Age of Empires III- 20 Million Games Played: Graham Somers of our community team tells us that we are approaching this significant number of games played through ESO. That is Age III vanilla, as it is called, excluding the two expansions. That summation includes standard games, deathmatch, and custom games, all rolled into one number that was 19,291,512 as of June 16. In the week before over 56,000 games of Age III vanilla were played. Last week over 60,000 games were played (school is out). It’s good for us to hear data like this so we maintain an awareness of the amount of entertainment we can create with an excellent game.

Age of Empires III Back in Top 20: NPD data on PC game sales for May of 2008 show our game at #20. That’s pretty good for a game published in 2005, but there haven’t been a lot of great PC games come out in the intervening years. Many of the other games in the top 20 have also been around for a while, but #1 is a new title, the Age of Conan MMORPG. It has been fashionable, if not prescient, to predict the looming end of PC games. For example, an executive of Nvidia is quoted as saying there is no future for PC-exclusive games. Check out his comments at the link below. We’ll see.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/no-future-for-pc-exclusive-games-says-nvidia
 
Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties for the Mac: We expect to have preview copies of this game in our office soon and assuming no problems it should be available in the near future.

HaloWars.com: Keep checking this site as our community team adds more information about the game going forward. Based on our Halo Wars forums chat, the GamePro article seems to have raised more questions than it answered, which is good . As we nail down the answers (still working on many things) and get the okay to speak about them, we will post on this site.

There will also be a lot of information about Halo Wars coming out of E3 in a few weeks, so watch for that also. We expect to have several demo stations set up and a large number of media representatives will be getting a chance to play.
Archive build #786 went by this afternoon.

Halo Wars Controls: One of the key messages out of the GamePro article was the effort we have put into the control system. I may have mentioned many blogs ago that we reprogrammed Age of Mythology to be playable with an Xbox controller as a proof of concept. Designer/programmer Tim Deen got to the point that he could play AoM better with the controller than the mouse/keyboard. We are very excited about how the new, built from scratch, control system is working. We know that if we do a good job with Halo Wars, especially the controls, it could encourage a much more rich and interesting genre of console strategy games for the future. Ideally we would like to do for strategy games on the console what Halo itself did for first-person shooters on the console.

Impressions from Testing Halo Wars: Here are just a few comments on my experience playing Halo Wars recently. First, the pace of the action is pretty high. This is not a strategy game where you don’t interact with your opponent for the first 15 to 25 minutes. Many games are over by that point. Second, you have strategic choices. You can invest deep in technology or get into the fight fast. There are unit combinations to try. You can’t build and invest in everything, but you have to be flexible if your current plan is not working. Third, there are opportunities for players to demonstrate skill by matching up the correct units to take advantage of strengths and weaknesses.

I think there is a lot of fun here for casual gamers but also plenty of depth where really skilled players can elevate their game.  The capabilities of the various units are coming together in a fun framework where each has its role, strengths, and weaknesses. There is still enough stuff being tweaked that a particular strategy seems overwhelming one day and not so much the next. But overall the roster of units and their attributes is getting settled. We still have a lot of work to do in completing content and balance testing.

Crunch Menu: The Halo Wars team is crunching again getting ready in particular for E3. As I have mentioned before, the studio provides lunch and dinner during crunch, while we put in required extra hours. Here is a sample of the menu for one recent crunch day. After years of doing this, our admin team has found some great caterers and the food is very good.

• Monday Lunch (Cheesecake Factory): herb crusted salmon salad, grilled chicken tostada salad, Chinese chicken salad, rolls.
• Monday Dinner (Dallas City Market): lemon thyme chicken, carrot sauté, roasted herb potatoes, rolls & butter, salad, carrot cake.

Prototypes Coming and Going: I mentioned previously that we set up three prototype teams out of the staff of a major project that we cancelled. After six months of very interesting work, we have now stopped two of those prototypes, with one getting more time to demonstrate the value of its concept. In exchange we have started two new prototypes. We feel that putting excellent people on this work gives them valuable experience as creative leads, regardless of what happens down the road. And we fully expect great games to eventually result from this experimentation. We believe working on these prototypes, while most of our studio focuses on a major project like Halo Wars, supports the mission of our studio - create great games and a great place to work.

Bruce Shelley