After taking a one-week break, developer Oxide Games has posted its latest video dev diary for its upcoming historical grand strategy game Ara: History Untold. This time, the dev diary"s host Steven Bell welcomes back a previous dev diary guest, Oxide Games Lead Designer Michael Califf.
For this dev diary entry, Califf talks about the crafting system that"s being put into the game. Crafting is something that you might not see in too many 4X strategy games, but Califf stated the team wanted to give players more than just going to war and creating weapons.
By adding this resource management idea, this idea of crafting, it kind of allows us to explore different avenues of things that were important throughout history in terms of taking care of and maintaining your people rather than just getting into fights with everyone. And so that was really some of the inspiration.
For example, creating food and selling them in an arena in your city will make the populous happy and bring in some income to your civilization. Bringing in books in a library will make people in the city start to read and could set up more advancements in technology in your society.
Some resources in the game will be available right from the beginning to craft food and items like wheat, rice, copper, and iron. In later stages of the game, other different kinds of resources will become available to craft other items, such as uranium for an atomic bomb and more.
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in 2024. You can join the Ara Insider Program right now to play pre-release builds for the game. Oxide announced recently that a new technical alpha test is slated to begin "soon" and you can learn more about how to participate on the game"s Steam page.