With the recently released Age of Mythology: Retold and the upcoming Civilization 7, you may have overlooked another strategy title that aims to make a mark: Ara: History Untold. Developed by Oxide Games and published by Microsoft, this game has already caught the attention of a handful of players both for its mechanics and for its inclusion in Xbox Game Pass at launch. So, what can we expect from this experience? Well, certainly not a board game, according to its creators.
Gabriela Leskur, narrative and experience lead, and Matt Turnbull, executive producer at Xbox Game Studios, have given an interview to PC Gamer to address one of the key features of Ara: History Untold: the shapes of its regions and zones. Instead of using hexagonal tiles like other strategy games, players will find a world more similar to real life here.
“I am a big fan of Risk, but we are not playing a board game, we are really trying to simulate part of what we see in real life,” Leskur comments in the interview. “One thing that is unique is that we have these dynamically generated regions. They are not hexagons, they are irregular shapes based on things you see in nature. They are next to rivers, next to the shore of seas. They are these unusual shapes that reflect how we believe cartographers have done things in our history, and also how the natural world is itself.”
Irregular grid-shaped regions and zones understood as pizzas
If Oxide Games is opting for a model different from the more common shapes, how is the world they have built for Ara: History Untold organized? On one hand, with regions; land units that cities can claim as they grow, or that can be occupied by military forces moving across the map. Essentially, these pieces make up a grid with cells of different sizes and shapes.
On the other hand, these regions are further subdivided by zones; smaller spaces that reflect the improvements made by the player. It’s a bit difficult to understand on paper, so Leskur describes this distribution as if they were pizzas: “I strategically think as I expand my city,” begins the professional in the conversation. “I do this by claiming nearby regions. I look at them and say, ‘OK, how many zones are in this region?’ If I want to build an impressive Triumph, which is something like the Pyramids of Giza, I probably want to do it in a region that only has two zones – just two pizza slices cut in half – because I am sacrificing the whole region to build that impressive Triumph.”
“On the other hand, if I want to claim a region to use it in agriculture, to insert as many improvements as possible, I probably want a region of five or six slices of pizza, because each of those zones is a place where you can build an improvement.” Obviously, all of this will be put to the test with the final version of the game, which will be released on PC on September 24. Either way, it is clear that the Oxide Games team wants to stand out in the strategy genre.
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