Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria Wrap Report

Changes and Enhancements As you can guess from what I have already said above, the major features all found their way into the game pretty much as we intended them. At a lower level though, we made many tweaks and enhancements to things as we went. One of the areas we always tweak the most is the interface. I don't think anybody can really tell what type of interface is needed on a new game until they've sat down and played it for many hours.

One of the biggest areas of contention was the basic mouse-clicking method. You have the turn-based strategy way and the RTS way (left click and right click). We knew that we needed to implement the standard turn-based system, but having developed RTS games for the past three to four years, we also knew the advantages of that method. In the end, we provided both and gave the user an option to set it either way.

If you look back to the very original design of Warlords IV from four years ago however, I think almost everything changed! The original design was for something very big and complex, which blended features from Heroes of Might & Magic and Age of Wonders and Warlords into one, and then added some new things! I am very glad that we had the freedom to change what was required - for example, the original tactical combat system had combats taking five to10 minutes each. When you note that a typical game of Warlords has hundred of combats, using this system would have been disastrous! The final system we settled on was quick to play and retained the Warlords flavor.

Major Challenges The three biggest challenges we faced were undoubtedly time, graphic quality and what I call the Warlords Legacy.

Time was an obvious issue as I mentioned previously. Six months of development is not really enough time for a large turn-based strategy title; 12 months would probably be more normal. We knew we could only deal with this constraint by careful planning followed by long, hard work. In the end, we probably crammed nine months of development into six, but we did so without any major bugs or design flaws, and we still shipped on time.

Graphic quality was another obvious problem. Because most of the game's assets were two years old, we were very concerned about how well they would stand up against the competitors. Graphic styles in computer games are constantly changing... not just improving in quality but changing in their actual style. The improvement in quality is quite steady, but the styles themselves swing about quite quickly, usually following one of the market leaders. It is no coincidence that the market is currently being assaulted by games that are very similar in style to Warcraft III. At the end of the day, there was very little we could do about this except to tweak the graphics where possible. We took an approach that, over the six-month development period, we would constantly identify the worst looking part of the game and then seek to fix it. After that, we would find the next worst looking part and fix that. I think that we did everything we could here, but if we had started the graphics in 2003, I think it would have been quite a different looking game.

The Warlords Legacy is a rather odd thing to include, because it is at the same time one of our biggest assets and one of our biggest challenges. The Warlords name is widely known, and that's great because it means a lot of people will take a look and try us out, but it also brings with it a weight of expectation from people who have played (and loved) the previous games. I can feel this expectation whenever I start a new title, and perhaps I felt it more keenly in Warlords IV than any other game, mainly because of the time constraints and the fact we could not include everything we wanted. I can only shudder to think of the pressure that someone like Peter Jackson was under with Lord of the Rings... I mean take what I felt on Warlords IV and multiply it by 1,000... I have huge respect for him!

So, the challenge really amounted to making sure that we minimized the number of people who were disappointed, and the best way to do this was to make sure that the game contained the same elements that made previous Warlords games fun. You have to be realistic here - some fans are going to hate your new game no matter what it is and no matter how well you do it. I've been around for a number of years now, and I see it with every game we do. From e-mails I've received, I think about two-thirds of the old fans are enjoying the new game, which is about what we achieved with Warlords II to Warlords III. What is really encouraging is the number of people who have written in to say that they have never played a Warlords game before and that they are enjoying this one.