In early August, I had the opportunity and pleasure to sit down with Brian Reynolds, President of Big Huge Games, to talk about his company's upcoming real-time strategy game, Rise of Nations, in his summer home situated in the beautiful 1000 Islands region of southeastern Ontario. This is the sixth part of the preview based on that conversation. This concluding chapter centres in on the abscence of government types, the inability to trade units and cities, the outlook on a game demo and beta testing, and finally what the BHG team does to kick back and relax.
SAY IT AIN'T SO, MISTER GAME DEVELOPER
While I admit the following revelation shocked me when it first came to my attention, I am beginning to understand the reasoning for it in favour of emphasis on other components and its inherent complexity in its own right in a real-time environment. This is a really complicated round about way of saying that government types are not apart of Rise of Nations. It you find yourself a little disillusioned as I was initially, here Reynolds out and note possibility of these being something being thought of as a serious candidate for an expansion pack.
"[For those] who have learned the game, and like the game, and want to have a little bit more, we can bring [governments in]. But, I don't want to talk about the expansion pack before we ship the game yet. [This is] something that we think might be a little bit of an overload when you're just learning the game to make [this] an integral part of the [first playing experience] of [RoN] which is already this kind of genre-hybrid [of real-time and turn based strategy games]... [I]t's its own thing and people are going to have to learn some of that stuff and we think that [governments] will be something that we can introduce later".
As the common cliché goes, only time will tell.
YES, YOU CAN'T
What you cannot do: trade cities and units. What you can do: engage in co-operative games where you can control ally units. Reynolds describes the mindset behind these early decisions. On unit trades specifically:
“The interface for it has to be complex… and I'm not sure yet how often people are going to need that function in the game… as compared to playing a team game… [..] I'm just not sure it's worth the interface clutter as every bit of space [is precious]… [and I] don't want beginners to have to see [such things]… because [they] don't want to play with that [while] advanced players can turn on more functions… [..] So far, we have not found that to be one of the compelling functions that a lot of players are dying to have. It may [in fact] make the final game, but I cannot say for sure yet”.
Is this the stirring of expansion pack discussion already, perhaps? With a laugh, Reynolds says “[i]t may be one of those features that we simplify out because it is not in demand enough and, if there is a big outcry we'll put it in an expansion pack”. He continues on about the inability to trade cities and units and feature cuts in general:
“We have to make our guesses about what people are after, what people will like and we have to make tradeoffs between things... and in the end, we think of expansion packs as the chance to kind of satisfy some people that, you know, thought that we may have left something out that we should have put in and often it is something that we tried and we decided that we didn't like, and so we might bring back something that we had decided to take out, and we usually add some major new things".
Rise Up: Reynolds On RoN 
