Developer Oxide Games is still working on its long-awaited grand strategy game Ara: History Untold, which will be published by Microsoft"s Xbox Game Studios division for the PC. This week, Oxide released the latest entry in its long-running video dev diaries about the game,
This week"s entry on YouTube has its host "@GamerZakh" talking with Oxide"s co-founder and President Marc Meyer, who answers some questions from Ara"s community about the game. Meyer started the video by saying the team at Oxide is "firing on all cylinders trying to get Ara ready for everyone." He added that the game has now reached both its feature and content complete milestones, and now the team is "finding all the places we can add polish and improve performance."
One of the questions from fans addressed what was seen as an issue in one of the gameplay videos where rivers were flowing water from bank to bank instead of flowing down. Meyer stated that the team will be fixing that issue and with others involving the game"s terrain before launch. He added about the game"s terrain generation:
We"re trying to get it nice and fast so that you can start a new game and see a new world over and over and over . . . So hopefully once you get your hands on it, you will always see a beautiful world.
Another topic in the dev diary was how its AI will challenge players. Meyer stated that AI behavior in the game changes at higher difficult levels. He added:
This just opened up a whole world for us to be able to say at this difficulty level, you know, Genghis Khan is going to be even more aggressive when coming after you which is just incredible.
Meyer said that one of Oxide"s engineers recently gave a talk at the 2024 Game Developers Conference about "how sophisticated our planning architecture is for the AI."
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in the fall of 2024. If you are interested in playing the game before it officially launches, you can join the Ara Insider Program right now for the chance to play pre-release builds. You can learn more about how to participate on the game"s Steam page.