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Interview with Sandy Petersen

Ensemble Studios' lead designer Sandy Petersen, famous for his 'Ask Sandy' Q&A sessions, kindly stopped by and and answered some of our questions regarding the release of the Age of Empires III Expansion Pack, 'The WarChiefs'. Here's what he had to say:

by HeavenGames | October 24, 2006

HG: Could you please give a short bio of yourself and what your job at Ensemble is?

ES: The best way to see my bio is to look me up in Wikipedia. My job is to be a game designer, and that's what I've done for the last 26 years, at first in paper games and later on computers.

HG: What were the reasons behind the decision made to go with natives as the main feature of the Expansion Pack? What other ideas were suggested?

ES: Let me answer these questions in reverse order. The major other suggestions were to incorporate Asia or Africa. The issues we had with these were that we'd abandon most of the work we'd done in the New World. In essence, we'd be "spreading" the game wider, but losing depth. We wanted to focus in more on the New World experience, add more maps, and the concept of playing the natives just really appealed to us, because we knew they would have to be very different from the Europeans. We'd be forced into innovative ways of play.

It's not like there's a right or wrong here. If we'd done Africa instead of natives, we would still have done a fun expansion pack. So really it came down to what the team could get the most excited about (and thus do the very best job). This proved to be natives.

"It's not like there's a right or wrong here. If we'd done Africa instead of natives, we would still have done a fun expansion pack."

HG: We already know the Inca were considered, but which other civilizations were considered as additions for The Warchiefs?

ES: We briefly considered adding a new European nation (probably Sweden), and we also considered adding the Americans as a potential nation.

HG: We know that the Native nations are very different from European ones, but how much do they differ from each other?

ES: They are more different from each other than any of the European civs are from each other. They have entirely unique units, for one thing.

HG: Balancing for The WarChiefs must have been an interesting process. What new strategies and tactics did you encounter during the testing and balancing phase and were any nerfed?

ES: We'd need about 100 pages of text to list all the new strats that we found out. Yes many many were nerfed, but some promising ideas were beefed up so that they would be more useful (because they were fun). I'll just list one. The Iroquois start out with a travois - a unit that can transform itself into any building. We found early on that the Iroquois always sent their travois to a Trading Post socket, got their post up in the first minute of the game, and then raked in the XP so they always won. So we changed the travois so it couldn't build a trading post.

HG: A lot has been made of how the native navies will stand up to the European ones. So far in the game we have the native canoe - what other naval units will the native civilizations receive and what bonuses or qualities will they have?

ES: They get the War Canoe, and the Aztecs (only) have the Tlaloc War Canoe. All native canoes can fish, and all can transport. They are weaker than European ships, except in numbers. They are pretty good at taking out a dock, however. They can also be trained much much faster than European ships.

HG: Have any changes been made to the treasure system and have any more treasures been added, removed or tweaked?

ES: Well the Native Friendship ability is a pretty big change - warchiefs can in effect ally with treasure guardians. We tweaked just about every single treasure in the game, changing the number of guards or the amount of treasure you get. We only added a very few treasures however, mostly for the new maps.

HG: What, in your opinion, is your favorite feature, addition to or part of the expansion pack?

ES: Playing the natives.

HG: Will the Multiplayer service (ESO2) be improved?

ES: even as we speak improvements are underway, and we have no plans to stop this progress.

HG: Will players be able to port their old Home Cities to the expansion?

ES: you actually have the SAME home cities in the expansion as in the regular game! In fact, every home city you have can get a single reset. This sets your "cards picked" to 0, but leaves your level the same, so you can go in and pick all the neat new Warchief cards in your old 44 level HC. You can only reset each city once however. You can play a city in both the old game and warchiefs, however decks that would be illegal in the old game are not available.

HG: Will the new Treaty Mode games count as rated games? How will they be handled on ESO?

ES: I believe they are on a separate ladder from supremacy.

HG: What about the music in the Expansion? Any improvements/remixes/additions to the soundtrack?

ES: We did add new music.

HG: After The WarChiefs has been released, are you still going to support the vanilla version by patches and/or balance fixes?

ES: I'm sure we will, but probably all the balance fixes will be made so they're also applicable to Warchiefs.

HG: How about the Warchiefs itself, how much support will it get from the Ensemble team post-release?

ES: I think you can expect the same degree of support you've see on Age3 so far..

HG: Is it true that one of the super secret Ensemble prototype game is a Flying Purple Hippo FPS with lots of naked chicks, big guns and spicy fajitas?

ES: We are always rigidly moral in our personal choices, so unless "naked chicks" are baby birds of some kind, you can't expect them in any ES game coming soon.

HG: Coke or Pepsi?

ES: Dr. Pepper, this is Texas after all.

HG: Anything else you want to say to the Age fans?

ES: We love you guys and we think about you all the time.