In an interview before the Age of Empires 25th Anniversary celebration, two members of co-developer World’s Edge went on record to talk about how the sausage is made.
The people on interview where World’s Edge creative director, Adam Isgreen, and director of customer voice, Emma Bridle. The most interesting they talked about was how they approached the topic of history. Without elaborating, the Age of Empires games have been known for taking creative liberties, partly because of technical limitations, and partly because they focused on an enjoyable playing experience.
Today, the Age of Empires staff have a narrative director who is trained on history, and acts as their full time geopolitical liaison. Emma’s team have several historians, including a full time historical writer who is tasked with research, an academic medievalist who writes for their website, and Emma herself, who is a theologian.
Of course, their staff also draws in people from different cultural backgrounds as well, and they themselves get excited when they see how much better the games now handle accurate representation of historical events, and those different peoples and their cultures as well.
We’ll share some key paragraphs from Adam and Emma here.
Adam Isgreen: “You know, we recognize because Age is played all over the world that we need to represent the cultures accurately. And, you know, it’s having seen people get excited about representing their culture correctly, and us getting it right, like even in the language and stuff and people saying like, “Oh, my God, this is great! This is the language that they spoke!””
Emma Bridle: “It’s really complex, you know, we are building a game, but I think society shifted so much since the last Age of Empires game came out in 16 years, and the way that we think about representation and inclusion and accuracy, and so it’s a great honor to have that responsibility, but it’s complex. As Adam said, you know, we can put all the research in, but we also understand that when we put things out, we’re gonna get feedback.”
“You know, when we put the flag icons in games, people are very passionate about flags. How do we represent that correctly? And I think we all have to be humble and know that we can put our best effort in, but we won’t always get it fully, right. So we do as much work as we can, and then we listen to the community when we put it out there to get their feedback.”
On the side, Emma and Adam also talked about how they have specced out the game’s graphics to continue to cater to players with low power computers. While they have continued to move forward with graphics improvements, the developers also haven’t dropped support for those players. This also explains the design choice not to make it so that players would not have to scroll in and out to see the action, taking the exact opposite track that Creative Assembly’s Total War series has gone. Once again, this is for the benefit of all players, including those with weaker hardware. While it means Age of Empires isn’t as graphically advanced, it also means more people can still play Age of Empires.
After this interview, Microsoft confirmed both Age of Empires II and Age of Empires IV would be making it to Xbox.
Source: Screenrant
