Hello from a Developer
Hi, my name’s Bob Smith, and I’m a game designer. More particularly, I’m the instigator of Oriental Empires.
The idea for Oriental Empires was born just after the launch of Civilization V. Work on my title Armada 2526 was winding down, and, needing a new project, I began thinking about what it would take to make a civilization building game. Making a straight copy of Civ would be pointless and commercially foolish, so I needed a new angle on the genre. Zooming in on a particular culture, and covering it in more detail seemed a promising approach, and since I was living in Asia, an Oriental theme seemed the way to go. I guess the original idea was to cover a range of Eastern nations (hence the name), but once I started researching the history of China, I realized what a vast and varied nation it is, and that it has enough well recorded history for a whole bunch of games. I decided to narrow the focus down to just China and its most important enemies, so as to do the material justice. The name, however, stuck. Hopefully other nations will be covered in future expansions.
Thus the basic idea was formed to create a civilization building game focusing on the rise of China. It would have a historical scenario, as well as the option to play on randomly generated maps. There were two other major features I wanted too.
Firstly, I’ve always been a sucker for beautiful maps, so I was keen to make the game map as attractive as possible, and I also wanted to be able to realistically portray the vast and varied landscape of China without resorting to the cartoony tiled maps generally used in strategy games. The map building technology has turned out pretty well I think, and I’m sure modders and scenario designers will be pleased to find how easily they can make great looking maps.
Secondly, I wanted to have a more interesting combat system than is usual for strategy games, without slowing down gameplay by having battles be resolved separately. Thus the idea came about to have realistic looking mini battles taking place right on the strategy map. Players would have some control by setting up formations and battle plans, but would not control battles directly, meaning the battles could be resolved quickly and not bog the game down.
By this stage I had plenty of ideas, and needed to see if they would fit together into a coherent whole. I contracted John Carline (with whom I’d worked previously on Medieval Total War 2) to mock up some concept art, to see what the game might look like, and sort out important issues such as the relative scale of the various game items, terrain, cities, soldiers etc. We thrashed out all the basic concepts over the course of an exciting two month period, at the end of which the project was looking so promising that John decided to join the project as co-creator and art director.
John was mainly responsible for one of the other unique features of Oriental Empires, the ability to step right into the game, by zooming in to ground level, and turning the camera up to point at the horizon. This lets you see your peasants working in the field, wander round your cities, or review your armies close up. It may sound like a fluff feature, but it’s a surprisingly powerful effect, and adds a sense of immersion and reality that you just don’t get with conventional views.
So anyway, after four years of hard work, Oriental Empires is almost ready to be unleashed upon the world. We’re really pleased to have a game that showcases the history of such an important nation, that few people in the West know much about. We’re also pleased that we’ve been able to implement some interesting new ideas in the strategy/4X genre. It’s been a lot of work, we hope you like it.
Zitat von Louis XV.
Wie ist das Spiel denn im Vergleich zu Rome II?
Berechtigungen
Zitieren
