Developer Muzzy Lane has released their first developer diary for turn-based strategy Making History: The Great War, which is available through Steam Early Access and was on show at PAX East.
Product manager Chris Parsons talks us through such a huge event and how even a World War One game got swamped with attention, especially when they learnt they could change history.
For fans of Making History that’s not news at all, but others found it rather enticing. He also suffered the mandatory affliction of the ‘hoarse voice’ after 3 days at PAX.
Check out the full developer diary below for Making History: The Great War. It’s available on Steam Early Access.
April 2014 was a big month for us here at Muzzy Lane, and for Making History: The Great War. First we launched TGW on Steam’s Early Access, and then showed it to some of the 70,000 plus gamers at PAX East 2014. These two milestones mark the first time anyone outside Muzzy Lane has gotten a chance to see and play the game, and the response was pretty remarkable.
For those unfamiliar with PAX, it is one of the premier game conferences on the planet, with annual shows in Seattle, Boston, and Australia. The Boston event draws more than 70,000 people annually for the 3-dayevent. For us, it was a fantastic opportunity to see people playing our game and ask them about it. As an added draw, we also had a prototype Steam Controller that one of our engineers brought back from Steam Dev Days, a developer event hosted by Valve in Seattle this past January.
Our booth was packed for pretty much the entire event. Turn-based grand strategy may be seen as a niche genre, but when you have a pool of70,000 gamers, a whole bunch of them are going to be interested in strategy games. Some were just curious about a new game, and others just wanted to try out the Steam controller. But a lot of them were veteran strategy gamers. All of them got a chance to play TGW, and afterwards, our booth staff compared notes and found a number of themes repeatedly mentioned by those who played the game.
One of the most common remarks was the era itself. People were very interested in the fact that we set our game in the World War One period. It’s a time most people know something about–mainly the trench warfare from the western front. But most were interested to learn about the global situation taking place during the early 20thcentury. The self-serving monarchies of the west, the newly emerging Japanese Empire and it’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, the civil struggle between warlords in China. All of that was new to many, which made it important when we told them that they’d be able to play as any country by the time we officially release TGW this July.
Another frequent remark from players was the appreciation that they could change the course of history. Of course, we did get a number of Making History fans, to whom this was not news, but for the rest the idea of an historical strategy game that allowed them act ahistorically was very intriguing. The MH players were especially interested in some of the changes from earlier games, such as the ability to build more than one thing at a time in a city, or bombard adjacent regions with artillery. A lot of people liked how we tied rail density to production. Higher levels of rail allow more factories in a city, and also allow more resources to be extracted from remote colonies, while destroying rail reduces output.
What was surprising to many players was the level of geopolitical options in TGW. They found that there is a whole world swirling around them with events outside their control as they try to navigate their way through the political minefield of convoluted alliances that could prematurely drag them into war and angry citizens threatening riots and rebellions. Some nations are stable, others quite unstable, such as Russia or the Balkans. Revolutions can happen, just like they actually did! Players can fund this activity, undermining rivals and instigating coups while spending limited funds to keep other countries from doing the same to them. Almost every person I demoed the game to tried this. Let’s face it, it IS pretty sweet to start a revolution in a neighboring country before you invade, err, liberate them.
Another thing we discovered: If you have everyone play the German Empire and they typically play for about 10 minutes or so, it’s only a matter of time before things go bad for Luxembourg.
When all was said and done, and my voice was hoarse from 3 days of shouting above the cacophony of noise in the convention hall, we felt pretty good about our game, and grateful to have all the feedback from the many people who came to our booth. Now it’s back to work incorporating what we’ve learned from PAX and from the Steam Community Hub into future builds of the game and making sure we get all the fun stuff in the game balanced and working properly before the official launch of the game on July 28. Forward!
