Why Heroes?

By Rick Goodman

One of the great joys in any game developer's life is shipping a game and receiving accolades from gamers and reviewers when all that hard work has gone right. Reading the kudos that Age of Empires® received was certainly among the high points of my life.

For us as developers, however, the release of Age was also an occasion of great pain - letting go of our baby when there was so much more development we wanted to see it through. No game is ever perfect, and Age, while a tribute to the brilliant teamwork of everyone at Ensemble and Microsoft, only scratches the surface of where I believe real-time strategy games can go.

If you're a very lucky game developer, however, you get to revisit your passions. That's what fuels my day-to-day work on Empire Earth, a game that is very different from Age of Empires yet shares one important feature: it brings the excitement, the drama and, most importantly, the fun of human history to game players. We're currently tuning the game's design, taking suggestions from many sources - employees, family members, press contacts, the gamers who communicate through our Web site - and virtually all of them have asked about the one element I wanted in Age but didn't have time to implement: heroes.

If Empire Earth is to fulfill my vision for re-creating the epic sweep of human history, it needs to have heroes. Much of the historical research we've done for the game tends to interpret historical cause and effect according to one of two theories. The "Great Event" theory holds that individuals are not truly responsible for history; rather, events happen because thousands of interrelated social and historical currents push matters to a certain conclusion. For instance, the American Civil War would have happened pretty much the way it did whether or not Abraham Lincoln had been president. The competing "Great Person" theory holds that the course of human history is filled with turning points in which human destiny was forever altered by the actions of remarkable individuals acting over the course of a few years. Regardless of which theory is true (and it's probably a little bit of both), the "Great Person" theory is the one we're following in Empire Earth for one simple reason - it's the most fun! The way we implement heroes in Empire Earth is to define the power these "Great People" had to affect history in the real world, then translate it into the game and give that power to you, the gamer, to wield however you see fit.

In our readings I realized that under the "Great Person" theory, historical personages become more than just names - they become synonymous with their entire era. Seeing Genghis Khan charge over the hill at head of a column of berserk horse archers is far more fun than seeing some generic "Lotor the Bronze Age barbarian" about whom you know nothing. However, some fictional characters have nearly the same cachet as real historical figures, so we're also considering including a few that would be appropriate for a particular era. For example, many of our own staff love characters like King Arthur, Gilgamesh and Hercules.

Anyone's suggestions on how to improve Empire Earth are welcome, and many people, from our programmers to friends of the company to gamers on our Web site, contribute great ideas all the time, many of which will eventually get into the game. However, an idea is only the beginning of the development process. The value of a great idea is in its implementation. A lot of people are really pumped at the concept of heroes, but how do we use them in the game?

We want to make sure that heroes aren't so powerful that they make the player controlling them unbeatable. We're also making sure that the heroes we select pass the all-important "fun" test. We don't want to get so caught up in "historical accuracy" that we forget to make the game great.

In short, the answer to the question "Why Heroes?" must be "Why wouldn't you have heroes?" Heroes represent the best aspects of history - color, drama, excitement and great stories. Most important, heroes are fun. We aim to allow players to deploy and play civilization's most powerful historical characters and explore some of the world's most intriguing unanswered questions such as "Who would win if Napoleon and Cyrus the Great met on the battlefield?" or "Who has the worst hair, Elizabeth I or Otto Von Bismarck?" Well, maybe the game won't answer that question, but the beauty and fun of Empire Earth is that just about everything else is up for grabs!