We speak to Oxide Games’ Gabriela Leskur and Xbox’s Matt Turnbull about the upcoming Ara: History Untold.
It’s a fascinating time for fans of turn-based 4X strategy games as we see formulas that have been intact for many years be broken down and evolve in the newest wave of releases – and what’s to come is even more of a departure from tradition., Microsoft’s first foray into this type of strategy game.
“That idea of creating a world, a place, something new and different – that really resonated with a lot of people, so between that and enjoying how it sounds when you say it, it felt like it really did everything it needed to do,” he explains. For Xbox Game Studios and Microsoft, the development of Ara is a bigger deal than it may seem from the outside. “We’ve done strategy games, obviously,” Turnbull says, naming the iconic Age of Empires series. “But turn-based strategy on this scale is not something we’ve dipped our toes into.” For the company, this foray into another niche generally associated with hardcore PC gaming is an important step to diversify its game portfolio.
One of the core ideas for Ara was that “the world is organic” – it has regions, which are shaped by the terrain and nature, instead of hex tiles – and that players can see the changes they make have an impact on their citizens. Turnbull names open-world games as an inspiration for that particular aspect.
Leskur emphasizes the wide array of backgrounds on the narrative team with herself having a background in social studies and anthropology, while others have theirs in history and even comic books. Doing the research fueling these narrative events wasn’t just about fact-finding, but also about anthropological, sociological, and ecological patterns the team could spot. The goal was “expanding outside of just what we often think of history – who won and who lost.
The team eventually compromised on a corpus of rules to help it make those choices – and one of them has to do with the kind of worldview Ara wants to show. “With Ara: History Untold, we’re trying to show an optimistic view of history, humanity, and of what people can do when they come together to build things,” Turnbull explains.
“We haven’t done as many of the flashy things that we could have possibly done,” Turnbull says. “The team was really focused on what’s going to create the most interesting gameplay and the most interesting segmentation between the leaders.” “When they first penciled in the idea about breaking the game down into playable chunks, a lot of it was about targeting some of the challenges in the genre,” Turnbull explains. “We found that a ton of people who play these games never finish a game. They’ll just play the first part over and over again, because by the time you get to the third part of the game you’re just hitting ‘End Turn’ waiting to win or you’ve already lost.
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