Hi Honey, We're Home

Age of Empires games have always been built by playtesting.  At Ensemble before and at Robot now, our basic development philosophy remains unchanged – get a playable version of the game up and running as soon as possible, then play the living hell out of it.

This approach has massive advantages.  Everyone on the team knows and contributes to their game.    If something is broken, all of the most capable eyes are looking.  If an idea isn’t going to work the way you saw in your head, the reaction in playtest makes that obvious.  And nothing is better for guiding fast, impactful changes – a few weeks back, there were people literally making realtime fixes to Age of Empires Online based on problems players in the alpha were chatting to us while they played.        

But, great as playtesting is, it doesn’t make everything kitten whiskers and long walks on the beach.  In the minus column, iteration like this can cause problems with perspective. 

You see, constantly testing your game to make it better is a lot like having that friend who thinks any humorous thing he has encountered while traipsing about the internet can only be made funnier by running it into the ground at full speed.  You know who I’m talking about.  That guy who keeps cut-and-pasting “demotivational posters” or responding to everything with the same phrase until you lose it and screech “SAY CHUCK NORRIS AGAIN AND I WILL BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH TIM’S WOODEN DRAGON.”

As with your idiot friend, constant exposure to anything changes your perspective on it.  What starts as funny later becomes grounds for manslaughter.  Game development is not somehow immune to this.  Sometimes you playtest your way into something good, then decide it needs to be changed, not because there’s something better, but rather because you’ve been playing the same thing for sooooooooo long.  You forget that your audience won’t have played the game 2000 times and grown tired of a feature when they pick up the game for the first time.

As it is with individual games, it is also with the series.  Every time we start working on a new Age of Empires game, we have to evaluate a number of things.  What did people say they liked in our last game?  What did they dislike?  What didn’t work?  What made the game more fun?  What wasn’t worth the effort?  What are our players doing now?  The answers to all of these questions are just as influenced by our constant exposure as our views of individual features are during the development of one specific game.  After Age of Kings, for example, an opinion that contributed to the decision to do Age of Mythology was that people were sick of historical games, which was backed by pointing out the success of sci-fi and fantasy games. 

“People,” of course,  weren’t sick of historical games at all.  We were sick of them.  We had done years of historical stuff and wanted the freedom to do something a little different.  But our constant exposure to the material had influenced our perception.  If everyone you see and talk to every day says they’re tired of history, it’s easy to imagine that there is a similar distribution of opinion beyond your walls.

I can look back and see the ebb and flow of this in our games.  I can see the times when we grew weary of something and drifted in another direction or when a particular game or fan mod or style of gameplay grew popular with our crew and we started to think about how we could nudge Age in that direction.  I’m sure some of the people who have been playing the Age games for a long time can too.

When we first went back to work on what has become Age of Empires Online (it was then Age of Empires 4), one of the things the team did was attempt to strip some of this away and, as much as is possible, look at the heart of Age of Empires.  Not where we had gone or what we were tired of or where things seemed to be going, just “What makes an Age game?” 

An idea we had discussed and started to embrace was the belief that there wasn’t One True Path – we had talked a lot about the trends we were seeing with game time or online or campaigns and someone mentioned that, while “all other RTSs” might be doing something, what we should consider is the possibility that we’re successful because we aren’t.  That maybe people who don’t enjoy the gameplay featured in “all other RTSs” gravitate to Age specifically because we offer something different.  That maybe we should embrace our differences instead of trying to figure out how to become more like something else.

This seemed sage to me and we later settled on a number of things that we thought made something “an Age game.”  One element, which more and more RTSs seem to have decided to move away from, is the economic game.  We thought we had the combat – econ split just about perfect in Age of Kings, so we put AoK back out in the playtest area and started playing it again.  We quickly noticed a lot of things that had eroded in the games we did after Kings…but which were really fun.  Things we found we missed.  We had a lot of “why did we ever decide to…?” conversations.

That soon grew into the original direction for what has become Age of Empires Online.  We adopted “Age of Kings style gameplay in an Age of Empires setting” as our basic vision statement.  When we started floating some of the early game out to people other pieces fell into place – I cannot tell you how many times I have had someone email me or talk to me at a show and mention how much they loved the villagers carrying big hunks of meat in the original Age or the priest “wololo.”  In a thousand years, I never would have guessed that the Brontosaurus Burger-esque vills gathering meat animation from AoE would be the thing that someone kept with them from that game but…here we are.

This process has worked very well for us.  Certainly, in making a game for release today, we’ve changed and added and modified a great number of things.  But still, sitting in playtest, in the middle of a PVP game or a struggle against an AI, players familiar with Age of Kings feel their old friend there again.  For us, it’s nice to know that the core gameplay is still fun and that people who missed Age of Kings might soon get a taste of it.