Ara: History Untold is an upcoming turn-based grand strategy video game by Oxide Games, and it has some big plans for the genre. With its encouragement of an unprecedented amount of player agency, its extensive map design, and its massive selection of historical leaders for players to choose from, Ara: History Untold is aiming to change the game with its multitude of innovative features.
Game Rant recently had the chance to interview a few of the developers at Oxide Games — narrative and experience lead Gabriela Leskur and principal graphics architect Dan Baker — as well as executive producer in publishing at Xbox Game Studios, Matt Turnbull. In the interview, the team broke down the unique gameplay elements and features players can expect to see in Ara: History Untold. The following interview transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Building a New World in Ara: History Untold
Q: First, I wanted to ask you to delve into the subtitle for Ara: History Untold. Tell us more about what that means and what that’s going to look like in the game.
Baker: The title is an ode to the idea that this is an alternate world; this is a question of “what if.” What if Sappho was the leader of Greece? What if Rome didn’t fall and extended to the Modern Era? What if the pyramids were built in an icy area? I think it’s important to understand that it’s a history that could have been. It’s not a fantasy history. If Julius Caesar had never been assassinated, what would have happened? So, it’s very easy to point to these events.
Leskur: I think the thing that inspires me as a woman with a background in social sciences is also giving people the opportunity to imagine how their hand might have changed the course of history. To me, that gets me excited because there are so many people in the world who want to make a positive impact, who want to see who they could be, and Ara is a place to think about “How might I have impacted the ancient times with the way that I see the world? How might I have shaped the Renaissance? How might I shape the future for a nation, for a people, if I were Caesar?” So, I think it’s cool to have these elements of history, and then alternate history, and then personal empowerment, allowing people to dream up and be inspired by their own potential.
Q: One thing that I did notice when I was watching the Gamescom footage is that there are three different acts in the game. Could you tell us more about how those three acts are going to differ and what players might be doing to get to each one?
Baker: All types of 4X games sort of subconsciously play out this way — sometimes they explicitly put an era in and sometimes they don’t. But we put explicit eras in because, at the very first part of the game, it’s conceptually a little bit different. The world is new, you’re exploring, and you don’t know what’s out there. By the end of the first act, it’s expected that a good chunk of the world, at least your continent, is probably known, and you know a lot of things that are going on. The act structure is fairly simple. To get to the next act, you practically just have to research enough technologies to get there.
But one of the things we wanted to avoid in the game, and also to spice things up a little bit, is that a lot of times, if a nation is just really weak by the end of an act, it doesn’t make sense to have them keep going. Nations will fail all the time, so one of the biggest things that happens between acts is that a very small number of nations that aren’t doing as well will fail and end up in ruins. That’s the biggest difference between the acts, that technology will change, but also the really weak nations will just not make it.
Leskur: I like to say that they’re lost to time, which also reflects the world as we’ve seen it. Some nations and some cultures had contributions that we’d much appreciate, but over time, they were lost, or they assimilated into a larger nation. Also, by having these few nations not continue into the next act, you’re now allowing their land to be claimed by other nations, so it opens up the game map.
Baker: One of the things that can happen in these games is you get to a point where there’s nothing new to explore or claim because everyone has taken it unless you want to go to war. But by having this structure, it means there’s a way to expand these points that don’t require you to invade anybody because the nation just failed, and it’s sort of up for grabs for anybody.
Turnbull: What I will say also is that a lot of it comes down to the scale of decision-making. So, as they said, there are three acts across the game, twelve technological eras, and each one is set up into these four technological eras for those. The scale of the decisions you make in the first act is a lot about your nation in terms of your tribe, your very small settlements, and your first couple of cities. And then, later in the second act, it’s a lot about your colonies, your expansion, and the conflicts you’re having with other nations.
In the third act, it’s the decisions that are at the scale of a superpower, and the goal is to make sure the player isn’t locked into doing the same kind of things in every act. In the first act, you may be worrying about food for your very first city to make sure your people aren’t starving, and then later on you’ve got a multitude of cities, and you’re trying to tune your economy and industry so that the grain storage for your entire nation is safe and healthy. A lot of it is about scale and how those decisions stack on each other and then tuning the machine as opposed to crafting the machine early on.
