Interview with 2 CaptureAge devs
Hey guys, Spirit of the Law here. In this video,
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to chat with a couple of the devs from the Chronicles
Alexander DLC, which is officially out as of yesterday. Now, I admittedly don’t do a lot of
interviews, but the whole Chronicles project in particular is one I’m a huge fan of, as I think
the game benefits a lot from single player focused content, as well as the fact it’s a great example
of a community-led project that originated with the Rome at War mod. Some of you may remember
from a video a few years back. In this video, I had a great discussion with the original
creator of the Rome at War mod, Roger Troup, who is now the lead producer at Capture Age,
as well as the narrative lead at Capture Age, and Oxford educated ancient historian, Dr. Ben
Angel. Hope you guys enjoy. So, first off, guys, I just want to thank you for carving out a bit of
time to chat. I know this is a very busy time for you, I’m sure. And maybe the best way to start
is first by letting everyone know who you are and what you both do at Chronicles. And maybe
Roger, we’ll start with you. Uh, yeah. Well, thanks for having us, Spirit. I’m Roger Troop.
I’m the lead producer here at Capture Age, overseeing production for the Chronicles series
and the latest edition, Alexander the Great, which uh is about to release. Great. And Ben? I’m Ben
Angel and I’m the narrative lead at Capture Age. I suppose narrative design means something entirely
different at every different video game studio in the industry. So I kind of do all the things that
you might expect a writer narrative designer to do with, uh, story, characters, writing the script,
casting, directing, voice actors, but I’m also involved in level design and game design generally
and suppose I’m the de facto historical consultant for the studio. Cool. How many guys are working on
this team? I guess guys and gals, how many how big is this team? I you know there’s there’s multiple
projects we’re working on but the Chronicle series of roughly about 30 people working on it. Oh wow
that’s more than I thought. Okay. actually maybe a good place to start here next is let’s talk about
the origins of the whole Chronicles project and uh maybe how each of you got involved into it and
how it’s evolved over that time. I particularly like this story as I have a minor role to play
in it and uh yeah maybe Roger if you can tell us about kind of the origins of this. Yeah, sure.
I mean it it really started all in community. I was actually poking around in the forums when uh
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition dropped and uh I I fell back in love with the games the
game from my childhood and I was poking around, saw another mod project going on, and it sort of
fizzled out, but I learned some things from those guys and and figured out how to port Age of Age
of Empires 1 definitive edition graphics into into the game. And uh, yeah, it it got me thinking
it would be cool to uh to do a conversion mod, something set in antiquity based on Rome. And
uh I started out just kind of myself trying to port graphics and uh before long I I found out I
I couldn’t do all of that. And so I actually hired an artist on CG Trader and I got them to start
making units for me. And uh I kept posting the content within the forums to just get attention
and hopefully solicit, you know, some uh some designers to help with the effort. And uh we kind
of just kept tinkering away there and eventually you know I got enough content out there that a
few other folks uh decided to join the effort and before long I pulled them all into a discord and
it was a bunch of you know indiv uh international hobbyists you know spread across the world just
uh tinkering here and innovating on civ designs and building assets for the game. And uh a few
folks started to take notice as we were doing our play test. They were posting in the forums and
uh a nice guy by the name of Spirit of the Law uh offered to showcase our our mod and did and uh
that went up on YouTube. A few people noticed and uh yeah, so that got featured uh a few years back
uh on on your YouTube channel. folks took notice and uh before long we were in touch with World’s
Edge, Xbox studios and they asked us uh if we’d be willing to consider professionalizing it and uh
you know we as we were kind of evaluating those options we got put in touch with Capture Age which
uh they themselves were a you know from community they had created a a a spectator tool and you
know they had all the dev talent and We had the content pipeline and the idea and so we decided to
partner and figure out how to uh develop content professionally for Age of Empires 2. Ben, do you
mind telling me how you got involved in this as the sort of historical consultant slash lots
of different jobs guy? Yeah. I guess they got all of that together and then it was decided that
there was going to be a single player focus. So, they needed some campaigns. So, the job went
