Monday 11th April 2005
INTERVIEW: AGE OF EMPIRES III EXPLORED, PART ONE
Ensemble Studios' latest in its established strategy series comes under scrutiny as we chat with lead designer Greg Street
In terms of missions and campaigns, how is AoE III structured, and what modes are you including outside what we expect to be the main single-player campaign mode?
Greg Street: We have one campaign story, more like the campaign from AOM than AOK. While the AOK time period had some great characters like William Wallace and Genghis Khan, we didn't feel like the "heroes" from the AOE3 time period were as interesting (though several of them still make cameos in the story). Besides, the AOM campaign with its emphasis on characters and plot twists was well received, and so we wanted to do it again.
Structurally, the AOE3 story is told over the course of three generations. We figured that made more sense than trying to explain why a single character could survive for 100+ years. But there are some characters who show up in more than one act, and the events early in the story affect what happens later, so it still feels like a single campaign.
We always like letting players try out a diversity of civilizations in our campaigns, so what we did this time around was make up three new civilizations (one for each act) that let us combine some of the characteristics of the civilizations in the random map games. For example, the US civilization appears only in the campaign, and shares a lot in common with the British civ (as you might expect), but has some unique twists as well.