We had the chance to chat a bit with Pavel Kubat, developer of Aggressors, our epic upcoming 4x game set during Ancient Rome!
Matrix: First of all, thanks a lot for your time and congrats for the outstanding job with this game so far. What moved you to adopt the Ancient Mediterranean during the period of the rise of Rome as setting?
Pavel Kubat: The Aggressors was initially supposed to be released as a multimod game, but I eventually realized that this was simply not possible. Not just because we had a very small development team, but also because the amount of testing required and likelihood of bugs would not let us finish it.
The Ancient Mediterranean was chosen to be the first mod to finish. Even in this phase I did not want to release just one campaign map. I wanted to give players hundreds of hours of fun straight away. Three different historical periods were attractive for me - the expansion of Rome, the conflicts between Sparta and Athens (and Greek city states in general) and the fall of the Roman Empire. Instead of parallel development of three mods, we started to work on three scenarios in parallel. Eventually we came to a crossroad where a very important question arose. Which is better? Is it three scenarios done well or one scenario polished into finest details? After a long discussion we decided to go for the second option. But not only that. We decided to extend the rules and historical feeling by introducing objectives tailored for each country and other features (which we will reveal soon in one of our upcoming dev diaries). This would simply not be possible to finish for all three scenarios. But don't worry. They were not cancelled, just suspended, waiting for the day when they come back to life.
So, we decided to go for one polished scenario but which one? Don't you think that the first release of Aggressors coincides nicely with the rise of Rome as a metaphor?