Rick’s new Empire

Men with sticks – the revolution has arrived. Nicely animated, ability-crammed men with sticks though. Logan Booker was at Rick Goodman’s presentation of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World.

Far away from his homeland in Boston, Massachusetts, Rick Goodman was in Australia last Wednesday for his first public presentation in the southern hemisphere. On display was Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, a kind of semi-sequel to the developer's previous title, Empire Earth.

Activision's headquarters was looking especially tall that day, and aside from the blazing heat of the sun, it wasn't too bad a morning. Thirty minute-plus train rides still suck though.

After arriving at the venue, and making my way to The Goodman, we shook hands and had a brief conversation on RTSes and related topics.

Bend at knees, sit on chair.

We did manage to snatch a position close to the slightly larger than large plasma screen used for the display. All was prepared, and with a shake of the head to dispel some IMAX-like disorientation, we started on Empires: Dawn of the Modern World.

Easily noticed was a heavily tweaked Empire Earth engine manning the machinations. The upgrade seen was capable of handling many more units on screen, as well as better and more detailed texture support. Zoomed units actually has facial expressions, and structures and landscapes very defined. The maps looked a bit Spartan otherwise, and apart from the various man-made constructions, vegetation and other expected land features were mainly absent.

As the presentation progressed, Rick showed the crowd various sides and unit abilities. Stainless Steel Studios has done a massive amount of research in regards to the historical accuracy of said units and their characteristics. But with any game, abstract design always has a hand in.

We saw a number of games, both single and multiplayer, as well as a few different sides. Dumped from Empires is the 'customise your race' feature; SSS has reverted to a set of workable fixed sides. We had a demo of Korea and China first, and then a display of English and German might in a WWII demo.

As Rick went through the replays, we saw a couple of interesting gameplay dynamics. The major one of these being the two play modes: 'Empire building' and 'Tournament'. While an Empire building game can take any from one to three hours, and Tournament game is designed to be played quickly, and won't go for anything longer than an hour.

To accommodate the fast and furious game style, the different sides have particular abilities. For example, Korea can build 'mobile' structures and units, such as the mobile barracks to produce units on the go. The side can also produce mobile artillery, saving them the trouble of building them at home and carting them to the front.

'We've taken a lot of feedback from gamers from our surveys,' said Goodman, referring to the Empire Earth surveys of last year (2002). Through-out the presentation, Rick assigned the evolution of new game elements to player feedback from EE.

On top of this, Stainless Steel Studios decided to break up development by having two teams work seperately on single player and multiplayer, and is a similar course that was taken with RTCW. 'We have assembled a team of Warcraft and Starcraft players to work on the multiplayer,' Goodman explained. Apparently the team is working on making Empires a game with well-balanced and varied sides, to bolster the longevity of the title.

Empire Earth received a lot of criticism on its overly-ambitious nature; the game covered a large span of human history, including a fantasy future setting. From the surveys, SSS found that many players enjoyed the earlier Renaissance eras and World War eras, but not the prehistoric or far-future settings.

With this in mind, Empires focuses on just 1,000 years of human civilisation, centred on the eras players enjoyed most.

On something completely different, Empires has some great animations. General unit movement and attacking was excellent. Especially good were the archers. We've always loved filling the sky with arrows, and we are going to really enjoy doing it in Empires.

We did see a bug in the engine though – sometimes when units engaged an explosion (or other propeller of bodies) they'd be thrown around the screen like demonic basketballs; bouncing over hills and then back again. We felt sorry for the poor guys, completely at the mercy of the physics algorithms. Funny, but fixable.

Empires did reminded us somewhat of Age of Mythology. The longer we watched the presentation, the more the similarities grew between Microsoft's flagship RTS and Rick's new kid. Apart from tiny guys beating the hit points out of one another, what really got my attention was the new way technology is researched. Upgrades are stored so they can be used at a later point in the game, much like AoM and the god powers. However, Empires allows for quite a number of upgrades to be stored at a time, whereas AoM is limited to four. Countering also played a big part, as it did in EE and AoM – you'll need long-swordsman to get at archers, and siege weapons to take on buildings and fortifications.

It's good to see someone making use of pixel shaders in an RTS. So, if you're making a game, where's the first place you're going to use this tech? Water, of course! The ships we saw sailed over seas of programmable pixels, leaving nice, pretty wakes behind them. Oh, and ship-to-ship combat was a bit of alright too – there's something about a ship-of-the-line that gives us goose bumps.

Although the game was only 60% complete, and there's currently no release date, Empires is looking like a nice package. It does at times come off as a late upgrade to Empire Earth, and it does borrow from other recent titles, however, the game should introduce enough new stuff to flesh it out from other RTSes.

Logan Booker