Q: Creating a map in Ara looks pretty extensive, so could you tell us more about how a map build is going to affect gameplay and what players can expect to see happening with their choices in that area?
Baker: That’s a fun one. We put a lot of work into making maps, and, as you can imagine, not having a regular hex grid or a square grid made this an incredibly challenging problem. We were committed to doing that. But also keeping all the parameters that can randomize the planet. There’s a ton of options. You can change the axial tilt, you can change the overall temperature of the planet and the humidity, and there are a ton of fun things that can happen.
If you build a really cold map and put a lot of players on it, for instance, what will happen is that everybody has to start on the equator in this narrow habitable area, and then the rest of the world isn’t that habitable. And that’s the kind of thing that you can mess with. It makes more of a difference than anything else, letting players create some absolutely crazy scenarios. We’re really excited to see how people try to play the game in these interesting ways.
Turnbull: There’s like a million different ways to set things up, and it does completely change the dynamic for the players. Many years ago, when we first met Oxide, they were talking about world generation and map generation, how authentic they wanted the maps to feel, the living world to feel, with more natural borders. So, it’s not like everything just has six sides. Certain regions have two borders, certain regions have eight borders. It just depends on how it’s shaped and what the natural terrain is. Mountains create natural borders, rivers create natural borders — all of these things that you would expect in real life to create natural borders.
At the end of the day, the thing that brought Xbox in on this journey and got us very excited about Ara from very early on is the idea of delivering on that fantasy of being a leader in a real place. The map generation and the fact that they do things like calculate erosion and wind direction, and all of these other things. With the way that they generate the map, it creates that fantasy, lets you live that fantasy, and lets you see the reflection of all your choices as a leader on the world map and the thousands of citizens wandering around.
Leading and Winning in Ara: History Untold
Q: In Ara, I know the goal is to become the most prestigious nation; that’s the ultimate goal. So, dive a little bit deeper into the Prestige system — how players can gain Prestige, and how they can take advantage of the whole system in general.
Leskur: I think something really interesting about Ara‘s Prestige system is that it doesn’t force players into one playstyle, so you aren’t confined to a military victory or a cultural victory, etc. You can gain Prestige in a wide variety of domains, and this is reflective of what we often see of nations that have stood the test of time in the real world. They might have been known in one era for one certain type of feat, and in the future, they grew to a new type of prestige, a new type of world renown.
I know Matt really likes playing as Elizabeth I because leaders also have interesting ways of making it easier to gain Prestige in different ways through different acts. So, I think the Prestige system, first and foremost, allows for you to have diversity in your playstyle, it allows you to evolve and grow as a player and as a nation over time, and I think that’s very freeing and exciting because these can be quite long games. If you decide halfway through that you like building masterpieces and want to stop fighting with your neighbors, you can do that and still feasibly find your way into first place.
Baker: One of the problems that can happen with a 4X game is that you can end up in a trap where you’re playing the game and all of a sudden you get blindsided because you lost a battle that you didn’t know was happening or everybody voted against you because they don’t like that your skin is green. And then all of a sudden you lose even though you were doing great, you just lost from this condition that came out of nowhere. We wanted to avoid those scenarios where there’s a binary condition. Sure, if there’s a dominant world religion and someone else has it, they’re going to get a lot of Prestige for that, but if you’re really good at other things, that may not be enough for them to just overcome and win. Many things contribute to a nation’s Prestige. It’s not just one thing.
Turnbull: The Elizabeth example I love is that, in Act 2, her main leader ability, Gloriana, gives you this massive advantage in land warfare with your Line Infantry and your Longbowman, and so you end up being one of the more powerful military forces in the high medieval and Renaissance enlightenment period. But all of that starts to taper off, and you start to lose those advantages as you move into the Modern Era. But then some of her other abilities that help with things like prosperity start to be more valuable. So, I love playing the arc where you defend yourself very early on and keep yourself safe, and then you move into the middle era and start building all of these coastal cities and baiting people and taking things over, and then you slowly start to build up your cities and your Prestige and being a force of culture in the third act.
