Page 5

FiringSquad: It really sets your game apart from other RTS games. War is much more costly…

Brian Reynolds: Yeah! It’s hard to imagine Rise of Nations now without attrition. And it led to where you can increase the attrition rate, and the pro-attrition Wonders and anti-attrition-Wonders.

FiringSquad: As good as the game is, are you worried about the audience at all? You’ve got the hardcore RTS gamers, the mainstream RTS gamers, and then the hoary 4X crowd that wants to take 30 minutes between turns. Are you worried about alienating them at all?

Brian Reynolds: Since we’re a new license, we’re a new line of games, we’re not a sequel… we feel we’re not in the business of repelling any segment of the audience. We think we’ll attract some 4X players and we’ll attract a lot of RTS players, and of course there will be people from both genres who just won’t be interested in what we’re doing. But we think we have a lot that will appeal to strategy gamers. We put in our ideas not because we thought it would sell. We put them in because we thought they’d make a good game. We just hope there’s a large group of players who agree with us! (laughs)

FiringSquad: Let’s talk about Conquer the World. It isn’t entirely a new idea. Warlords Battlecry has something similar, so does the Total War series. Was it a part of Rise of Nations from the beginning? Did you think: “The campaign for Rise of Nations will be like Risk!”

Brian Reynolds: No we didn’t even think of that until about April of 2002. (laughs)

FiringSquad: It seems like a lot of work to add it so late in development.

Brian Reynolds: Originally we thought we’d do the kind of campaign you usually find in RTS games. Connected scenarios, historical scenarios plus stories, very traditional stuff. We even did some work on that and it might appear later as a free download or something like that. But we found it didn’t really appeal to our strengths as game developers. It didn’t fit the game. So we started looking for other ideas. We started thinking about our strengths as developers and then we started thinking what about our… Turn-Based experience!” We tried to create something that generates a more open-ended campaign and give the player more control over what happens next, what’s at stake, etc., At first we were going to make a campaign generator. Then we hit on the idea of a map and… borrowed liberally from many boardgames.