Rick Goodman On Building Empires

Thanks to Empires Heaven for their interview with Stainless Steel Studios' head Rick Goodman regarding the PC RTS title Empires: Dawn Of The Modern World. He discusses why the game will become a trilogy by using expansion packs ("One of the compromises I think you make in Civilization 3 is, to cover that [large of a] period of time, you can't cover any one period very in-depth"), and the circumstances that led to his split with Age Of Empires creators Ensemble Studios, which he co-founded ("Ensemble wanted to do their next game in a year, and I told them that I wasn't the kind of guy that could do a game in a year and I should probably go off and take whatever time I needed and let them take the time they needed.") He concludes by discussing the difficulties of development: "One thing you learn [in the industry] that most gamers don't understand: that game development is a series of compromises."

Crossing genres and the future

[KrinnDNZ]

Goodman mentions that

"it's very hard to appeal to everybody. Part of the way we did this was we divided the game into an Empire Builder and an Action mode to try to target those audiences more carefully than perhaps other games have done in the past. And I think that was a wise thing to do."

as he speaks of balancing the game between novices and expert players. However, this brings up a question that he dodges later in the interview(the third page, specifically), about where RTS games (and by extension, games in general) are going in the future.

He doesn't talk much about the decision to divide the game into two different styles, which is a shame. What about the future of games that, in the process of play, change from one style to another ? Let's take a current example - the Army game [americasarmy.com]. It has an FPS part, and what they're calling an RPG part. Would a game where you did both of those things, then shifted more towards the RTS paradigm as your character ascended in rank, be marketplace-viable? What would you tell a developer who wanted to make a game along the lines of Elixir's Republic: The Revolution [eidosinteractive.co.uk] - only that it was an adventure game until you became a political big wheel, at which point it turned into a nation-building strategy game somewhat like Civ/Capitalism, with an intrusion of FPS in the Rainbow 6 style when ninjas attempt to kidnap the president ? Are these games inherently a bad idea, or has their time not yet come ? Final Fantasy-style minigames certainly wouldn't cut it - but I think that that shows that there have already been some tenative pokes at this.

Personally, I think that a game that's capable of moving between genres in response to the player's actions is a spectacularly good idea, but is it? And for that matter, if it is, what about implementation?