It’s just fun how you can chart your own path and create these arcs. Sometimes, they’ll match real-world history to an extent, and sometimes you can play a totally different path. The act structure combined with the diversity of the leader traits means that even though you’re playing one leader and one nation from the beginning of the game to the end, your strategy can still change, you can still explore the Prestige system, still have fun changing up what you’re doing as you go and explore different ways to play.
Q: What about the simultaneous turns feature? How is that going to impact gameplay, and can you give us some examples of how that’s going to factor in?
Baker: So, simultaneous gameplay is another big commitment we made early on, and we underestimated how complicated and difficult that would be. I don’t think that people neglect simultaneous turns because it isn’t better. I think that they don’t see it in 4X games because it’s really hard to implement. With simultaneous turns, you haven’t committed the turn until you hit “End Turn,” so it’s effectively like an undo because until you hit the “End Turn” button, nothing has really happened.
So, it allows you to mess around with anything, including unit movements or anything you want. And then you can just change your mind, you can cancel an order, you can cancel a build, you can cancel destroying something. It’s really nice because I don’t know how many times I’ve been playing one of these strategy games and I move a unit and click the wrong thing, and then I have to save scum just because I clicked the wrong button. It also allows a little bit of uncertainty because it doesn’t give any preference to whoever plays first.
There’s a concept of “alpha strike” in a lot of games that’s like, whoever strikes first is getting a big advantage, and it’s really hard to remove that. So, by having simultaneous turns in Ara, it gets rid of that alpha strike advantage — to an extent anyway. Then there are some less obvious benefits that I actually think are more profound. Simultaneous turns really speed up the pace of the game. That leads to one of the biggest things we wanted to do in multiplayer. In Ara‘s multiplayer, when you have up to 36 players, with simultaneous turns, it’s just as fast to play against 36 players as it is to play against 4 players. That enables multiplayer to be a good experience. It doesn’t change the game. The game plays 99% in multiplayer as it does in single-player.
Leskur: I’m leaping out of my seat with excitement. We often play multiplayer in the office and the biggest thing is that we have a friend in the office who always goes and fights everyone, so in multiplayer we always gang up against them. It really has changed my whole perspective on the turn-based genre. I grew up playing where my whole family over many hours would pass the baton, but now it happens all at once. Now, I can’t go back because we each have the same amount of time for our turn. When we all click “End Turn” and we’re ready to go forward, it very quickly resolves our actions and we immediately have our next turn. So, that pacing is a lot more fun, especially when you’re playing with friends, and you want to gang up against the one who’s attacking. It’s really exciting.
Turnbull: This is also one of the places where Xbox was able to leverage some of our technology and expertise to partner with Oxide’s incredible technical experience with their engine and their deep knowledge of the genre. The game itself can be played completely offline, single-player, you don’t have to be signed in or anything. For multiplayer, it’s a cloud-based multiplayer, and there’s a turn server in the cloud that is a version of the game that processes turns in the cloud, and that leads to a very quick resolution of the turn timer.
So, you can do a thing where you have 36 players, you set a 5-minute turn timer, all 36 players take their actions within those 5 minutes, then they either hit “End Turn” or the 5 minutes are up, and then it all goes to the cloud-based turn server, quickly spins out the results, and the game will resolve it in a way that’s determined by the players. So, you can queue up everything you’re going to do, and then you get the results back, and it’s an exciting feeling every time, especially in multiplayer.
Shaping History in Ara: History Untold
Q: What about the Narrative Events system? How is that going to factor in?
Leskur: I love the Narrative Events system. My title is Narrative and Experience Lead over here on the Oxide side, and Matt has been our fearless leader on the Microsoft side with Narrative Events. As Dan said earlier about this alternate history, we looked at things that have happened in the past, but we’re not trying to reflect history with accuracy as much as being inspired by history. In the Narrative Events system, we take these different historical events, these different sociological, cultural patterns that we see to provide players with rich dilemmas that require them to think about their playstyle, the impact on their nation, culture, and citizens, then that really impacts the state of the world, whatever choice they make.
So, many of our Narrative Events are triggered based on the conditions that the players have created in the world. Some of these would be meeting a new tribe, a new nation, and others, when they do things like build a new type of improvement or reach a new technological milestone, these events are then prompted and give them this really interesting choice. So, the Narrative Events have the potential to impact their inventory, their relationships with tribes and other nations, the happiness of their citizens, and a lot more.
