Civilization-like Ara blurs lines between hot-seat and play-by-mail multiplayer

We haven’t written much about Ara: History Untold, a new historical turn-based strategy PC game that’s been in the works for a few years now. Part of that’s because its publisher, Xbox Game Studios, hasn’t put much fanfare behind it; it wasn’t even mentioned in Microsoft’s not-E3 extravaganza last week. But perhaps both we and Microsoft should be putting more of a spotlight on it, given that it now has a release date: September 24, 2024. The game will be released on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC simultaneously. The date was announced during an Official Xbox Podcast interview (and accompanying blog post) with Marc Meyer, president of Oxide Games, the studio developing Ara. The podcast covered more than just the release date, though, with Meyer offering up some new gameplay details—particularly about how multiplayer will work. But first, here’s a quick primer on exactly what Ara is since we haven’t covered it previously. Essentially, it’s a new spin on the classic PC game Civilization. As in that game, you lead a society from sticks and stones to the modern age. You explore a randomly generated world, build cities, research technologies, manage armies, and conduct diplomacy turn by turn along the way. In terms of what’s different, the game offers a more robust simulation of what the citizens of your society are doing as they trek around the map and react to phenomena like weather or illness. In fact, the game’s evolutionary approach to AI was the topic of a dense but compelling if-you-understand-the-concepts talk at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this year. Ara also features a sophisticated crafting economy, a non-linear tech tree, and the ability to zoom in and out from a global level to see individual citizens going about their business in the streets and fields. New multiplayer gameplay details During the podcast, Meyer shared details about how multiplayer will work, and that promises some improvements over Civilization as well. The game runs in the cloud, and is persistently going on whether you’re logged in or not. That blurs the lines between the old play-by-email games and live multiplayer. When multiple players are logged in at once, it has a system that allows them to perform most of the tasks for their turns simultaneously. Alternatively, players can just log in, make some moves, log out, and come back to it later, allowing for asynchronous play without much hassle. Meyers described the simultaneous turns this way: The way that works is you submit your actions, and everyone else in the world submits their actions at the same time, and then they all get resolved together. It’s not a situation where if you go first, you get to get the claim; the person who goes second doesn’t get the claim. In this model, everyone goes at the same time. So, in multiplayer you really have a fair chance at everything. He also noted that players may optionally cede control to an AI if they decide to stop playing a multiplayer match, allowing other players to finish. There have been some other challengers to the Civilization throne—Amplitude’s Humankind comes to mind—but so far not many have managed to fully compete. With Civilization VII also just announced, Ara: History Untold is going to have to stand out. We’ll find out just how much it does this September. Fortunately for Ara, it’ll have room on the stage to itself for a while, as Civilization VII isn’t expected to launch until next year. Listing image by Microsoft