up for the narrative designer. At the time, I was working as a writer at Ubisoft on the Ano
series,, Ano 1800 and the upcoming Ano 1117, another game set in the ancient world. That’s
very much my niche. prior to that, I had been in academia all my life. I did a master’s degree
and a PhD in ancient history at the University of Oxford. And I had been, like Roger, a lifelong
Age of Empires fan. playing the original Age of Empires at sort of about age of six was really my
first video game experience. Age of Empires 2 has always been my go-to favorite video game of all
time. And so, it was always an ambition of mine to work on the series. And when that job came
up, yeah, it’s it’s just an incredible privilege uh to have the opportunity to work on it. So I
came in, we had Athenians, Spartans and Aayanids, and I was told, “Right, make some campaign content
out of that.” Then so it was a wonderful sort of blank slate. a really amazing creative time where
we could kind of think things are fresh because it was a brand new project. We could do things in
a slightly different way for how they’d already been done in the Age of Empires franchise. So
we started to come up with our wish list which inevitably had to be paired down but there were
many things that we were able to achieve like with the animated cutscenes the very different approach
to campaign structure and narrative delivery etc. so yeah I joined in April 2023 more than two and
a half years ago now and yeah the rest is history. Can you tell us a bit more about that process
of researching and synthesizing so much history into a cohesive narrative? It just feels like it
would be hard to even know where to start. Well, it all begins with me going over to my bookshelf
over there and taking down a bunch of sources on the ancient world. So, it always starts with
the primary sources with the ancient authors themselves. obviously I’m largely familiar with
them already because of my academic background. So, I’ll troll through those and come up with
a general shape for the story for the DLC and also pick out a set of levels that we can use to
convey that story. events that ideally have some promising gameplay potential in the context
of Age of Empires. So, I’ll turn those into a set of concept pages for the levels, uh, with all
the sources there, but also a historical overview that’s a bit shorter. And from there, we’ll work
and brainstorm as a whole level design team, and really come up with what’s the core concept
for each scenario, what’s the core mechanic, how do we represent history through the game play.
We come up with a pitch for each scenario that we’re all really happy with and then that’s given
to the individual level designer who’s actually going to implement it in engine. And uh they hash
out all of the grizzly details. and then we start implementing to various stages testing all the way
through. And perhaps Roger maybe you can talk a bit about how we test and validate our designs
once we start making them. Yeah absolutely. I mean, you know, as Ben talks about, we, you know,
we figure out what the story is, the narrative, the what’s the narrative arc we want to cover, and
then as we get through outline, we have our series of production gates we try to, we try to walk
through, whether that’s alpha, beta, and then kind of like a polish phase. And so, you know, as
we go through each one of those gates, you know, we’re really trying to get kind of we’re trying to
really lock down some of the the the designs, like what’s the core mechanic we want to introduce? How
does this fit into the overall narrative arc? And you know, as we get through farther along,
that testing becomes more and more rigorous uh just through play testing. And towards the
very end of it, you know, it’s really about the UX and the balance and making sure that this feels
right, that the players have the right you know, impression of that level. And uh and you know I I
I I think really circling back to something that Ben talks about is just we we very much have taken
kind of a campaign first kind of narrative first vision of like how it is we’re approaching these
and so you know these levels how do they fit into the historical story and what what cool stories
do we get to tell about the characters that we’re introducing to the player? and making sure that
that lands correctly with how we’re setting it up. And so, not only are we trying to work through
kind of the, you know, being bug free and things working as intended, but it’s also like does it
have the impact that we want it to have when the player engages with it. And so, it’s definitely
a very collaborative process. It’s it’s iterative for sure. we, you know, we don’t make a lot of
sacrifices or compromises there. And so we will often go back and try to get that right because
we just we think our fans expect it and we expect it from ourselves. Yeah. Well, I mean it’s a very
