According to Tim Train, that's how Big Huge Games views their real-time strategy hit, Rise of Nations. It's an odd way to describe a game that garnered excellent sales, voluminous critical praise, and more than a few "Game of the Year" awards -- surely a home run by most estimates. It does, however, go a long way towards explaining the inexplicable. How does a game developer with a money-in-their-pocket sure-fire hit like Rise of Nations 2 decide to put that game on the back burner, instead branching out into a completely unproven franchise based in a fantasy universe, as Big Huge Games is doing for Rise of Legends?
"You can never be satisfied," Train said as we started our conversation about the development of Rise of Legends. "Don't get me wrong, we're proud of Rise of Nations, but when we sat down to consider what our next game would be, all we kept talking about were the things in Rise of Nations we felt we could have done better." According to Train, one of the major elements they were unhappy with was the game's graphics engine, which was technologically behind the curve at the time. What the team really wanted to do was build something from scratch that could really show off Big Huge Games' technological prowess.
"That didn't necessarily rule out a Rise of Nations 2, of course." Train said. "We could have just done it with a bigger, better graphics engine." As the team started prototyping various aspects of their new game, however, they realized that their dissatisfaction with the game's graphics wasn't just in the shiny bits that the Rise of Nations engine couldn't handle, it was with the subject matter itself. "Games based on the real world history are incredibly fun, but they're also incredibly limiting in terms of the kinds of spectacular imagery you can put on the screen. Sure, you can make bigger, better explosions, but in the end, a tank is a tank is a tank."
The Birth of Aio
The fact that "a tank is a tank is a tank" was also the spur to another of the development team's design goals. "We really wanted to make the sides different this time around." Train points out that while the civilizations in Rise of Nations play pretty differently based on their bonuses and unique units, they're all bound by the same thing that constrains the graphics -- reality. The beauty of a video game, however, is that reality is just another variable that can be tweaked, adjusted, or even dumped at the whim of the designers -- so they did.
"The move to a fantasy setting was tremendously freeing for us," Train said. "All of a sudden, we didn't have to worry about whether or not these incredibly wild units we had come up with were plausible in the real world." That was the birth of Rise of Legends' world of Aio. It didn't have a name yet, nor did it have a history, or heroes or even native races to call its own. All it had was the development team's idea that Aio was not Earth, was not bound by the same laws of physics that we labor under every day, and would be able to support the kinds of spectacular imagery that the Big Huge Games team knew they were capable of creating and support the implementation of three radically different sides.
"Once we decided to go fantasy," Train explained, "we needed to decide what sort of fantasy we were going to create." According to Train, the first principle the design team came up with was "No Elves." More broadly, the team had decided to reject the traditional Tolkien-esque pseudo-European fantasy realm that's par for the course in most fantasy games. If they were going to come up with a fantasy universe, why not base it on a mythology that's just as rich and interesting, is familiar to most people, but also has the virtue of not being completely over-mined. "The Arabian Nights just fit the bill completely," Train said. "It's a setting everyone's familiar with -- deserts, genies, minarets, fire, sand, and air spirits -- but it also feels exotic and new."