Ara: What’s Next?
Last month’s release of Version 1.4 seemed to be well received. It marked the first update since we assumed responsibility for Ara: History Untold so we were pretty excited and nervous. It’s been a great experience! The teams at Oxide and Microsoft have been wonderful to work with and now we’re ready to start talking about what’s next.
Who are you?
You probably don’t know me but I know you. Or at least, I’d like to think I do because in real life, I suspect we’ve have a blast chatting about the history of these kinds of games. You probably liked Alpha Centauri. You probably could debate the merits of Civilization IV vs. V vs. VI. You may even be a player of Humankind and Millenium and Old World. And of course there’s Stellaris, Crusader Kings, Sins of a Solar Empire, Colonization, Master of Orion, etc. And all of these games bring different things to the genre.
In a previous entry, I mentioned how Ara has to find its own voice. That was a big challenge during the game’s initial development. The Oxide leads were the leads from Civilization V. So there was a desire to make sure this game took the game in a different direction. After all, if it’s just Civilization with different visuals, we might as well call it “Call to Power” (I suspect you reading this know the reference). The direction Ara ultimately took was to delve into what life in these time periods was like as expressed by the resources that could be used and the goods that could be produced.
Having a supply chain in a history 4X game was the right move, but in a world with games like Anno, which do it very well, the game has to really be careful in how it’s implemented, and Ara is definitely a v1.0 game in that respect. Our job is to mold the game to finding its unique place in this pantheon of amazing strategy games. Hopefully, version 1.4 showed that we were on the right track. That brings us to v2.0.
Version 2.0
There are the things we want to do and the things we can do by September. That’s when v2.0 is scheduled for release. Pick the right things to put into 2.0 and the game’s community grows and we build new things into v2.1 and so forth. Pick the wrong things and the game becomes a footnote.
Additionally, we have insisted that the features we are adding must be free and part of the game. There is no DLC accompanying v2.0. It’s a massive free update.
The key features include:
Per nation units and/or improvements.
Culture. I want to my nation to develop in its own unique way and be able to affect the world through other means than war.
Influence as a tool to use. Whether it be for getting your way in negotiations or expanding your territory, influence, should be just as powerful as military might.
Nation differentiation. Or more of it. I mentioned the units but we mean different ways of playing the game.
On top of that, there’s the other general improvements that we are working on:
Reduce micromanagement. v1.4 was a first step.
Performance improvements, especially on low end. Again, v1.4 was a first step. We’ve made a lot of progress since then.
UI improvements. Better readability, more accessible information, etc.
Warfare improvements. This could be broken into its own section. How much we can for September remains to be seen.
AI improvements including adaptive AI (can adjust itself based on how the game is going – optional feature).
Near term
We have a version 1.41 in QA right now. Various fixes and improvements. We are pretty eager to get v2.0 up as a preview. A lot of what is discussed above is already done. So we’re pretty excited to start sharing this stuff with you.