wellreceived, you know, battle for Greece and I’m sure this Alexander one will be as well. So it
seems to be paying off actually. If we can talk about that a little bit on this one. So you’re
talking about sort of these balances that you have to make sometimes and you know you’re saying
you try not to compromise on certainly quality but there are some compromises I think you probably
have to make in the story. So Alexander, for example, is a very polarizing figure the more you
look into it. There’s, you know, it kind of gets glazed a little bit as this, you know, philosopher
king is very multicultural and has never lost a battle. There’s a very positive spin you can do
on the guy. But there’s also a very negative spin that, you know, he kills family members, uh,
you know, at least like step siblings. He he kills one of his friends in a drunken rage. He’s
definitely an alcoholic even by the time period, the standard of the time. uh and certainly a lot
of the there’s a lot of things about his mother and a bit of a mama’s boy and I think this had
more negative connotation back then in Macedonian culture. So you get the positive and the negative
from both sides. So how do you thread that and try to come up with a single cohesive story that
you know keep in mind it’s supposed to be fun and entertaining as well? Yes. Often we have the issue
that there’s very little source material for our characters and as you say with Alexander it’s the
opposite. There’s a multiplicity of sources, five major ancient sources for Alexander, none of which
is ideal. They’re all three to six centuries after his death. And each of them has its own view of
Alexander and has its own agenda. I mean, Quintis Curtis Rufus, for example, the Roman writer,
isn’t really writing about Alexander at all. He’s writing about Roman despotic emperors and he
uses the figure of Alexander to to talk through that. So all of these sources are conflicted and
strange and modern scholars views have diverged even further. For someone like um WW Tarn who
was basking in the the last dying twilight of the British Empire, Alexander was this very positive
romantic idealistic figure man who was going to bring the world together sort of thing. Uh for
Erns Badian who was coming at the tail end of the worst horrors of the 20th century on the other
hand Alexander is a psychopathic paranoid tyrant. So you can really make of Alexander whatever
you wish. And as a historian, if I was to write a historical account of Alexander, I would
perhaps be very cautious and say we can’t really say anything definitive about Alexander at all.
He’s lost to the mists of time because of the problems with our sources. That when you’re doing
historical fiction would make for a very, very boring character. we have to be bold and pick what
we’re going to do with Alexander. The key thing all the way through was answering this question of
what is it about this guy that he could convince people to follow him to the ends of the earth?
Like the fact is that we know that the people did that. So what was it about him that accounts
for that fact? And so we turn Alexander into this rather strange rather larger than life figure.
Um like a figure from a sophocan tragedy. He’s someone like or someone like Achilles from the
Iliad. Someone who is kind of greater than other mortals. There’s something a whiff of supernatural
about him. But there’s also something terrible and dangerous about that fact. almost as if this
is not the sort of being that’s supposed to coexist with normal mortals on Earth. And you see
this throughout the campaign. People comment on Alexander with this mix of awe and fear. Um, and
I I did a strangeness pass on Alexander’s lines. I kind of went back and made them all a little
bit weird. You’ll notice as the campaign goes on, he sort of says things and you just think,
who talks like that? Who says that? Because he is this extraordinary figure. It’s almost like
he’s got kind of Matrix vision. He sees the world as something grander and more magnificent and
more epic than ordinary people do. And there’s something really magnetic about that. But in
good Greek tragic style, that’s also the seed of his downfall. He is going to go too far. He is
going to do some of those terrible things that you mentioned. And ultimately, his army is going to
mutiny and say, “No, we’re not going any further.” Um, so just accounting for that extraordinary
arc that we know has to happen with the character himself is a very tough thing to do because you
know I’m just a little British fellow. How do how do you convey a sense of extraordinary charisma
and personality? Uh, it takes a lot of work but the portrait of Alexander that we have I think is
extraordinarily interesting and multifaceted. So, you know, I I I like the Oliver Stone movie,
but I do sometimes wonder, would would I really follow that Colin FTH Alexander to the end of the
world? I think there’s something a little more interesting going on with Alexander in in our DLC.
