Developer Interview: Rick Goodman
GameSpot | 07/22/03

My name is Rick Goodman and I'm the lead designer on a game called Empires: Dawn of the Modern World that's shipping this year in the Christmas season. Empires spans 1000 years of modern history from the Middle ages up to, and including, World War 2. The game includes and covers 7 of the mightiest civilizations during that period of time.

Our last game Empire Earth taught us a lot about the process of making RTS and our next game, the game we're working on right now, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is similar in the sense that its a historical real time strategy, but with that common route in mind that similarity ends, what we've wanted to achieve in this game is the ability to focus, focus on a more narrow time frame and make it a more robust game in the time frame that we are covering.

So we went out and asked gamers what time frames, what periods, that were most fun for them, and they told us that, according to our surveys, that the Middle ages and World War 2 where some of their favorite time periods, so that's how we honed down the scope for the game that we're working on now and by honing down the scope to merely a 1000 years of time, which is still quite an epic span of time to cover, we're able to do a lot more in that period of time and make it much more realistic and make it much more historical..and make it more fun.

Well, what we belive is that we're making a game for a trained audience, which means that people are used to certain ways and conventions..or how RTS works, and what we have tried to do is to make the game more deep, more interesting and more exciting in many ways, but not necessarily change the way, which gamers are used to be playing the games, so you'll see a lot of very familiar interface reposals for you during the game, what we've done is to make the game much more deep and much more interesting and much more surprising actually. Those are the things that we think are going to make the game very exciting for players, not complexity and not new UI conventions.

Well I think that veterans and casual gamers alike are going to like our approach on Empires: Dawn of the Modern World where we are actually covering 7 unique civilizations, one of the things that people told us, that they really wanted in their next RTS, or the next historical RTS, was civilizations that where actually based on real civilizations, with hstorical units, technologies, strengths and weaknesses that where culturally correct and accurate on a civilization by civilization basis, and they didn't want one set of units that where shared among multiple civilizations, so we have gone to extraordinary to make sure that every unit, every civilizations is completely different from their technology trees to their economies to their special abilities, to their weapons and soldiers. So this means that each time you play and pick a new civilization to play with, will it be like playing a different game.

The game includes two basic play modes, we call them "Action" and "Empire Builder", and they are designed for two very different audiences. The "Empire Builder" mode is designed primarily for the singleplayer audience, because we have surveyed our customers and they've told us that they often like to play many multi-hour game that last a long time with many different AIs. This is a singeplayer experience that has existed back from the days of Civilization. So we have created a mode that plays very much like that, and in that mode is resource gathering a little bit slower than in "Action" mode, it's more important that you expand and take over make resources on the map, and the resources don't run out, so we have linked your success to how much land you own and how much territory you control, that's important to the "Empire Builder" player.

In addition to that, we have walls and towers play a very important role, so you can have sieges. And there is many ways to defend yourself against rushes, so we have homed down the rush for the "Empire Builder". And it becomes a empire building style of game with this particular type of mode, which will appeal to the greater mass audience that likes this style of game.

The "Action" mode is entirely different, it's designed for a different audience, the audience I call the "Pro gamers", gamers who likes to play multiplayer and particular likes to play it online. They are often ladder-ranked and they like tournaments. A typical pro gamer would like to play about 30 games in a day, that way the pro gamer could move up the ladder quicker by finishing more games. The pro gamer typically likes the rush, they like to find new ways to age up as quickly as possible and to rush players as quickly as possible and the game is much more designed for a quick conclusion, so that you can end the game at 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 40 minutes at longest. It's not necessarily about territory control, so fore example the resources diminish very quickly so it requires you to think very carefully about your next move. And if the game lasts a little bit longer, you need to move to new resource areas along the map, so it's more dynamic in that sense. Walls and towers are very weak so you don't have opportunities to have large sieges and there are no turtles in that game. It's much more fluid and action packed.

Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is scheduled for release later this year.