AOE3 Interview
Shacknews has posted up an interesting interview with 5 team members of Ensemble Studios. The interview is very long and does cover talk of multiplayer features. Here's a snippet from the interview:
Shack: How is the multiplayer shaping up? Will we see more of the same or some new innovations?
Dave Pottinger (Lead Programmer): Multiplayer has actually been one of the most stable pieces of our development this time around. We took a long, hard look at ESO and the ingame multiplayer systems in AOM. We decided to do wholesale rewrites of both, which has turned out to be a very good decision. Our ingame multiplayer codebase has been rock solid since the new implementation went in. The new version of ESO, called ESO2 of all things, was both a functional and philosophical redo. ESO2 is built upon a much better foundation, but, more importantly, we've refocused the direction of the design. After looking at AOM, we realized that we focused ESO1 too much on the casual, never-been-online gamer. Age3's multiplayer experience is focused more around what the online community wants. We do have several very large innovations/extensions for the multiplayer gamer, but we're not quite ready to roll those out yet. (Read more at FileFront)
Shack: How is the multiplayer shaping up? Will we see more of the same or some new innovations?
Dave Pottinger (Lead Programmer): Multiplayer has actually been one of the most stable pieces of our development this time around. We took a long, hard look at ESO and the ingame multiplayer systems in AOM. We decided to do wholesale rewrites of both, which has turned out to be a very good decision. Our ingame multiplayer codebase has been rock solid since the new implementation went in. The new version of ESO, called ESO2 of all things, was both a functional and philosophical redo. ESO2 is built upon a much better foundation, but, more importantly, we've refocused the direction of the design. After looking at AOM, we realized that we focused ESO1 too much on the casual, never-been-online gamer. Age3's multiplayer experience is focused more around what the online community wants. We do have several very large innovations/extensions for the multiplayer gamer, but we're not quite ready to roll those out yet. (Read more at FileFront)
