies. While we considered most other features up for grabs, we didnāt want to violate any of these core tenets. At one point we didnāt even have Ages, though they have triumphantly returned. The franchise is in good hands: the lead designer, programmer, artist, producer and sound and music director have all worked on previous games in the series. Bruce Shelley is still involved in helping drive the vision and features of the game. Many of the programmers and artists who worked on the original Age of Empires are at work on Age of Empires III. I donāt think our goals and visions for the franchise have changed; we offer a real time strategy experience loosely based on history, which is easy to approach, but has a lot of strategic depth. We put enormous focus on design iteration, artistic detail and polish throughout the project. It means our games take a long time to do, but they also stay popular for a long time after they are released.
TVG: AOE III kicks off where AOE ended. Can you divulge any of the background story, setting, to the new game and for those not au-fait?
GS: In Age of Kings, you guided a civilization through the Dark Ages and up until the beginning of the Renaissance. In Age of Empires III, it is time to take that nation overseas and attempt to establish a new empire in the New World. Youāll have to find a place to build your colony, locate resources, explore the wilderness, come into contact with Native Americans, establish trade routes, compete against rival Europeans, and ultimately strive to bring glory to your home city.
TVG: Can tell us what nations will be presented and what distinguishes each of them?
GS: We have 8 European nations, plus about a dozen Native American nations. So far we have announced 3 of the Europeans: the Spanish, British and French. Most Europeans share a few key units, such as the Musketeer and Hussar, but there are several unique units as well. For example, the British have the Congreve Rocket, while the French have the mighty Cuirassier, the heaviest cavalry in the game. If your civilization has access to a unit, you can upgrade it completely. However, each civilization also has 2 unit lines that can be upgraded to an even mightier degree. For example, the British have the strongest Musketeers in the game, but the French have better Skirmishers. Each civilization has unique upgrades in their Home City as well. The Native Americans represent potential allies. If youāre the British player and you forge a strategic alliance with the Iroquois, you are essentially now playing as two civilizations, and you can combine Iroquois knowledge and warriors alongside good old British ingenuity and formations of redcoats.
TVG: How much of the game do you already have in place in terms of battles, structure, even mechanics? What is the basic creation cycle to the game and will the game change much over the next 6 months through possible feedback or early play testing?
GS: We have almost the entire game in place. We didnāt want to announce AOEIII too early, and then disappoint fans when features changed. So we kept our hand of cards close to our chest until we had a design that was really stable. We have been working on AOEIII since Age of Mythology was finished, and the game has changed a hundred times since that point, but weāre enormously proud of the gameplay we have now. Sure, weāll continue to tweak and polish everything from unit stats to UI elements, and some of that will definitely be based on feedback from fans and the media who get an early peek at the game.
TVG: AOEIII will offer unsurpassed details in realism, battle physics and visual details. Please will you quantify some of these comments? You are not using more processing power so how does this come about and will these new features be discernable in a big way!? (Could you also expand on what advanced battle physics offers and what kind of extra details there will be?)
GS: Graphically, weāve incorporated a lot of advanced features, such as shaders, realtime projected shadows, and bump and specular maps. Itās been widely discussed that we dedicated an entire programmerās time just to making the water look good (and almost the same amount of time on our cliffs). We incorporated the Havok engine to handle our physics. This lets us do everything from having trees slide down a hill when they are chopped down, to having infantry get thrown when they are hit by a cannon blast, to having the shingles fly off the Town Centre when it gets hit by a Mortar shell. Itās hard to enumerate all the details. Dead Musketeers leave their muskets behind on the battlefield. Turtles crawl out of ponds to sun themselves on logs. Bison slowly migrate around the map, but stop to graze or lie down in the sun.
TVG: AOE offers up the concept of a 'Home City'. Please tell us more?
