While Civilization 7’s 2025 launch is some way off, there’s plenty of new 4X goodness right on our doorstep. Ara: History Untold, the historical strategy game from Oxide Games and Xbox Game Studios, is just around the corner, and it isn’t afraid to step outside the now-familiar standards of the genre established by its rivals. As its launch nears, I sat down with historian and narrative designer Grace Rojas and executive producer Matt Turnbull from Xbox to talk about Ara’s deep-rooted love for history and their favorite leaders to play.
Ara: History Untold bears some of the hallmarks that feel like comfortably familiar standards among the best 4X games, but it’s also not afraid to step away from that safety. There are no hex-grids here; instead, regions are more naturally and irregularly shaped. Once each nation has made its plans, turns play out simultaneously, making the ability to predict your rivals an essential skill. Tech trees are notably absent, and victory isn’t obtained by strategically min-maxing into one singular specialization, but rather by earning the most prestige through any number of different feats and accomplishments.
You can read Sam’s Ara: History Untold preview for a deeper dive into gameplay, but I’m here to discuss the care its team has put into making its historical influences shine. “The biggest thing I wanted my team to focus on – and this is nowhere official, it’s just my own terminology – are what I like to call the three As,” Rojas tells me. “You want to have accuracy, you want to have accessible content, and you want to have content that advocates not just for the cultures that we are covering but also for the person playing it.”
Key to attaining that goal was the development of the game alongside its players. “In addition to the institutions and the professionals that we connected with, the more players and testers that were able to engage with the game, the more feedback we got,” Rojas explains. “These are people that know their culture – maybe they saw it represented and pointed out, ‘Hey this isn’t fully accurate,’ or ‘Maybe you should think about it this way.’ Getting that feedback from players was really essential to getting it right.”
“Hopefully people get excited in the way that, when I was a kid, playing these kinds of games got me excited about history – it’s what made me fall in love with it,” Turnbull says. Including every single part of history would be an impossible goal, he notes, so the teams at Oxide and Xbox determined that they “wanted to make a game that is optimistic about history, about what humanity can do when it comes together. When people come together to build amazing things – using some of those things as a touchstone really helped us identify the right components.”
A big part of sparking that excitement is Ara’s Encarta – a vast resource allowing you to learn about nearly every aspect of the game, from leaders to technologies and everything else besides. It’s all available from the beginning, Rojas notes, “because we want players to be able to go in and learn and engage with this feature that can really enhance their gameplay experience.”
When playing, you can lock any tooltips into place at any time, then use your mouse to highlight other terms on that card and bring up additional information. “I want to craft bread because I want to grow my city,” Turnbull suggests. “I’m going to highlight bread – okay, I need to get grain. Where can I get grain? I need to harvest rice or wheat. Where do I do that? Oh, I need to build a farm in these places. And so you can follow that nested tooltip.
“Then with the vast majority of those, if you click on any individual one of them it takes you to the Encarta article, which gives you both the more nuanced view of the historical representation, but also the gameplay ramifications. It’s a chance to give players access to that depth, and to surface the things they need to read about when they want to read about them.”
“There’s something really special about going into the Encarta and clicking, let’s say, to learn about Sappho and being able to read her history but also, like Matt said, the gameplay ramifications, any of those specifics for her,” Rojas continues. “Being able to do all of that in one place and mentally strategize what you want to do with your leader – whether you want to be a military powerhouse or you want to go really into arts and culture – you can do all of that within the Encarta. So it’s a really versatile piece of the game, I would say.”
That continues into Ara’s events, which roll out regularly as you progress and also offer some additional historical facts to keep you thinking about the real-world inspirations behind the timeline you’re creating. “Regardless of how you’re interacting, you do get pieces of information that keep your brain in that historical mindset,” Rojas says. “It keeps you excited about the possibilities of the living world that you’re in and how your alternate history is working out – or how the real history that you’re interacting with might influence your own decision-making.”
The timeline in Ara: History Untold is split into three major acts, each of which crosses four technological eras. “Each era includes ten or more individual technologies, including an era catalyst which propels you to the next era,” Turnbull explains. “Players have the ability to research a certain number of technologies and then leave behind some specialties, or they can be thorough and keep exploring. That leads to a spread of technology with the sort of small gaps that have occurred all throughout real-world history.”
“When you don’t have a tech tree, when you’re not shackled to that, you have this open-ended [experience],” he continues. “You can have a society on the coast that researches sailing immediately and starts building fishing nets and learning how to tie ropes better. Or a city that’s landlocked and surrounded by a bunch of grazing animals that goes straight for animal husbandry first.”
So with 36 leaders at launch and an additional five in the deluxe packs, which of them are Grace and Matt’s personal picks? “My answer is going to be totally biased – it’s mainly history-based,” Rojas says. “I love playing as Yaa Asentewaa. I think her history is absolutely fascinating; her contribution to the Ashanti people, the impact she had on Ghanaian history, is incredible. So every time I play as her I feel like I can do anything. I can conquer any situation, I can win this game in so many different ways. Her history inspires me.”
“I love a lot of leaders,” Turnbull says, “One of my favorites to play is Simón Bolívar – partly because I just love his real-world history and all of the amazing things he accomplished. But also because, within the context of the game, the way that you can play as him, especially on the harder difficulties, and his strengths across each of the acts changes the game dramatically.
“In the early eras, he has abilities that are pushing in one way, and then by the time you get to the late game, it’s much more about cultural and economic progress – because some of the things that he was empowering in act one no longer apply. But now these other abilities apply even more – and because of the game’s open-ended scoring system, where you’re trying to become the most prestigious nation but you’re not locked into any one strategy, when I get to play a leader like Simón Bolívar – or Elizabeth I is another great example – I get to strategically make choices that are different within each act and play a very different way.
“In act two I might be colonizing the world with powerful longbowmen and line infantry as Elizabeth I, and then in act three I might be consolidating my cities down, building museums, and trying to share arts and culture, to create masterpieces. And Elizabeth’s unique leader traits and personality abilities – all of those things factor differently into those different eras.”
Ara History Untold launches on Tuesday September 24. You can pre-purchase it now to receive a special ‘gilded leader’ skin set. Expect to pay $59.99 / £49.99 for the standard edition, $62.99 / £53.99 for the deluxe offering, or $71.99 / £62.99 for the premium pack. Just head here to take a look for yourself.
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