Turnbull: I love the Narrative Events system too, it’s a lot of fun. There are hundreds of events in the game, and every single one is based on a real-world historical event. Every one includes a little blurb that shows what really happened in history, and kind of the inspiration behind this decision you have to make. One of my favorite things is the way that they can create unique chains of events, unique circumstances, or outcomes you don’t see coming.
One of my favorite chains of events in the game is this eclipse that can happen, and in the first act, it’s seen as an omen, and you have to make a decision about what to do with this omen. In the middle part of the game, there’s a scientific result of deciding between heliocentrism or geocentrism for the universe. And then, in the third act, it’s about a scientific partnership with other nations to study the eclipse. So, it’s the same eclipse going on in each of these different eras. Similar things where choices you make can have unexpected consequences and surprise you, while also being strategically interesting choices. We do show the results that are going to happen when you make your choice. You have to decide what you’re willing to invest and where. There’s always pros and cons to everything. It’s just a lot of fun.
Q: I do have one last question that’s kind of more personal. So, you have over 30 leaders in Ara. Who, for each of you, is your favorite leader, and why?
Leskur: Oh, no! It’s like choosing between children!
Baker: I’m going to pick Sappho before you do.
Leskur: Darn it! Well, I started my fledgling education in a Great Books program, and one of the first things we read outside of Plato was Sappho and Sappho’s poems. I just found them to be so beautiful, these fragments of someone who was considered such a great muse. Some of her writing is lost to time, and even these fragments are so powerful. So, here I am, getting to play as Sappho in Ara, and I can imagine if her work had survived, if she had been given power outside just the artistic realm, who could she be?
I also really like her strategy. I think it’s the only reason why I keep winning, to the surprise of our colleagues, because if you build her on coastlines, you get really great buffs to prosperity. So, by building up these coastal regions, you can quickly emerge as a frontrunner in the game. I think there’s some good synergy between her unique leader traits and the buffs that they give, as well as my playstyle. I think that’s why Sappho’s one of my current favorites.
Baker: I don’t know. I just think she looks cool in a suit.
Leskur: Yeah, her modern outfit is very cool. I don’t know if you’ve seen the different outfits that the leaders can wear, but I think the modern Elizabeth one is really cool too.
Turnbull: I do like the modern Elizabeth one. One of the interesting things that Oxide brought at the very beginning was about wanting to expand the definition of “leader.” It’s not just famous politicians, it’s not just famous kings and queens and emperors. There are so many different ways of being a leader. You can be a military leader. You can be a thought leader. You can be a great activist. You can be a cultural or artistic leader. There are so many different approaches, so by expanding the definition of what it means to be a leader and leaning into that alternate history, it gave them the opportunity to add people to the game like Sappho and Joan of Arc, for example — Jeanne d’Arc of France — who was never a leader of France. But if you do the alternate history, the “what if she was,” it changes the gameplay dramatically.
Another thing that we did was we tried to partner with Oxide to find some modern leaders, some people who we could bring into the game who have done amazing things. One of the coolest ones, in my opinion, is Wilma Mankiller. Wilma Mankiller was a very important Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. She was this really incredible activist in the Modern Era who helped reform a bunch of different things and helped improve the lives of so many different people. So, getting to work with her family and having the opportunity to bring her into Ara as one of our leaders is an opportunity that we all relished — to have that person sit in there alongside Julius Caesar and Elizabeth I, ruling a nation and showing what they can accomplish on the world stage.
Leskur: To briefly speak about something really interesting about Oxide, I have a background in narrative design, but I also have a Master’s in social work. So, Wilma, with her background in social work and her character, her community, is really inspiring to me personally. But I think it also speaks to the diverse community of people here at Oxide, and Microsoft, who have helped with the game. Sometimes, with our Narrative Events, talking to our different colleagues from different cultures, and asking them, “What are some historical facts that really inspire you?” It’s cool to see that come to the floor.
We have some people who are new to the game industry, and we also have game industry veterans who have worked on Civilization 5 and other pillars of the 4X genre. Working with our pals at Microsoft, bringing in historians, and people with backgrounds in video game writing, and comic book writing — it’s been really cool to see how this diverse team can bring different perspectives to create a new IP.
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