Earlier this month, had the privilege of being invited to visit strategy game makers , nestled a short drive north of the U.S. city of Baltimore.
While there, we got to take a hands-on preview with the eagerly awaited , and talk to the team’s executive producer Dennis Shirk, and game designer Carl Harrison. After having spent almost three hours playing the new installment, and having been a massive fan of the franchise for almost 30 years, I walked away tremendously impressed by how the team has worked to construct the freshest sequel yet. Our day kicked off with a presentation by ’s lead designer Ed Beach, who described the core of what he feels makes what it is; strategic depth, historical immersion, and emergent narrative potentials.
Beach spoke of how he wished to better evoke a sense of mankind’s evolutionary history by capturing how real-world civilizations are built upon the foundations, or ashes, of prior ones. He used London as an example, where native tribes along the Thames were eventually driven out by the Romans who founded the city, which was then taken over by the Saxons following Rome’s fall, and who were largely responsible for evolving the city into what we now know it as today. realizes this by splitting up a game into three distinct ‘ages’; Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern.
When starting a new game, you’re only allowed to choose a civilization that belonged to the real-world antiquity era. When you or one of your opponents hit the next age,.