Op de website van cgonline is een interview gevonden met de makers van Age of Empires 3, Greg Street van Ensemble Studios. Het interview richt zich veel verschillende punten waaronder de multiplayer mogelijkheden, singleplayer campaigns, de grafische engine en de Havok physics engine. Hier een stuk van het interview:
Computer Games – What can we expect in terms of multiplayer support?
Greg Street – Fans of our games will find a very ambitious multiplayer site that combines the best features of Age of Mythology’s ESO and Age of Kings’s Zone. If you’re looking for a quick game and don’t care about the parameters, we still offer that, but we also let you browse through games lists to find a game that offers the specific settings you’re looking for. We’re doing a lot with multiplayer. I wish I could talk about it all yet. Hardcore gamers who like to play many games a night are going to be pleased.
Computer Games – What can you tell us about the graphics engine features for Age of Empires III?
Greg Street – For too long, RTS games have been in the long shadow of the first-person shooters. When you go to E3, everyone is talking about the FPS games. If a game makes it into Time magazine, it’s invariably a shooter. We thought it was high time for RTS games to rise up and claim their portion of the spotlight. So one of our insane early goals was to simply make the best looking game ever. We’ll let our fans debate about to what degree we achieved that goal (or to what degree an RTS ever can achieve that goal), but we’re thrilled with the attention AOEIII’s graphics have gotten so far. Our strategy was pretty simple. We looked at every cutting-edge graphic feature being used in an FPS, and tried to apply it to our world. So we have shaders, we have light blooms and streaking, we have projected shadows, and we have real-time physics. We also had to deal with a lot of situations unique to an RTS game. For example, at the scale at which you view our oceans, it’s easy to make them ripple so fast that they look like bathtubs. All of these changes resulted in a graphics engine that started out as the AOM Bang! engine, but in which almost every line was code was rewritten to get where we are.
Het gehele interview kun je hier vinden.
