The Asian Dynasties Wrapping Up: Big Huge Games and our testers, both here and in Redmond, are working through the final testing of The Asian Dynasties. Our test regimens are very rigorous and the standards at Microsoft are very high for shipping software, so publication is not imminent, but soon. It’s looking and playing great.
The Asian Dynasties Campus Visit: The Games for Windows group in Redmond invited several key media outlets to their campus to see first hand the latest update for the coming expansion packs for both Flight Simulator and Age of Empires III. Brian Reynolds and Ike Ellis of Big Huge Games were there to discuss The Asian Dynasties specifically and I was asked to talk about how the expansion fits into the Age series. Ike was the lead designer for Big Huge. The journalists present were Jason Ocampo of Gamespot, Thierry Nguyen of GameTap, and Andy Mahood from PC Gamer. Ike gave a brief demo of the game, while Brian and I talked about the overall plan, how our studios came to work together, and how we felt about the project now that it is coming to conclusion. I reiterated our position that the business case for another Age of Empires III expansion pack was strong, but we didn’t have the people to do it.
Fortunately, Big Huge Games was still near the beginning of their next big project and had some resources available. Plus, they were big fans of the Age series and obviously skilled in the real-time strategy genre. The journalists got in some hands on play and then had an opportunity to ask us all questions.
At one point we were asked if we each had a favorite civilization and we replied completely unrehearsed, India (Ike), China (Brian), and Japan (me). Ike’s short answer for why he liked the Indian’s was elephants. I don’t recall Brian’s reason for choosing China. (I like Japan because their economy just seems powerful with their Shrines [houses] generating the resource of your choice; my Samurai units seem to be able to fight anything; and I like the fact Japanese Home City cards are repeatable.) So, based on this small sample, The Asian Dynasties appears perfectly balanced J, despite my bias. While Big Huge and our balance test team have worked hard to get the new civilizations into balance with the existing ones from the original game and The WarChiefs, I won’t be surprised if we have to make some adjustments after the game gets into the hands of the gaming public.
You can read comments from two of the journalists here.
http://www.gametap.com/home/read/article/8a25090114d539a80114d6c75ca50ac2
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/ageofempiresiiitheasiandynasties/news.html?sid=6178080&om_act=convert&om_clk=newlyadded&tag=newlyadded;title;1
Halo Wars on Spike TV’s Gamehead: The Gamehead program is doing a one hour Halo 3 launch special, plus scattered additional interviews, on September 25th and Halo Wars will be part of this. A Gamehead crew visited our offices and spent time with the team, particularly lead designer Graeme Devine. We don’t know how much mention our game will get but they got a lot of material to work with.
Halo Wars in Vegas, Baby: Bill Jackson of our team and Josh Goldberg from our marketing group in Redmond traveled to sin city to present Halo Wars to about 5000 Gamestop store managers at their annual convention. Our game was part of a larger keynote from Microsoft Game Studios, led by Shane Kim. Also represented were Halo 3 (obviously) and Mass Effect. Bill reported the crowd was big, loud, and scary (in a good way). Bill drove the demo while Josh described the action. The crowd apparently responded positively and loudly to exploding methane tanks, grunt bowling, details like grenades, and the Scarab. Our guys got an awesome applause when they finished. The MGS show finished with a Halo 3 multiplayer demo, which rocked the house. Our company message was that Halo 3 is coming and will be the biggest game launch ever (and the Gamespot people agreed), but that we have great games coming next year also.
ES Chatter This Week: The longest work related email thread this week concerned the forthcoming Halo 3 ad campaigns. Some liked them and some hated them, but most seemed to watch them, which I guess is the idea. There was also a lot of interest in the Halo 3 diorama (12 feet tall and 1200 square feet in area) and cartoons making fun of in-game advertising. Halo 3 is not going to be surprise to people with a pulse. The longest non-work related thread concerned melting arctic ice caps and the effects of that on weather and sea levels. Many people got engaged in a serious conversation about the phenomena and its effects, but we have our jokers. We’re nothing if not hip around here and our threads usually end up with Photo Shopped cat pictures. Paul Bettner noted that he wasn’t impressed with the arctic ice cap thread’s “start to cat” time of almost two hours.
A Thinking Gamer’s RTS Wish List: A funny (and adult language) list of things one gamer would like to see fixed in real-time strategy games was recently spotted online by our Chris Van Doren and he passed the link around. This particular list is focused on the forthcoming Starcraft II, but the comments have been given some thought and are relevant to all games in the genre. Having struggled with some of these issues, we understand that there are not easy solutions to some of them. Check the list here.
http://www.juvenilecomedy.com/starcraft_wishlist.htm
Hobby Games-The 100 Best: The book of 100 best hobby games (board, paper, card) that several us at ES contributed to has received the first review that I’ve seen, and it’s very positive (A Wonderful Book). I got my copy this week and look forward to reading it.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/201784
Bruce Shelley