Bueno, pues si querian informacion, se le tiene:
Van a sacar 2 ediciones a la venta: La edicion normal, la cual consta de el juego y el manual, y la edicion para coleccionistas la cual incluye un dvd de como se hizo el juego, un cd con la banda sonora, arte grafico, y un manual supercompleto.
El paquete normal vale 50 dolares, y el collectors 70
A otra cosa, aqui esta las respuestas a inumerables preguntas que se le hicieron a uno de los diseñadores del juego, ahi se responden muchos de sus interrogantes(en ingles)
Es muy largo que creo que no saldra completo, yo vere una buena recompensa jejeje(Karmita querido)
Q: Where do you get your ideas for gameplay from? Books, other games, boardgames?
ES_DeathShrimp:
All of the above. Like I said above, the actual ideas are easy. It's making them work that's hard. Consider the Home City, which is our number one feature. The concept of persistent elements in RTS games frankly isn't that radical in and of itself. What is audacious is how completely we are embracing the concept, even in multiplayer. It's a nightmare to balance. But that boldness, that "how the *** are they going to pull that off?" is what makes it so cool
Q: What do you do with the ideas from the fanbase? (like the civ designs in this forum and the entries from PAoM's age of unit contest)? Read them and thus gain ideas, only read them if they are hot-topics? Only use them to get elemtary ideas? Something else?
ES_DeathShrimp:
We read everything. What fans sometimes forget is that we think about these things an awful lot, and there are a lot of smart people working at ES. So it is rare that someone will come up with a completely new idea that hasn't already made the rounds here in some form or another. Instead, we generally pay more attention to general trends we see. If a lot of fans are asking for more interesting economic decisions, that's something we look at. If a lot of people say a single trigger addition would make a huge difference in their scenario work, we pay attention.
Q: How long does it take to design the detailed general idea for a game (civs, gamelay, etc. everything except the precise statistics) before starting the actual programming)?
ES_DeathShrimp:
We use a slightly different approach. We come up with a very general design at first and try and get it playable ASAP. So the game is playable at an even coarser level than you describe. The original version of AOE3 had a single civilization, no Ages, a couple of buildings and one unit. We hadn't even worried a lot about how many civs we'd have, or what the resources would be. There is no point spending a lot of time brainstorming about features if an initial test shows you that there is no way the feature would work. For AOE3 (which is a bit unusual in that we iterated on the design for so long), we probably spent 3-4 months in the pure brainstorm phase before we had a playable version of the game. Everything after that was trying out different designs. It would have been longer if we were also making a new engine from scratch, but a lot of the engine changes for AOE3 came online over time. One day the new renderer was turned on. Then the new multiplayer backbone was added. At some point we decided we had enough good features to make a game so we cut off the spigot and started polishing what we had. The process is much more like decorating a room (a bit here, a bit there, a few mistakes along the way) than it is like baking a cake (follow a linear recipe from start to finish).
Q: Will we see elements from the boardgame Settlers of Catan in AoE3?
ES_DeathShrimp:
Yes. Fewer games have had such an impact on the general philosophy of game design at ES. Now, the original design for AOE3 was very board-gamey. We had something like Longest Road and everything. It was actually a lot of fun, but it felt so much like a board game that it didn't feel much like Age of Empires. So we backed off that design quite a bit, while still keeping some of the interesting decisions that Settlers and other boardgames (especially the German ones) offer.
Q: Why is it that I am hearing there will only be eight civs and if it is true why? What happened to the ten plus civs?
ES_DeathShrimp:
There are 4 reasons we chose a smaller number of civs:
1) We wanted the civilizations to play really differently, instead of the AOK civs, which basically had a unique unit, a civ bonus of the +10% variety, and some holes in the tech tree.
2) There is a ton of art content in this game, and each additional civ means fewer assets for the existing civs.
3) Because of the Home City feature, civilizations can feel radically different from each other. There was talk of scrapping the notion of civs altogether and just letting everyone develop their own civ, but we decided that choosing whether to play the X or the Y was a hallmark of the Age series, even if you end up tweaking your civ quite a bit through the Home City.
4) This game is already a nightmare to balance. We had to stop somewhere.
We have several Sheridan graduates. We always have a need for concept artists, and learning classical animation can apply towards learning 3D animation (we use 3D Studio Max, by the way). We are always looking out for good artists, so if you know any, tell them to send their resumes in.
Q: What made you end up choosing the colonization of America as the topic of the game, instead of just covering all European matters happening at the time?
ES_DeathShrimp:
It was just a matter of focus. We thought players would immediately get what a game about colonization was about. If it was everything in Europe + colonization, that gets to be kind of a mess, design-wise. We could have chosen just to do Europe -- just updated AOK to the 1800s -- but we thought we'd get some interesting new features out of doing colonization. Besides, it makes more sense to say "You're France -- you start with nothing in Canada and must build a city" than to say "You're France -- you start with nothing in France and must build a city." I will agree with what some posters have already pointed out: our games are all about YOU leading the empire. So you have to start out with what history gave you, but you aren't confined to relive history exactly. That wouldn't give the player many true options.
Q: Why Max, isn't Lightwave and Maya used much more on the game busness (SP?)? I heard that it gives much more freedom or something.