Um, actually, now that you mentioned that movie, uh, there was something that I’ve noticed it’s
come up in my comment section a couple times. Wondering if you could just quickly answer it. Um,
so you went for sort of a ScottishIrish accent for the Macedonians. And I’ve heard in that movie they
did that because, you know, the Macedonians were kind of like this rural northern community to the
Greeks who saw themselves as more civilized. Is that sort of a play on the English seeing the
Scottish and the Irish as a little more rural? Is it kind of playing off that idea or is it just
coincidence? Well, I I’m I’m really glad you you brought up the voice acting because it’s something
I’m very passionate about. Um, I can’t promise you a short answer here because it’s it’s a subject
that’s that I’m so passionate about and as soon as I joined and started working on Chronicles,
I wanted to do voice acting and indeed the style of the writing in a very particular way. Um, and
it’s been very gratifying to see that the effort that we put into the voice acting is something
that’s been praised in all of the reviews and all of the online comments. It’s it’s really
wonderful to see what we do with the accents specifically. So you notice even in Battle for
Greece, uh it’s a mixture of English accents, there’s um northern accents, you know, Yorkshire
accents, a whole mix of them. Ultimately, what I try to do with the accents is match the voice to
the character. It’s got to be the the voice should instantly give the audience an impression of who
the character is and what their background is. Um, and I think actually it’s no less authentic
than using other types of accents. Um, firstly because I mean people say why why does
he have a Scottish accent or why does he have an English accent? Nobody ever asks why are they
speaking English? It’s already artificial. And then what would an ancient Macedonian accent even
sound like? What would what would an ancient Greek accent sound like? It certainly wouldn’t sound
like a modern Greek accent. They’re completely different languages. Um, so already there’s plenty
of artificiality, but what you can do if you use modern accents is instantly key the audience into
who that character is. You think of say Aristides in Battle for Greece where he speaks with, you
know, a very upper class, very posh accent. Uh, the reference that I gave to the actor was Tobias
Menses who plays Prince Phillip in in The Crown. um you instantly get a sense that he’s this kind
of upper class aristocratic character and he’s contrasted with the myisticles who has a Yorkshire
accent. It’s just the actor Enzo Chilent’s natural accent. Um and you instantly get a sense of their
relative stations in society that he’s the kind of upstart. He’s not part of the traditional elite.
Um, so with with Alexander campaign specifically, uh, yes, I did use the the Scottish accent to give
the sense that the the Macedonian royal family are somewhat different from the Greeks, that
they are these kind of rugged Highlanders. Um, the sort of thing that Oliver Stone was going
for. So, Cletus, I I had that Scottish accent in my mind all the time when I was writing him.
Philillip. Interestingly, when we auditioned, I said, you know, he could have an Irish accent,
he could have a Scottish accent, Welsh, Northern, just long as it’s not southern RP. And we had
a whole range of different casting options. We went with Alec Newman, who, as you’ve heard, just
magnificent performance. He’s a brilliant actor. Recently won a BAFTA for for Still Waits the Deep.
He’s terrifying in that role. Um, but and you’ll notice Palmenon, who is also a Macedonian, has
an upper class English accent because that’s his character. And again, I notice when we watch
people play, they hear Palmenon talk for the first time, and they instantly get who he’s meant
to be. This smmy upper class person who looks down on people. So, it’s a stylistic choice. Not
everybody is going to agree with it, but I think the boldness has paid off. I think if we didn’t do
it, you wouldn’t have characters like Aristagaras and Lysander from Battle for Greece. So, I shall
defend that decision to the H. I, you know, I I think it’s well, one, it’s always amazing talking
to, you know, hearing Ben talk about this and uh this is part of the evolution of going from a
mod to professional content development. I mean, I think it just comes across when you listen
to Ben talk about this and his command of like the historical facts and the direction here.
Like, you know, as we as we joined Capture Age, it was we needed to expand the team and work with
professionals who have this experience. And I I I think that clearly comes through when uh when
you’re listening to Ben talk about his enthusiasm about it. Uh I would also say uh just add to this
choice that we’ve made in terms of the the accents and uh I remember when we were auditioning and
looking at the first uh potential cast for Battle for Greece and there was just I think we attempted
to do accents and um we just couldn’t get the character to come out the way we wanted to if if
I remember correctly, Ben. And I think that’s when we made we partly made this decision and it was
just like these characters came jumping out at you the moment um you know we went this direction and
Lysander and these characters that we’re talking about I think just hit really well and uh I think
it it was a it was a wise choice to do. I I knew all from the start the way I wanted to do it but
we did get some with with Greek accents from the studio. Yes. because they had worked on other
Age of Empires content previously and I think there was sort of some confusion over this new
direction we were going. Um so we had to sort of iron that out. Um but we work with the amazing
side studio in London. Um and certainly for the Alexander DLC now that we’ve been through it once
they really get what we’re going for. We have a lot of meetings with them beforehand. I am much
completely involved in the casting process doing it live as well as listening to the recordings
after now. Um so they really get what we want and I tell you the the choices of actors that
they gave us magnificent and when you hear the talent in this campaign this is just an incredible
voice cast we’ve got and a lot of them are proper award-winning actors on screen and stage and
the job they’ve done for this is is magnificent. But I’ve only played three missions, but so
far it’s very impressive, I have to say. Uh, next, you guys mind if we talk a little bit
about civilization design? So, I know you’re very limited in how many sibs you can pick.
