Oxide Games and Xbox Game Studios have announced September 24 launch date for turn-based strategy game Ara: History Untold. It’s coming to PC via Steam, Microsoft Store and PC Game Pass.
The grand strategy title was surprisingly absent during the Xbox Showcase, but it was featured at the special episode of Xbox Podcast where the team from Oxide Games shared some details about the game and confirmed the release date.
Ara: History Untold was announced at the Xbox Showcase 2022 and was initially supposed to come out in 2023, but has suffered a delay. Playtests have been ongoing since September 2022 and the team was very active on social media, giving updates on development. Oxide Games has previously shipped sci-fi real-time strategy Ashes of Singularity, but the team is no stranger to turn-based strategy titles as the studio was formed by ex-Civilization developers.
Ara: History Untold is a historical turn-based grand strategy game that spans the scope of human history from ancient times to modern era and beyond. Oxide aims to bring both both familiar and innovative gameplay mechanics, delivering an evolution in historical grand strategy with no pre-set paths to victory, leading to endless possibilities.
During the deep dive at the Xbox Podcast, President of Oxide Games Marc Meyer and Head of Ara for Xbox Game Studios Brian Stone shared some details about the game. Ara will feature 36 leaders, but maybe more which they will share at a later date. “Each of the leaders has sort of this unique hero trait that that sets them apart from everyone else,” says Marc Meyer. “They’ve got these set of traits that they share with each other and they kind of dictate a little bit of the underlying pieces of their personality and they dictate how they’re going to get along with each other… It lets us have a huge variety in the different leaders that we offer and so that playing each one of them is very different.”
Ara will have both singleplayer and multiplayer modes. In multiplayer, Oxide has come up with a solution which they ‘Simultaneous Turn’, which involves players resolving their turns at the same time. This is nothing groundbreaking, but the team has come up with a unique way to implement it. “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,” explains Marc Meyer. “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.”
Oxide has built all the turn processing in the Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service, and we will see if Ara: History Untold is the next big step in turn-based grand strategy genre on September 24.
Watch the Ara: History Untold Xbox Podcast Deep Dive below:
