Wargamer Interview With Arcen Games
Hey everyone, here's a recent interview that was done by The Wargamer which featured Arcen Games' Chris Park! A lengthy interview regarding about the history of Arcen Games, and the future that Arcen hopes to pursue into the future.
Here are some highlights from the interview:
The main reason I keep improving the game? I still play it, and I want to keep playing it for a long time. When it comes to my personal tastes, AI War is like a greatest hits album of everything that I love most about the strategy genre, and it has a lot of new stuff that I’ve not seen anywhere else, either. It would be very hard for me to play another RTS game in my weekly co-op sessions after this, unfortunately, so if I want to keep playing co-op strategy games I have to keep improving this one!
Kidding aside, I really think that the evolution of the experience is appealing to other grognards as much as it is to me. A year after release, AI War is more popular now than it’s ever been, and I think that’s because of how the game evolves. People always talk about how they wish that RTS games would have a “learning AI,” and that’s something that no strategy game has at present for a lot of technical reasons. But AI War has the next-best thing, with both an AI and a game world that is constantly growing, constantly surprising players and giving them something new to do. I think that’s pretty core to the AI War experience.
I’ve said that my intent was to support AI War in this sort of fashion for around 5 years, and we’re currently into the second year with no signs of slowing down. But honestly, new ideas just keep pouring in from the Arcen staff as well as the fanbase. So who knows, at the end of that 5 year period we might just keep right on building more and more AI War for however long there is interest from the fans and the staff. I really don’t know what the final product will look like, it’s too far into the future!
All in all, we’ve completed some 1400 items in the last year, most of which were either suggestions from players or bug reports. Looking back at the community DLC poll results thread, there are certainly some highlights there, such as riot starships, formation movement, heavy turrets, clickable alerts, flak turrets… et cetera. It’s really hard to explain the scope of what we’ve been doing with the game: the release notes from 1.0 to 2.0 were 46,000 words by themselves – that’s basically 184 pages of a novel! And there were even more changes from 2.0 to 3.0, and now between 3.0 and the upcoming 4.0 – which will finally be adding Mac OSX support, which has also been long requested by fans. It’s pretty cool looking back at all that, though honestly 1400 items seems like a lowball figure!
I’ve admired Child’s Play since it was initially being talked about on Penny Arcade, first for the “let’s show those gamer detractors what gamers are really like,” and then even moreso for the stories from parents and hospital staff about all the good the charity does. I’ve wanted to do something for Child’s Play for a long time, but I’ve never had the means to do anything significant before. At the same time, I really wanted to do a new expansion for AI War this year, but there just didn’t seem to be time in the schedule for doing a full expansion like The Zenith Remnant.
Hopefully we’ll be able to raise about $14,000.00 USD for Child’s Play in 2010, and if this is successful I think we might make charity micro-expansions for an Arcen title an annual thing. We’ll just see how this one goes. I’d also like to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association and various others, but Child’s Play was certainly the one most on my mind this year.