So, I bet you were kind of capped at three, and obviously Macedonians are in. Wondering if
you can comment on Thrace and Puru. I don’t think too many people had heard of Puru before this.
I’m curious if these felt like obvious choices to you guys or if this is something there was
quite a bit of debate internally about. Yes, there is a story. Um, so Thrace, uh, we we kind of
settled on fairly quickly because it’s Alexander’s sort of first real campaign when he comes to
power. He goes up into the Balkans and deals with these thrian tribes that have always been
me menacing Macedon’s borders uh, for hundreds of years. And we also wanted this sort of prologue
before Alexander becomes king where he goes with his father up north and he faces thribal. So,
we knew we wanted them in there and we knew it could be a really cool civ. These mountain men
with the Romire blades, these sort of wicked long folks like blades. Uh, we thought that was just so
cool. As for the Puru, now of course there’s got to be the South Asian civilization. That takes
up a good portion of the end of our campaign. And you may be wondering indeed why didn’t we go
with someone very famous like the Marian Empire or the Nander Empire. I think if we were sort of
going civilization first then maybe that’s who we would have picked. But because it’s campaign
first we thought it would be a bit odd if we had say the Marian Empire. You play the Alexander
campaign which takes place before they really rose to power. You never encounter the Marians or
if you do they’re simply renamed. We thought that might be a bit odd and players might feel a bit
cheated by that. So we thought, okay, let’s just go with the people that Alexander actually fought
who fought under King Porus. Right? Okay, nice and simple. Who were they then? You realize very
quickly that the sources don’t tell you what the name of this kingdom or the name of this people
were. You look at the modern books that we have. um they either call them the Puru or the Paravas
or some scholars Alexander Stoneman’s book um just says Puru/Paravas and there are no ancient Indian
sources for King Porus. So we don’t have anything to go from there either. So we went with Puru
as the name just because you know closer to the kingdom of Porus that’s specifically what it is
but um yeah that is the convoluted reason why it’s the puru but when it comes to actually designing
the civ you know we have a lot of stuff to go on particularly the architecture the architecture
is largely we are listening to the community and we’re evaluating modern day Pakistan just north of
game modes potentially and it’s a surviving World site today. So, we actually had a lot of really
cool stuff to go off and the architecture set is beautiful. I’m sure you’ll agree. I know it’s
great. We got it in some screenshots. I haven’t gotten that far in the campaign yet, but yeah,
the screenshots showing it off. It looks great. Yeah, I would say that a part of the civ choices
that we do make um I guess this is more me wearing the production hat of just thinking where do we
get uh you know what could we explore and how many architecture sets could we possibly put
in there um and you know I think you want to strike a balance of meaningful civilizations
that obviously fit with the narrative but then also are interesting aesthetic and give
variety to this world because you know we you Depending on who you choose, you are limited
by what you can do. And I think the more architecture sets we can put into the game uh
that that fill out this story but then also just create the richness of the world and
re and creating this antiquity setting is uh is is our goal here for sure. Okay. So next
just to switch topics here u this is going to be kind of out of nowhere. So one thing that I
see a lot of my comments is people asking oh no are these going to come to ranked? How are they
possibly going to balance these things? You know, the totally different naval tech tree with the
regular civilizations. Do you mind just speaking to that? Like these are definitely never coming
to ranked anything that’s in Chronicles. And also, what do you guys have any ideas for using
these civilizations, you know, not in ranked, but outside of just the campaign? Because it
seems like such a shame to have these very fully fleshed out civilizations. I just put up an
