Scenarios Coming Soon: The next patches for both Age III and The WarChiefs will include support for custom designed scenarios for multiplayer games. This should open the door for lots of new content from fans around the world and bring a new dimension to really competitive play. A tournament, for example, might be played on a series of custom designed maps released ahead of time. Players taking part would have a chance to practice on the tournament maps prior to the competition.
We stand behind our randomly generated maps as a great feature in most situations. But for really top competition a custom designed may be superior because it can be designed to be supremely fair for placement of resources and terrain and player position. Fairness is a higher priority than how good a map looks for high level competitions. Age III becomes something like a chess match. This feature has been on our wish list for a while and we’re very excited to be able to make it happen.
Strategic Objectives Challenge Concluded: Moshe Levi reports that the single player scenario contest he designed for Age of Empires Heaven Games went very well and he has hopes of doing more. He forwarded to us many positive comments from players who took part. Several mentioned looking ahead to the day when they can play a similar contest online in multi-player.
Halo Wars Trailer Day: The Halo Wars team regularly hosts events to show off where their project is or refresh our understanding of the Halo universe. Last week our Halo Wars team hosted a showing of all the cut scenes from Halo 1 and Halo II for the whole company. Material like this keeps the story and characters fresh, and is a good introduction for new employees.
Top 25 Video Game Cinematic Moments: Having just watched the Halo series cut scenes, it was cool to see this list published by Gamespy and find our Halo Wars trailer at #25. There are at least four Halo related trailers in the list of 25.
Halo Fan Movie: Check out this fan movie put together using clips from a variety of Halo trailers and other film parts. There is some borrowing of ideas from The Matrix, but for a home made film it is pretty remarkable. There is certainly a lot of energy here.
http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.php?id=57998
Halo Wars Testing Update: Assistant Producer Karen Swanson announced that next week there will be open company playtests for Halo Wars. Most testing now is done within the team only, although when a seat is available anyone is welcome to join. These new sessions are intended to get a much broader involvement from people not working closely with the game already. We will be testing multiplayer only but eventually there will be other types of testing also.
Curt Shilling Seeking $48M for Game Company: A website devoted to news about private equity (venture capitalists and non-publicly traded investment companies) reported recently that Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling and his new game company, 38 Studios, have been pitching private equity groups trying to raise $48 million. The new studio is planning to develop online multiplayer games based initially on storylines from author R.A. Salvatore and visuals from comic book creator Todd MacFarlane. There is no word on topic or era, but Curt had a strong interest in the tactical World War II game Advanced Squad Leader at one time. We also hear he is a huge Everquest fan.
The article noted the unusually large amount of money being sought up front (the first round). Apparently new companies raise single-digit to very low double-digit millions in the first round, and then come back for more once they have something underway. One example give was RealTime Worlds that was launched with $3 million in 2004 and later obtained $31 million more in a second round.
We’re interested in how this works out. If we were venture capitalists we would be more inclined to support a WoW-like model (casual and hard core gaming) rather than the EQ model (more for hard core gamers only). The difference is 8 million customers versus 200 thousand, or close to that.
Native American Exhibit at the Field Museum: I recently toured a major new exhibit on Native American cultures at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. If you live in the Chicago area, or plan to visit anytime soon, I recommend the exhibit strongly. It concentrates mainly on a selection of pre-Columbian cultures, including those that are best known (Aztecs, Maya, Inca) and others less well known (Cahokia, Hopewell, Mississipian).
There are many impressive scale models of ancient cities that make it very easy to grasp the magnificence and technological advancement of their architecture. There is also a wealth of amazing artifacts, including very early Clovis spear points of the big game hunters, mundane stone choppers and grinders, beautiful stone pipes, jade amulets, pottery, textiles, religious items, copper ceremonial items, and incredibly intricate gold castings. Exhibits go into detail on how people in different parts of the Americas lived and how they adapted over time (hunters gradually became farmers; seacoast people learned to hunt whales and large fish).
It was interesting to consider what we borrowed from this period to make Age III and how much we skipped over in the interest of making an entertaining and successful game. The places and people we touch on in our game were real. The exhibit brought home why basing strategy games on historic periods can be a big differentiator, and often an advantage for creating broad appeal, over sci-fi or fantasy.
ES Work Life- Starbucks In: A big Starbucks coffee machine has been installed in one of our break areas to wide acclaim. The share price of SBUX was up only $.03, which probably doesn’t represent the long term effects of the installation on their company profits.
Bruce Shelley