Balancing an RTS game is no easy feat, but when you’re remaking a classic one, keeping things fair and fun while still being faithful to the source material can make things a little more challenging. This is the conundrum faced by the developers of Age of Mythology Retold – how do you modernize and rebalance such an intricate game without making it unrecognizable for those who have been playing the original for two decades. Speaking to us at Gamescom, director of production Earnest Yuen and senior game designer Kristen Hanlon-Pirillo reveal their labor-intensive but effective method to strike the right balance.
Released all the way back in 2002, Age of Mythology is renowned as one of the best RTS games ever – no pressure then for World’s Edge, the developer of its highly-anticipated remake. Age of Mythology Retold aims to bring the same strategic magic but with loads of new innovations, improvements, and fresh visuals.
However, despite the original’s status as an all-timer, it wasn’t without balancing issues or mechanics that may no longer feel completely fair for today’s audience. So, World’s Edge took the “stalkery” approach and rifled through years of gameplay footage and forums to make a hit list of people’s biggest bugbears.
“We have 20 years of people playing this game, and that means 20 years of internet archives of people complaining about the game and coming up with theorycrafting,” Hanlon-Pirillo tells us. “So [that’s how] we began the design and approached the whole balance of this game. In the Age lineup [Age of Mythology] is, design-wise, the most complex – there’s a lot of things that break the rock-paper-scissors, there’s tons of upgrades, there’s so many variants of things. And so we basically started as Indiana Jones, archeologists, going back to forums from like the early 2000s… we really did a lot of homework.”
On top of this, there are years of gameplay footage online where top players and content creators reacted to certain balance changes made to Age of Mythology over time, and World’s Edge could track and analyze those reactions and opinions too.
However, while pulling from the past is important, making sure any balance changes or systems changes won’t alienate players requires a solution from the present. Yuen explains that Retold has a “council” of long-time Age of Mythology and RTS players that have been giving “constant” feedback – often producing entire documents of thoughts and potential changes that they’d like to see.
So, while there will certainly be some big differences, a lot of effort has gone into ensuring they don’t hamper the enjoyment of experienced players and don’t take away from the soul of Age of Mythology.
Age of Mythology Retold releases on Wednesday September 4. You can jump over to its Steam page to learn more about it and wishlist it now.
For more amazing titles like Age of Mythology, here are the best strategy games on PC right now. To see what else is coming out for the remainder of this year, take a glance at our upcoming PC games list.
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Interview conducted by Sam Comrie.