overview today for Thrations, and I mean, people love hearing all these like ideas about what how
you can play their very interesting late game. I know like what do you think of that besides like
you know not ranked but any ideas you guys are kicking around for getting more use out of these
civilizations. So I will say there are no plans to add them to ranked but I I do we we are listening
to the community and looking for ways of you know how do you increase the replayability outside
of campaign and what interesting game modes or or things we could do there that uh that would
encourage that. And so, yeah, we’re, you know, with six civs now in the Chronicle series, um, we
have a few more options than we had before and, uh, we’re going to continue to, to look there and
see what we can do. Well, a couple of ideas that come to mind are, first of all, if you can just
comment on perhaps a different ranked ladder just for those civilizations. And also, I don’t know
if you’ve seen it in the latest Age of Mythology release, they now have this gauntlet mode where
it’s like a single player and you replay it and it’s very random and you get kind of bonus. as
like a rogue light where you play it and you play it again with different bonuses and play it
again, you unlock things as you replay it. Either of those ideas kind of jumping out at you as
potential down the road. Well, uh the the gauntlet is something Capture Age uh played a part in the
design there, so we’re familiar with that. Um, but yeah, I would I would say we’re definitely, you
know, looking to see, you know, what options make the most sense, you know, with the civ sets that
we have and and the balance we have and uh and, you know, where we can kind of flex on the product
and and give players what they want. So, what does that mean for a potential ranked ladder? Is that
something you guys are considering? Because I I have seen that suggested a few times. Do you think
there would be enough of a player base to sustain that? like this would be a separate rank ladder
from the other civ just to be very clear. Yeah, I mean it’s definitely something that we have
considered um and we’ve we’ve been looking at but we haven’t made any plans uh yet that I could
comment on. So switching topics here a little bit. I was curious if you guys can talk about uh maybe
the most time inensive part of the process. So whether that’s research, the new civ design, the
missions and the campaigns, the visual overhauls, the music, um like what’s the biggest investment
that you guys just refuse to compromise on? I can What do we refuse to compromise on? Pretty much
everything is the answer. Uh in fact, on on Battle for Greece especially, we were quite bad at saying
no to ourselves. Um, we’ve got a very enthusiastic team and a lot of us come directly from the Age
of Empires community or have been lifelong fans of the series. So, we all have this drive to
just put in as much stuff as we possibly can and I think people have seen that it’s hugely high
effort DLC in every area. So, we don’t compromise on that. I’m glad you brought up the music if
you’ll allow me to wax lyrical for a minute about that because the new soundtrack is incredible. I
got to be very indulgent there. Um I have a huge love of sort of classic Hollywood soundtracks,
you know, Miklos Rosa, sort of Benhur, Quoadist, that sort of thing. So, I was bombarding um our
wonderful composers over at Somatone Music with references and they just sort of turned all of
my favorite soundtrack pieces into new and fresh soundtrack pieces. So, it’s this amazing score
which balances classic Hollywood and a lot of my favorite classical music with a sort of modern Han
Zimmeresque sensibility and music. I think people don’t realize how much it elevates the experience
and helps make it unique. We of course have unique playlists for every single scenario. And we’ve
also now added the ability to switch them midway through a scenario so that when an event happens,
um, you know, a dramatic narrative event, we can switch the soundtrack to something appropriate.
We also have a new playlist for skirmish mode that really helps set the mood. And we have immersive
playlists if you choose that setting in the settings menu for each civilization individually.
