Ara: History Untold’s Multiplayer is Designed for Speed, Flexibility, and Fun

“To make these epic games not only practical but also enjoyable for players over extended periods, we’ve implemented cloud-based Ara servers. These servers allow the game to exist in the cloud, enabling players to seamlessly continue games in progress, whether they’re playing synchronously with others or asynchronously at their own pace. The key feature here is the ability to pick up right where you left off, making it easier to enjoy the game over weeks or even months without losing momentum,” President of Oxide Games Marc Meyer shares.

This robust online experience for Ara: History Untold will be a huge factor that helps it stand apart from competitors in this genre space. With games being hosted on the cloud, it means that you will be able to jump in and out of multiple games – you won’t need to have all the players available at the same time. This is where its unique simultaneous turns system comes into play.

“The key differentiator in Ara: History Untold is our simultaneous turn system,” Meyer says. “Players aren’t stuck waiting for others to finish their turns; instead, everyone makes their moves at the same time. This significantly reduces turn times, enabling us to support 20, 30, or even more players in a single game. It’s a more streamlined and engaging experience, letting you focus on the strategy rather than the waiting.”

To handle situations where different nation’s forces come into conflict, the game uses an initiative system based on the speed of the involved units to determine the outcome. Battles in Ara are similarly resolved as a single event, with both sides inflicting and receiving damage based on their statistics.

“Balancing fairness while ensuring each nation in the game feels unique is always a challenge,” Meyer adds. “Our focus has been on using extensive telemetry data to ensure that no nation (even Rome) dominates unfairly. With thousands of hours of data from players, we’ve been carefully fine-tuning the game to ensure that, while each nation plays differently, they’re evenly matched.”

The core game loop of Ara: History Untold is that you win by improving the lives of your people. You can measure how well you’re doing by referring to the Quality-of-Life scale that’s displayed in every city — this represents your nations’ ability to research new tech, build military strength, how productive your cities are, and how fast they can grow.

“The way players affect quality of life is through producing items. Look around at the items you have (in your home): computers, mobile phones, refrigeration, vaccines, and so on. Go back in time to the medieval era. What did they have? Basic medicines, grain stores, musical instruments, maybe some glass windows. Go to the Bronze age or even Neolithic era and you’re dealing with an occasional feast, herbal medicine, pottery, crude tools,” Meyer says.

For each example above, these items require resources and sophisticated supply chains to make them happen. In Ara, you can trade with other nations to get these goods and resources, or resort to conquest, as long as it’s not at the expense of your people’s well-being. Improving the lives of your people involves having access to resources and the knowledge to utilize those resources in innovative ways. And with crafted resources, players can form trade pacts, create research treaties, and forge alliances.

“While it might seem straightforward, in practice, it’s incredibly powerful. For example, if you want another player — human or AI — to “handle” a particular rival for you, you can gift them the resources or units they need to do the job. It’s a subtle but effective way to influence the battlefield without getting your hands dirty.”

Being able to customize these experiences will also be part of Ara’s accessible approach to its multiplayer design, Meyer explains. “At launch, we’re focused on understanding what players want rather than just what we envision. As we see how the game’s ‘meta’ evolves in first few months following release, we will look at introducing a range of new features that will allow players to customize their multiplayer experience and enjoy different paths to victory.”

We won’t have long to wait until we’re all able to start squaring off with friends online as Ara: History Untold is launching soon on Steam, Windows PC, and day one with Game Pass on September 24, 2024. While I may no longer be able to play multiplayer games well into the night too often anymore, I’m excited to see how Ara will allow me to experience its magnificent grand strategy experience on my time.