Last month we had a chance to take a spin through AoE III at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and this week we're finally allowed to spill the beans on what we saw. The game's progressed a good deal since this preview, but it was a luscious first glimpse of the engine in action.
Empires Come to Life
Picture, if you will, a crisp autumn morning off of the shores of the Great Lakes. In future centuries, this fertile stretch of ground may someday be a Chicago or Milwaukee, but right now it's home to scattered patches of settlers, and winding, rutted wagon trails. In Age of Empires III, this whole tableau is brought to life with a million little details. For instance, white smoke drifts lazily up from the chimneys of the log cabins, and a small English flag waves from a pole in the center of town. After a few moments it becomes clear that the flags and smoke are not static animations, but shift regularly and change direction with the invisible wind.
As we scroll the screen toward the lakes and away from the settlement, we start to see more animal life milling around the swaying woods. In one corner, a bear shakes a tree in order to down a squirrel who clutches for dear life. It turns out that the bear (and the critter he's chasing) are just a couple of the nearly 50 types of animals that players will find on either North American continent. Further up the woods we see a herd of deer ambling peacefully along. Here, we pause to admire the game's dynamic lighting: as a doe walks under the swaying branches of a tree, we can see the dappled sunlight on her back. Elsewhere, individual leaves fall from the handful of trees that have started to change their colors.
Waiting on the lake itself is a small fleet of boats, bobbing with waves and reflected in the relatively placid lake water. The boats are gigantic, and rendered with loving detail. You can see each and every line of rigging, and the sails ripple in the wind. The ships are so beautiful that it's almost a shame to get them into combat. Not that that's going to stop us. While we didn't spend a lot of time watching ship-to-ship combat, some very cool effects were present. Plumes of white smoke erupted from the cannons and drifted across the water, and individual cannonballs could travel through the sails of enemy ships.
Across the lake, a small Native American village prospers. It seemed like there were dozens of little animations playing in this tiny community. Women prepared hides, people paced between tents, and near one building a little kid walked along the top of the fence, carefully balancing as he strode along. "Alive" is really the only way to describe the graphics.
Of course, this was just one environment: later during our whirlwind tour of the game we got to see the frozen ice flows and treacherous water of the Northern part of the continent, where soldiers left footprints as they trudged through the snow. Marshy swamps, dense forests, and rocky highlands are also available in the game. Dozens of environments will be featured from all over North and South America.
(For more details about the graphics and the technology behind them, check out this extended feature on the AoE III engine from GameSpy's GDC Coverage.)
Strategy is Still the Key
Ensemble's design team sees this game as their opportunity to refresh the real-time strategy genre with some tweaks and additions to classic play. The team wants to focus on strategy: players will win not just based on how fast they click on their units, but how they maneuver and use them.
One way that strategy is emphasized over reflexes comes about by using a new concept called the home city. In AoE III, players represent various European powers colonizing the new world. The game action itself will take place in the Americas, but the player's power base is represented by his "home city" in Europe. In-game the home city appears as a beautifully rendered European capital -- it looks almost photographic. Resources from the New World can be used to upgrade your home city, which in turn can support you by developing new technology or by sending special new units as reinforcements.
There's a great deal of strategy in determining how you'll advance your capital. A defensive player might select upgrades that will allow him to build towers, for example. An aggressive player might constantly request boats loaded with high-powered reinforcements. Your home city "levels up" almost like an RPG character, meaning every player will have different strategies and even single-player campaigns can take on different flavors. You can even personalize the home city with touches of your own as you play.
Meanwhile, over in the New World, the natives will play a huge role in the player's strategy. Native citizens can support your colonial goals with troops or technology, but only if you have a good relationship with them. In practice, this means that a multiplayer game plays out as a race to establish strong ties with the locals. You can swing them in your favor by destroying enemy trading posts while building your own. Your opponent will be doing the same! Various home city upgrades can help you win over the natives faster.
Combat itself is very dependent on formations, as it often was during this time period. Managing your formations is a huge part of the game. If you set a large group of musketeers into a "volley" formation, they'll line up, take a shot, then step back so that another row can shoot. This is as opposed to a "Charge" formation, where they'll fix bayonets and rush forward. A good army will have a good mix of different units. The musketeers described above are vulnerable to skirmishers (as the Brits found out during the Revolutionary War), but they're good for defending against cavalry. Calvary, meanwhile, can mow down skirmishers.
And, of course, you also have artillery, which is very important in Age of Empires III. You can bring huge field pieces into battle, which are devastating against large groups of infantry, but susceptible to a cavalry charge. It's also interesting to note that artillery is now needed whenever you wish to destroy enemy settlements. That's right: no longer will a guy with a spear bring down a town center by poking it for 10 minutes. You'll need to bring in (and protect!) the big guns.
If it sounds like a lot to keep track of, don't worry. AoE III also makes efforts to do away with a lot of the micromanagement common to other real-time games. For instance, unlike AOE II, farms will automatically replenish themselves, and raw materials don't need to be carried back to buildings -- they're simply mined or harvested on the spot. Little changes like this mean that players will be focused on acquiring strategic parts of the map, advancing their home city, developing relationships with the natives, and managing the movements of their troops.
When it All Comes Together
During this tour of the game we only got the briefest introduction to the gameplay itself. But it looks as though when the empire-building and combat elements come together, it'll be spectacular. Age of Empires III uses real-time physics, leading to some amazing imagery as cannonballs skip along the ground through lines of troops or crash into buildings. The little soldiers can really go flying; hats and muskets will whirl in the air. It's even possible to knock guys off of cliffs. And individual buildings are never destroyed in the same way twice: cannonballs will tear off chunks of the architecture, which will spin through the air and crash into other buildings, exposing flaming timbers below. It's possible for cannonballs to smash their way all the way through a building, thudding into the ground somewhere on the other side.
Eye candy is great, but if the game truly is as strategically deep as the designers hope, it may be the most influential Age title yet. We hope to get some actual hands-on time with the game in the weeks to come, so stick around GameSpy for details.
Diambil dari http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/age-of-empires-iii/605149p1.html
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