So that’s a really awesome thing. The thing that takes the most time I think would have to be the
level design. Um, a lot of people have played around with the editor and you know, you think you
can get a level looking functional pretty quickly, but my word, the number of rounds of iteration
and feedback and testing and difficulty play testing and then bug fixing you have to go through
for every single scenario, it’s a huge amount of effort. Well, I would think particularly because
of how many choices you get. Like it’s not just this persistent choices that you guys have put in,
but even in mission two, there’s a lot of like, okay, which path do you want to take? And it
gives you the choice on the side of the screen. So there’s a lot of replayability there, but I
imagine that makes things very complicated to design and especially like bugs and everything
and you have to anticipate all the different ways people can do stuff. Yeah, I would second
that. Uh that it is level design that I think is probably the most intensive. Um it particularly
adds some some very strong dependencies down in the production. So, because of, you know,
we we tend to lock in our final script when we’re really locked in on the gameplay, you know,
that will kick off VO and and, uh, localization and everything there. Uh, and some of this
factors back into how we do our cutscenes, uh, and and the final timing and animation there. So I
think it’s it’s making I mean the the level design is definitely uh it has some of the longest run of
the production time and then it’s the particularly challenging areas of sort of the dependencies that
come off of it be you know as it wraps up and it gets to a certain stage. So, um, but yeah, it’s
also one of the areas where we just we don’t want to compromise because it’s so core to, um, what
we’re trying to accomplish with Chronicles. And, you know, part of that too, I would say, is we try
to introduce some, you know, novel mechanics and features within our campaign. The persistent
choices is obviously a way at allowing some replayability within them. But um you know when
you build in these systems and you try to figure out how to make them scalable and debug them and
not brittle um it’s it can be it can be some fun challenges not to break the uh break the editor
in our in our levels. You should have seen the original plans for the persistent choice system
where I’ve got this sort of bored up. Oh no, but if we do that we run into time travel problems
and the grandfather paradox. How are we going to do this? No. No. So, it went through a lot of
iterations. Is that something you guys have done more of in the Alexander DLC? Like the choices
and persistent choices because I know that was something you were kind of experimenting with in
Battle for Greece. And did you double down more on that with that? We have have not fundamentally
changed how the system worked technically. You’ll notice so we created this persistent variable
system in Battle for Greece. And then you saw that Forgotten Empires and the Three Kingdoms DLC had
an explicit choice system where you could click a button. Uh now we have that functionality as well.
So you know they get something of ours, we get something of theirs. It’s a lovely partnership. Um
so we’ve used that in our campaign, but we’ve not um changed the underlying system. However, we
have change the nature of some of the choices that you get to make. uh you say you’ve only
got to the third scenario so far, but as you go further into the campaign, we have this persistent
army feature because we were aware that having 16 scenarios as the Macedonians, which we felt was
necessary to tell Alexander’s story, the players, you know, are going to be playing with the same
civ a lot. So, we really wanted to get a lot of variety in there. One of the ways we do this is
with our level design, of course. No two levels are the same. It gets mixed up every time. But the
other thing that we have is this persistent army feature where you’re going to be able to choose
between different units to add to your army and you can recruit them in that scenario and then
in every future scenario as well. So that by the end of the campaign you’ve built up a whole roster
of different units including units from the other um Chronicles civilizations which you can recruit
as the Macedonians. I was also wondering if you could maybe touch on the difficulty balance
because that seems like that might be one of the harder things to do is this has to be fun for
you know top players who are streaming this. You know you get top 100 players that are playing
this but you also have those you know very very casual maybe their first time playing Age of
Empires 2 and they just want to jump into a campaign setting. So how do you go about making
that difficulty spread and is that something that you’re really paying attention to? Yeah, we we
definitely paid a lot more attention to it than we did with Battle for Greece. I think it was a
fair criticism of Battle for Greece. And we’re always we comb the forums and the reviews for the
feedback. We take it all on board and we really try to improve in the areas where we feel we need
to. And the difficulty was a little inconsistent in the Battle for Greece campaign. I think a lot
of people found maybe standard difficulty was a little too hard. Hard could be a little too easy
sometimes. So, we really wanted to address this. Uh the first thing we did was to plan it out a
little more cohesively. Right from the start, we have a difficulty curve for the whole campaign
that we planned out. In our level designs, we were thinking, right, what are the different levers
that we can pull to affect difficulty in this level? Is it going to be the number of troops that
are sent against you? Is it going to be how often they’re sent against you? Um, but really the main
thing that’s allowed us to refine the difficulty a lot more is just extensive play testing. I think
Battle for Greece, we got it into people’s hands a little too late. Whereas this time there have been
a large number of very large scale play tests with players from all sorts of different difficulty
levels. Right from, you know, people who want to play on the story mode that we’ve added, the
new easiest mode, all the way up to legendary, which is the new hardest sort of challenge mode.
