Ara: History Untold

[ggmoyang]

Oh one of the dev is answering to the game questions

 

[Civinator]

They did talk about naval warfare and that more is to be revealed before launching the game. I like naval warfare to be improved (and oceans not to be treated as another kind of desert)!

 

[PMF]

I saw that one of the designers was chatting in discord, super cool! I'm sure he won't be able to give a ton of info (issues of time and game's not launched yet) but I did see him talking about a few things, like, let's see... you can deploy your units from any city that isn't under siege, aircraft have a base and range, bombers are in there, and there are fighters to defend cities or escort bombers...

Screenshots of the encarta gives me some Civ 5 vibes and I love it, hahaha

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

They did talk about naval warfare and that more is to be revealed before launching the game. I like naval warfare to be improved (and oceans not to be treated as another kind of desert)!

My impression from what I've seen so far is that naval warfare is treated like land combat. Basically if both armies are in the same tile the battle plays out.

 

[PMF]

There's apparently an xml file (appspecificstyles.xml) that lets you play with the colors of the UI, so that's nice! (pics from the ara discord)



Also some buildings that let you really specialize an area:

and one more thing I thought was cool that I hadn't heard about before:

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

Where did you find that xml file?

 

[PMF]

Where did you find that xml file?

Frogboy in the discord is posting screenshots and gave the name of the file! sadly I do not have anything downloaded myself lol

 

[UncivilizedGuy]

I'm guessing he has an Alpha version or early access

 

[PMF]

Whoops -- honestly it's on me for not explaining better, I got a little excited -- Frogboy is with Oxide on the design team! He's been on and off answering questions or sharing screenshots.

 

[KayAU]

New Q&A!

Part 2 has been released now:

Things are definitely moving faster.

 

[PMF]

Really loving the activity and excited that release is getting closer!! I saw that it's getting released at 08:00 PDT so I guess I'll be in the middle of work... curses!!

Also pardon all my sharing from the discord, but I saw this from last night -- seems like they're already approved and budgeted for a year of free updates, very cool!

 

[KayAU]

Really loving the activity and excited that release is getting closer!! I saw that it's getting released at 08:00 PDT so I guess I'll be in the middle of work... curses!!

Also pardon all my sharing from the discord, but I saw this from last night -- seems like they're already approved and budgeted for a year of free updates, very cool!

View attachment 704044

That is absolutely wonderful to hear. Xbox Game Studios seem like a pretty awesome publisher.

 

[CivLuvah]

There's apparently an xml file (appspecificstyles.xml) that lets you play with the colors of the UI, so that's nice! (pics from the ara discord)

View attachment 703951

Also some buildings that let you really specialize an area:

View attachment 703956

and one more thing I thought was cool that I hadn't heard about before:

View attachment 703960

This feels clandestine. Like the dev has suddenly given all the secrets of the game before launch haha

If this is their idea of marketing engagement I am totally fine with this.

 

[Civinator]

They did not mention CFC as a forum for ARA.

 

[Xefjord]

I spent a lot of time talking with the devs on the discord last night, a couple tidbits that I have learned:

1. They are working internally on developing an Earth Map, but it won't be ready for launch.
2. There will not be nukes in 1.0. They want to make sure nukes being implemented is impactful and has real repercussions.
3. You can interact with the villagers/herdable animals on the map kind of Roller Coaster Tycoon style.
4. They are very focused on making things good for modders, they even opted to go for more 2d sprites because they figured it would be easier for modders to swap out and still feel vanilla to the game.
5. The team is largely consisting of former Civ 5 devs, but with folks taken from places like Paradox as well. They are all pretty avid gamers and play pretty much all the 4x games and are trying to take the best ideas from each.

They also brought up the politics controversy a bit, and made clear that there is a pretty wide range of political beliefs at their company and they are not trying to push any specific messages. For leaders that might be considered too activist, they generally always try provide a more traditional leader for folks to play as well. They seemed to indicate that anything kind of political is probably just coming from how things are worded from Microsoft, but they are much more neutral and want to make sure a wide variety of playstyles are viable.

I was overall pretty happy with the discussions and I feel like the devs are pretty passionate about the game and making sure it's fun to play.

 

[Thormodr]

This game and Oxide Games sounds better and better. Really like what I am hearing and seeing.

 

[Thormodr]

They did not mention CFC as a forum for ARA.

We need to do more marketing.

 

[fjaoaoaoao]

I spent a lot of time talking with the devs on the discord last night, a couple tidbits that I have learned:

1. They are working internally on developing an Earth Map, but it won't be ready for launch.
2. There will not be nukes in 1.0. They want to make sure nukes being implemented is impactful and has real repercussions.
3. You can interact with the villagers/herdable animals on the map kind of Roller Coaster Tycoon style.
4. They are very focused on making things good for modders, they even opted to go for more 2d sprites because they figured it would be easier for modders to swap out and still feel vanilla to the game.
5. The team is largely consisting of former Civ 5 devs, but with folks taken from places like Paradox as well. They are all pretty avid gamers and play pretty much all the 4x games and are trying to take the best ideas from each.

They also brought up the politics controversy a bit, and made clear that there is a pretty wide range of political beliefs at their company and they are not trying to push any specific messages. For leaders that might be considered too activist, they generally always try provide a more traditional leader for folks to play as well. They seemed to indicate that anything kind of political is probably just coming from how things are worded from Microsoft, but they are much more neutral and want to make sure a wide variety of playstyles are viable.

I was overall pretty happy with the discussions and I feel like the devs are pretty passionate about the game and making sure it's fun to play.

Being neutral is also a political choice!

I’m in the discord and I interpreted it as they just did whatever they felt like lol. It’s also a lot of different people working on the game so some people will have different ideas.

I remember a dev diary said they did a ton of vetting and research into deciding who was leaders. Plus this is history UNTOLD. They have said they wanted other types of leaders to differentiate from what has been done elsewhere. But of course as we have seen we also have a lot of the usual leaders in the game so people should just focus on who they can play rather than who they don’t want to play as.

 

[CivLuvah]

2. There will not be nukes in 1.0. They want to make sure nukes being implemented is impactful and has real repercussions.

That’s rather disappointing haha

 

[KayAU]

They did not mention CFC as a forum for ARA.

Yeah, I noticed that too...I don't know, sometimes I get the impression that they are intentionally avoiding mentioning "Civilization" at any cost, even though it is the most obvious comparison to Ara.