After taking a few more weeks off, developer Oxide Games just posted a new video dev diary on YouTube for its upcoming PC grand historical strategy game Ara: History Untold. The game will be published by Microsoft via its Xbox Game Studios division.
This time, the host of these dev diaries, "@GamerZakh," chats with Oxide"s Narrative Designer and Historian, Grace Rojas. In the video, Rojas says that storytelling, rather than just straight facts and figures about historical events and people, is a part of her job. She says:
To truly understand history, we must also be willing to dive deep into the past by acknowledging and examining pieces of the story that can often be overlooked, and how that information contributed to the development of the world as we know it.
Rojas also stated that they tried to be as historically accurate as possible while admitting that even history itself can sometimes be biased. She said:
To do this we worked with a mix of primary and secondary sources. We consulted with experts on the subject matter and we received feedback from folks who have ties to the regions we cover and so much more.
Ara also has a focus on real-life leaders in history, and Rojas says each of them has traits that can influence the direction of the player"s game:
Every leader"s personality traits are driven by research into their real world history, and each leader"s unique leader ability speaks to one of their great accomplishments as leaders. The initial relationships between leaders are impacted by how much they may or may not have in common with each other, and it also impacts the way that their AI chooses to pursue prestige and ultimately victory.
The game will also have its own digital encyclopedia, the Encarta (which ironically was also the name of Microsoft"s CD-ROM encyclopedia in the 1990s.) Rojas says:
It took some time for us to find a sweet spot where we could do justice to the information we"re presenting, while also keeping the content approachable for players. To achieve this, we needed to keep the content a reasonable length and use accessible language so players that are both casual enjoyers of history or really big history buffs feel like they can learn something new without taking too much time away from their gameplay.
Later this week, Oxide Games will launch a series of videos that centers on Encarta and how real historical people, places and events were put into the game. Ara History Untold will officially launch on September 24 for PC and PC Game Pass.