If you were hoping to see an update on grand strategy game Ara: History Untold at the recent Xbox showcase, you probably would’ve assumed its absence meant it still needed time in the oven. As it turns out, the game is scheduled to launch in just a few months, which makes me wonder why Microsoft didn’t highlight it at all during the showcase.
According to a June 12 Xbox Wire post, Ara: History Untold will launch on Xbox Series X|S and PC on September 24, with it also slated to be available via PC Game Pass. The post also shared further details provided by Marc Meyer, president of developer Oxide Games, and Brian Stone, head of Ara for Xbox Game Studios, who appeared on the official Xbox podcast to talk about how the game is structured and how its multiplayer mode works.
As a reminder, Ara: History Untold can be played solo. You’re provided a randomly generated world map comprised of different biomes and, after choosing a Leader from one of many real-world figures throughout history (like George Washington and Genghis Khan), must grow your nation into the most prestigious one on Earth.
There are multiple ways to accomplish this goal, such as through industrial efforts or military conquests, but you’ll also have access to your Leader of choice’s unique abilities. As Meyer put it, “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.”
While the game is turn-based, in multiplayer everyone takes their turns simultaneously, with players’ actions resolving all at once. It sounds like this was done to keep things fair, so players aren’t getting advantages by going before everyone else, and Stone revealed that turn processing was built in Azure Cloud, meaning multiplayer matches can constantly run even if a player drops out. If that happens, the AI takes over for them. “If you want to play a game like one turn a day or one turn every 30 seconds. It doesn’t matter. You can do that. You don’t need to worry about who’s hosting—it’s like almost unlimited flexibility in terms of how you play,” said Stone.
Even as someone who’s not usually interested in grand strategy games like Ara: History Untold, this all sounds fairly interesting. So, how come all this was shared several days after Xbox’s showcase and not during the event itself? I can understand not wanting to dedicate too much time on something that’s not one of the company’s bigger first-party announcements like Gears of War or Doom—Xbox Game Studios is publishing the game, but it’s being developed by third-party Oxide. But Microsoft was more than happy to highlight Ara during January’s Xbox presentation.
Was there not time in the otherwise packed showcase to spare for a trailer and date? Considering the gaming community’s eyes were all on the showcase, giving Ara some screen time could’ve potentially introduced it to new fans. Leaving new details to a blog post risks even those who’ve been waiting for the game since its 2022 reveal missing them.