And we’ve managed to get it to a place where most of the people who play on those difficulties,
who consider themselves set for that difficulty, are really satisfied with what we’ve got. We’ll
see how the community receives it when it goes out to thousands thousands more people, but we
think we’ve done a much better job this time. Well, I’ve heard a rumor that you have a top 100
player who has gone through and said the legendary will make anybody sweat, you know, right at the
top. So, I mean, that’s quite the endorsement. I’ve watched him panic in real time. And uh it’s
delightful. Yeah. I I I mean, I I just want to build on something that Ben said there, which is I
I think Battle for Greece was pretty foundational in terms of figuring out where we needed to spend
more time and uh and then factoring that in. And we still continue to learn from that process and
figuring out, you know, where do we where do we spend more time and when to to get that right. So,
makes a lot of sense. So, uh, one last thing here. I got a a bit of a rumor I’d like you to address
if you can. So, I think this is because AE1 and AE3 new content is sort of in limbo. Uh, currently
people are just looking to worry about stuff. Uh, there’s some speculation this might be the last
of the Chronicles. And I get there there’s limits on what you can say, but are you able to speak in
any way to that rumor and what the future might hold? Particularly because this all started with
the Roman war mod and we haven’t even had Romans yet. I mean, we can’t end it now, guys. We still
have to do Hannibal and and Republic of Rome, obviously. So, are you guys already cooking up
ideas for the next one or is there anything you can say about this? Well, we can’t really comment
on on future projects, but what we can say is we love making amazing content. Uh, and we appreciate
all the support we get from the community. And so we encourage folks to to buy Alexander the Great.
You know, leave a review, tell tell a friend about it. Um, we have ambitious plans and we love
doing this and we want to keep being able to do it. I’d echo that. I I’ll say that our design
team currently is larger than it ever has been. We improve constantly all the time. I think you’re
going to see a huge difference between Battle for Greece and Alexander the Great. I mean, Battle for
Greece was fantastic, and I think we’ve surpassed it with Alexander the Great. So, Capture Age is
set to do brilliant things. And as Roger says, if you enjoy the work that we’re doing, um, we’d
love it if you could spread the word. I mean, the Age of Empires community is is a little insular.
Um, I think there are many other people out there who would love to know that there’s something
kind of new and different. It’s not just another Age of Empires DLC. It’s maybe something that’s
appealing to fans of history, of narrative games, of RTS games more generally. Um, so we’re going
to be trying to put the word out there in the next few weeks and if you appreciate what we do, um,
we hope you’ll join us. I think that’s a fantastic place to leave it. And I will say everything I’ve
played with it has been a lot of fun. It’s just as good as Battle for Greece or better. You guys
have really outdone yourselves, I dare say. So, thanks very much for your time, guys. And all the
best. Thank you, Spirit. It’s been a pleasure. Uh, thank you for having us. You’re a legend, Spirit.
We love you. Thank you so much. You guys, too. So, that was my discussion with a couple of devs at
Capture Age. And I really can’t say enough good things about both Battle for Greece and what I
experienced in Alexander so far. As someone who doesn’t typically get swept up in Awe 2 campaigns,
these are honestly the most challenging and fun experience I’ve had in single player Awe 2. And
I highly recommend checking out the Alexander DLC. That’ll do it for this one, though. Thanks
for watching, guys, and I’ll see you next time.
In this interview I sit down with a couple of the CaptureAge devs working on the new Alexander DLC and learn more about that process.
Chronicles: Alexander the Great DLC – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3793540/Age_of_Empires_II_DE__Chronicles_Alexander_the_Great/
0:44 Introductions
1:55 Rome at War mod & origins of Chronicles
6:50 Research process
10:20 Alexander the Great
15:28 Why are the Macedonian voices Scottish?
21:40 The 3 new civilizations (Thrace and Puru?)
26:00 Are these civs coming to ranked?
28:20 What’s the most time-intensive part of a DLC?
31:10 Campaign choices
35:04 Getting the difficulty right
37:50 Is this the last Chronicles DLC?
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Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/SpiritoftheLaw
Background music from Epidemic Sound: http://www.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires II Definitive Edition