GS: Think of the Home City as a character that persists with you through multiple games. Say you choose to be British and name your Home City Liverpool. In your first game, Liverpool is pretty puny and canāt offer you much support. You donāt have many different types of buildings or soldiers you can use in the New World and you are limited in the types of resources you can gather. However, you persevere and defeat your despicable Spanish enemies time and time again. As you do so, you bring more glory home to Liverpool, and your city becomes more and more powerful. You can choose how that power is distributed. Perhaps youād like a strong navy, including the ability to manage a fishing fleet. Or perhaps you want the ability to train a powerful new unit, such as the Grenadier. The fun part is that any of these upgrades you choose will stick with you as long as you play that city, which could last for 100 games or more. Other players, including the AI ones run by the computer, are going to evolve their city in different ways. Your Liverpool and my Cambridge are likely to look and play very differently, even though they are both British cities at heart.
TVG: The RTS genre is a very competitive one. Firstly in terms of AOE III where has the team started from in terms of code, tools and previous assets (have you started from scratch) and what other RTS games have impressed you?
GS: We started AOEIII using the Bang! engine that powered Age of Mythology. However, we have modified it so extensively to support new features and graphics that it is essentially a completely new engine. We do use a lot of the tools from AOM, such as a heavily modified scenario editor and random map scripting language, but weāve added several new tools as well, such as our proprietary particle tool and animation manager. Folks at Ensemble Studios are consummate gamers, so we play every game that has come along. AOEIII borrows some of its feel from German board games and even console games. We look at competitor RTS games mostly to differentiate ourselves. For example, AOEIII will continue to have a lot of economic depth, and will continue to let players manage large armies (more the size of AOK armies than AOM armies), but weāve also pushed the graphics envelope much further than any RTS game has attempted to do before.
TVG: Have you worked on new formations and the balancing of units, which must be a real trial seeing that in AOEII it was nigh on perfect?
GS: We have done a lot with formations. We canāt divulge the full extent of how it works yet, but suffice to say that AOEIII will do for combat what AOEII did for movement. Yet, we arenāt taking unit control away from the player. We obsess about unit and civilization balance. We have a full-time balance team as part of the design department that is composed of expert gamers. We also invite other experts to play the game and help us detect problems. We have learned a lot about what works and what doesnāt in terms of balance. We know that every strategy needs something to counter it, and every civilization needs a tool in their toolbox to deal with every problem at every stage of the game. The British boom in a different way than the Spanish, and the British counter infantry in a different way, but that doesnāt make them overall a more powerful civilization.
TVG: There were a few comments about the AI in AOE II not being as good as expected. Is this fair comment and what of the AI in AOEIII?
GS: Weād pit our AI against that of any game. What fans may not always realize is that our AI doesnāt cheat, except on the hardest / impossible difficulty setting. That is, it has to gather resources and explore the map just like you do. However, our AI has to deal with a lot of situations that donāt come up in other RTS games. We have random maps with a lot of potential obstructions (like cliffs and walls), so we canāt just keep optimizing the maps around the idiosyncrasies of the AI the way competitors can. Plus we have a lot of units on the screen that need to move around and find targets. As far as what we have planned for AOEIII, the big drive is to make the AI fun to play against. We think we know how to make a challenging AI, so now we want to make one that is fun. We want you to hate enemy AIs and cheer on allied AIs the same way you would react to human opponents. In fact, we want the AI to feel like real characters with personalities rather than a mindless CPU spamming out units.
TVG: Finally, does it worry the team, a concern, that the PC is becoming a smaller market, a more specialised one and does the next batch of next gen machines fit the bill for the future of AOE titles?
GS: As great as next generation consoles have become (and we are huge console gamers at ES), they still canāt compete with PCs in two key areas: consoles lack an input device as good as a mouse, and they still canāt offer the resolution of a PC monitor, which is especially important for an RTS game that needs to display so much text. When new consoles come out they always look great, but PCs can be upgraded all the time, while consoles can only be upgraded with each new generation of hardware. Weāve heard talk of the death of the PC before, and while we have a vested interest in Xbox (we are part of Microsoft after all), we think PCs will continue to offer the best FPS games, MMO games and RTS games for the foreseeable future.
Promises of significantly enhanced realism through the use of Havok 2.0 physics is certainly an appealing feature for the genre, and should lead to some interesting scenarios; whilst you can be sure that the series is in good hands whilst under the careful eye of Ensemble.
Weāll have more on Age of Empires III soon.
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