ES_DeathShrimp:
I'm not an artist, so take this with a grain of salt, but lots of developers still use Max. Maya is the up-and-coming, new-kid-on-the-block product, so some developers are switching, but you lose a ton of knowledge about how to do things when you change software like that. It would be like telling the programmers that we're doing the next game in Fortran or Java or Linux or something. When working on small units (like for an RTS) number of animations has a bigger impact than the detailed texture per unit or the depth of animation for a single unit.
Q: Will riflemen be able to switch from ranged to melee combat? Imagine how ridiculous it would be watching riflemen go through the process of reloading while being hacked to death by a Native American with a tomahawk. The rifleman should be able to stab the enemy with his bayonet or at least bludgeon his foe with the blunt end of his rifle.
ES_DeathShrimp:
Well, riflemen didn't generally use bayonets in this time period, though musketeers did. Rifled muskets with bayonets are a little technologically beyond AOE3 (think US Civil War). However, to get to the spirit of your question, we agree it would look stupid for someone to be reloading his weapon while being attacked hand-to-hand.
Q: Hmmm, sounds like autoque is in there again. Hopefully using autoque will mean units will produce slower, so it's an option for noobs but everyone else will produce vills manually.
ES_DeathShrimp:
We haven't added autoqueue, at least not yet. Again without going into details, the demand just hasn't been there the way it was for AOM.
If you lose a battle in AOE3, it's because you brought the wrong unit, or didn't have enough upgrades, or couldn't afford enough soldiers, or just made a bad bet somewhere along the way. It's rarely because you just forgot to train units, which is the problem the Repeat button was trying to address.
This will sound cryptic, but the game probably plays more differently than you are thinking, but not because it's been dumbed down.
I've probably played hundreds (maybe thousands) of games of AOK and AOM, and near the end of the project you really burn out on playing over and over even though they are both great games. That hasn't happened this time. I am always dying to get a chance to play.
Q: How important is the designing/modding community to you? How much support do you think ES will give the independent content community for AoE3 after the game's release? Are we talking Warcraft (None) or Nevwinter Nights (constant)?
ES_DeathShrimp:
I would expect the same kinds of abilities you had on AOK and AOM. Designing / modding is important to us because we know that it extends the life of the game, but we don't treat it at the level of a "back of the box" feature. What I mean is that NWN was designed largely to be a tool that end-users could use to make their own adventures. Games like Doom are designed with re-licensing the engine in mind, so it is easier to plug in content. Our main goal is to make an RTS game that plays a certain way set in a certain period. We'll squeeze in as many features as we can to let you guys alter the game the way you want, but we wouldn't e.g. risk the memory footprint of the game, or compromise the anti-cheating stuff, or risk stability of the software, or the schedule to do so.
If user-designed-content as a concept continues to grow, as I expect it will, more and more games will consider it a must-have feature. On the other hand, software just gets more complicated over time, which makes editing it more difficult. I could (and did) make AI files for AOK, but the AI files for AOM look like C++ to me. That's true of RMs, the unit and tech data, and definitely is more true for unit textures and animations -- we have things like bump and spec mapping to contend with now.
Q: Why in the world would you take out such an important element of the aoe series as the resource stone? I think you did it because its too complex for most of the gamers. Its easyer to play a game that has less resources, or course, but I reckon its its a big mistake taking away a resource.
ES_DeathShrimp:
We took Stone out of AOM because we didn't want to have 5 resources (with the inclusion of Favor). Plus pop cap was harder to track in AOM. We didn't include Stone in AOE3 because you have enough to keep track of (both in terms of resource management and points of control on the map) without it. So in terms of complexity, I would phrase it not that we wanted to dumb down the game, but we wanted to keep a complex game from getting even more complex.
Q: What will the music be like? The loved the music from aok & aoc, I never heard such a good music in any game. Will it be the same style?
ES_DeathShrimp:
The music is our best ever. I know you guys probably think we say that about every aspect of the game, but it's definitely true of the music. We'll talk more about the music soon.
Q: How did you come up with the Idea of the Home City? I think its genius.
ES_DeathShrimp:
A lot of board games have similar features, games like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan. We didn't steal the idea outright, but 95% of game design is taking a germ of an idea and running with it in a new direction.
Q: What year did you decide that you will do aoe3?
ES_DeathShrimp:
Around the time AOM was finishing up. We've been working on it since then.
Q: How many play-testers are currently play-testing the game and how many hours a day, days a week?
ES_DeathShrimp:
Everyone at Ensemble plays the game at least once a week, and many of us play it more than once a day. We haven't opened up the game much beyond Microsoft yet.
Q: If you had to guess, do you think there will be aoe4 sometime in the next 5 years or so?
ES_DeathShrimp:
In all honesty, we haven't started talking about it at all. Do I think there will be an AOE4 at some point? Probably. In 5 years? Who knows? But it isn't being worked on yet and nobody has any idea what it's features or time period would be. Let's get this one out the door first.
Q: 1. I am very curious as to 'how involved' the player will feel in the micromanaging of battles of this time period considering the focus on unit formations?
2. Will we have complete control over individual units to pair them off to strategically counter a specific enemy unit (such as in previous age games) or will it feel more like we are commanding squads or are encouraged to do so because of the focus on 'unit formations'?
ES_DeathShrimp:
Micromanagement is a touchy subject that is hard to address without bringing down a firestorm of "love it" and "hate it."
We are doing a lot with combat, much more so than in any of our previous games, but we aren't getting rid of unit control. You can still task individual units and you don't make all of your decisions before the battle and then just sit back and watch. More soon.
