GameSpot | 09/05/03
Rick: My name is Rick Goodman, and I am president of Stainless Steel Studios, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Richard: My name is Richard Bishop, and I am a game designer at Stainless Steel Studios.
Rick: We're working on a RTS game named Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. One of the design goals of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is to create a game that's familiar and accessible and has a broad mass appeal, and what we realized when we started this project, by conducting online polls and by looking at the diversity of the design team internally with pro gamers, casual gamers, and single player design teams all under one roof, is that there is no one gamer out there. There are twenty different countries that purchase and play RTS games, that are primary, that are large countries, and they each have different styles and sensibilities and cultures. And so one of the biggest challenges we had was how do you make one game appeal to so many different people, and so many different countries, and so many different play styles.
Well I think that the different game play modes are an important part of the game, and the game play, and for Stainless Steel and for Empires, both now and in the future. Because I think what we want to do, we want to keep increasing the production values of games, we want to make single player higher quality, multiplayer higher quality, and we want to reach out to a larger audience who has played strategy games and those who haven't. So its extremely important to do what people in the marketing business have known a long time which is to segment your market. Rather than have designers come out with a game feel that is for us, would only appeal to a small group of audience and a small audience of players. What we do at Stainless Steel is we try to go out, we try to talk to gamers to find out what they like, and gear the type of work and type of game play to our audience, and I think getting in touch with your audience, listening to feed back, and finding out what the audience wants and what they are looking for now and in the future is apart of our key strategy. And I think being in touch with gamers is really the only road to success now, and in the future.
Richard: Well over the last year, the envelope has really been pushed forward, I mean, if you don't have certain features in the game, players aren't going to flock to your game. So stuff like automatic matchmaking, were you just hit a button and you're placed against someone with equivalent skill, we got that into the game, we have rankings that are automatically computed to display for everyone, leaning towards stuff like that is my main concern, to make sure we were up to par and beyond certainness of our competitors.
Rick: Well it's very interesting when you look at Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, because we have two multiplayer game variants, and one is Empire Builder and one is Action mode. And the gamers get to choose which one they want to play. One is geared toward the pro gamer, the action mode, where they can play a complete game in thirty minutes, walls and towers are not very strong, resources deplete, and its very action oriented game play. Where Empire builder is just the opposite, is about territory control, you have huge population limits, large maps, and walls and towers are very strong, so it's a much more defensive game.
Richard: The best part of multiplayer is all the civilizations play differently, they're unique, and if you're playing against someone who is playing China and you're Franks, you're going to have a totally different approach then they are. And it's really interesting to see different styles of game play come together like that, because you can rush really fast, you can play defensive, you can concentrate on technology and try to get ahead of your opponents technology. A good one with Franks is to play defensive in a very early game, since they have strong buildings, and they have really strong towers so they can hold off an enemy longer, and just to go up faster to try to get to more advanced units like cannons and musketeers when the opponent still has archers and stuff like that.
Rick: The pro gamers amongst the team at Stainless Steel are in charge of balancing the action style of game play. Myself, I am more of a casual gamer when it comes to playing, and we also have other designers on the team, and we spend our time and our focus on the Empire builder mode of game play, so we have multiple design teams at Stainless Steel. The third design team is in charge of developing the single player game play, so it's really three different games which we devote three different design teams to during the development process.
Richard: I guess the number one priority we have is to make sure it has a lot of strategic depth, to make sure the game has a long life time, and can play it compatibility for years and still learn.
Rick: Play balancing a game that has seven unique civilizations, is a huge challenge and its made us revise our internal processes when we approach this game from the start, because its not like any other game that we've done in the past, and its been a great challenge for us, and in fact the more unique we made the civilizations the more differentiation we made between them the more fun the game became but also at the same time it became a lot more difficult to ensure proper play balancing. That's why we've been working on play balance for almost over a year and a half now to make sure it's a superbly balanced game, when it ships this Christmas.
Richard: It's so tactically deep that you can't figure it out in just a month or two, we've been playing the game for over a year and we're still learning new stuff, learning new strategies every single day, and different counters. So it's a very deep game, so players will have to play the game for a very long time before they get close to exploring how deep it is.
Rick: Empires: Dawn of the Modern World includes three different campaigns, one is the Middle Ages campaign with Richard the Lionhearted, one is the Admiral Yi campaign that takes place in the 1500's in Korea, and the last and final campaign is with Patton in World War II. One of the interesting things about doing an Asian campaign aside from the fact that that history of the world is foreign to many Europeans and Americans like myself, is that we had to get our history very, very accurate, because people in that portion of the world really know their history, and they have famous heroes which to them are an important part of their national culture. So we made sure to research this Admiral Yi campaign very meticulously because its important to us to make sure the way in which the story unfolds is not only fun but it has to be highly realistic than in other campaigns that we've put together which are focused on other which history may be a little less unknown to take a little more opportunity to take creative licenses. You'll see the game released in stores, you'll be able to get it and play it in the October-November timeframe of this Christmas season.
Richard: The best part of multiplayer is all the civilizations play differently, they're unique, and if you're playing against someone who is playing China and you're Franks, you're going to have a totally different approach then they are. And it's really interesting to see different styles of game play come together like that, because you can rush really fast, you can play defensive, you can concentrate on technology and try to get ahead of your opponents technology. A good one with Franks is to play defensive in a very early game, since they have strong buildings, and they have really strong towers so they can hold off an enemy longer, and just to go up faster to try to get to more advanced units like cannons and musketeers when the opponent still has archers and stuff like that.