"History is only as exciting as the person who teaches it to you, right?" Wood quipped. Sometimes history is best told by focusing on characters, and sometimes it's best done by making complex ideas like staging a cavalry charge approachable. It's got that sense of casual authority and sincere passion that means it can structure missions around explaining the hyper-specific strategy driving the Battle of Hastings. The game's voice certainly feels in line with something you'd hear Richard Hammond or Jeremy Clarkson say ( minus the racism). "You don't necessarily have to be a car fan to enjoy Top Gear to watch it all the time, because it was a fun show," she explained. She described both the between-mission cutscenes and Hands on History videos as being similar to the British talk show Top Gear-a bit of fast casual history, if you will. Right off the bat, Wood gave a great example for how the Age of Empires IV narrative team wanted to guide players through real historical moments.
It's a great new approach, and one guided by Relic narrative lead like Philippe Boulle and narrative designer Lauren Wood, who sat down with Game Developer to discuss their approach for bringing history to life. Each level of the game's campaign is a guided experience narrated by voice actor Victoria Weisslinger , and mission design has become even more abstract to better focus on certain historical principles.
With text, 2D art, and, later on, voiceover, the games worked to try and tell the stories of these historical moments from the perspectives of people who lived through them.Īge of Empires IV, however, plays out like a documentary-and that's not just because Relic teamed up with Lion TV to produce micro-documentaries that introduce each mission. In ye olde days (of the late '90s), Age of Empires campaigns were built on point-of-view stories that had players leading the armies of favored historical figures like Joan of Arc, Saladin, Montezuma, and beyond.
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