Ara: History Untold’s headline gimmick is actually a couple of centuries old.
“And they basically created this massive table that had a modular terrain system.
There was an actual game master, who was the referee who you would report your moves to.
It’s the next turn - let’s see what people did.
Was it what you expected?”
“You get to see what the other person does and readjust your strategy.
But Baker and his colleagues were caught out by the scale of the task in practice.
“I don’t think we appreciated how difficult it was,” he says.
From an engineering standpoint, it ended up being a huge challenge for us to build the simultaneous turn.
It’s been a “nightmare” for the game designers too, lead designer Michael Califf says.
“And so it would actually both finish construction and then produce in the space of a single turn.
Califf has spent many months fiddling with nuances like this.
“It’s like, oh, this army was trying to move here.
Resolve that and tell the player how that works, right?
That kind of situation is where the absolute nightmare comes in, and that took a long time.”
Simultaneous turns aren’t Oxide’s only gamble with Ara: History Untold.
Instead, Ara’s strategic playspaces are defined by regions, placed atop the geography.
“It was a really, really tough challenge, but it makes a big difference.”
“Oh my God, rivers!”
“There is definitely the potential to mess around with it, to some extent.
You’ll very much tamper at your own risk, however.
