Life from the ashes
In Ashen, you get to rebuild a fallen civilization… in between thrilling action!
One of the highest pieces of praise I can give any creative work is this: “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.” With Ashen, it’s not because I’m a game dev, but rather at just how atmospheric and enthralling the game’s story is, and how simply and elegantly the world is built around you. At its simplest, Ashen is a game with stamina-based combat that will be familiar to any fan of Dark Souls, but it’s the world itself that grabbed me, and it did so in the first five minutes of my hands-on session at PAX Australia 2018.
Visually, the game’s stunning art style reminds me of Absolver, with a muted colour palette and simple but expressive character models. It’s a smart move for an indie studio aiming to make an ambitious open world game, and it certainly sets itself aside from other titles in the genre. But the elemental nature of the art also expresses something about the world and those who live in it.
Each age of the world of Ashen is expressed in a birth of light, and it passes into darkness, and each age also sees the rise of a new race – humanity is just the latest, but it too has now passed into a time of darkness. However, there is a glimmer of hope – and light – on the horizon.
While you’ll spend most of your time out and about in the world, fighting with raiders, grabbing phat lewts, and finishing quests, the spine of the game is about building a community. One of the first things you do in the game is to create a safe space from the chaos of the world, and as you explore it, you’ll meet people you can invite back home. You’ll help them in a quest, or they’ll help you, and when you return to your refuge, someone will have moved into a run-down hut, or built something entirely new. As you keep working with them, they’ll build and grow with you, bringing new capabilities to your growing town. Effectively, you are the change you want to see in the world.
You’re also pretty mean in a fight, thankfully, so part of that change is about making live bad guys very, very dead. The more and heavier you attack, the more you drain your stamina bar, so timing your attacks for maximum effect, and watching your spacing so you don’t have to dodge too much is of paramount importance. The open world environments are often quite busy, too, covered in foliage and rock outcroppings, to it pays dividends to be aware of your environment at all times. This can work against you. You can fail to dodge because a tree is blocking your path, and take a big hit; or, on the other hand, the verticality of the world means you can maneuver enemies into fatal falls. The combat is fast, responsive, and has a lovely weight to it – you will die, of course, but that simply sees you respawning at a mystical standing stone in your growing village.
And while the raiders that come at you singly and in packs, in melee and at range, are a challenge you can easily rise to, some monsters and other bosses have a whole different bag of tricks to throw at you… Integral to beating these encounters and generally staying alive is the game’s passive multiplayer system whereby your companion may be being played by the game’s AI or another player (with you being their companion character). In that respect the game feels a lot like PlayStation’s Journey – you can’t communicate with these other players, so you’re left to work out how to work with them in wholly different ways.
I’m generally not a fan of this style of game, but the sheer charm of Ashen’s world, with its lost and hopeful cast of characters searching for a new light in the darkness, has me keen to see more of the world beyond my brief hands on time on the show floor.
As you keep working with them, they’ll build and grow with you...
The history of computer strategy games begins on tables and boards, crammed inside cupboards alongside that knackered old box of Risk that every home seems to possess. The moment strategy made the leap to consoles and computers, it was already familiar. These weren’t just inspired by the games people were playing, in many cases they were direct copies that had been squeezed, sometimes awkwardly, onto a new platform.
In 1972, Invasion was released for the Magnavox Odyssey. It was Risk, essentially, but with Pong-like battles that were fought on top of overlays that had to be slapped on the front of the television. Aside from the battles, Invasion was mostly played on a physical board, so the actual strategy game didn’t really take place on the console at all. The Odyssey’s limited capabilities ended at displaying a few squares that could be moved by twiddling the knobs attached to the little boxes that served as controllers.
The success of microcomputers like the TRS-80 and Apple II inspired a new wave of tabletop adaptations, spearheaded by Strategic Simulations Inc.. So began a cavalcade of wargames, and more than a few RPGs, that would last for around 20 years. Founder Joe Billings had shopped around the idea of making adaptations of existing wargames to tabletop publishers like Avalon Hill, but had no takers. That didn’t deter him. SSI’s first game, Computer Bismarck, bore a striking resemblance to Avalon Hill’s Bismarck. The publisher noticed.
Quickly, Avalon Hill started releasing its own games on computers, competing with SSI. The pair churned out wargames with dizzying momentum, but SSI took the lead early, launching 12 games in 1981. Some of these games were tabletop wargames with a digital component – their boxes full of tokens, maps and thick manuals – but others, including Computer Bismarck, featured AI opponents and could be played entirely on a computer.
Eastern Front (1941), published by Atari in 1981, immediately made its contemporaries seem antiquated. It was one of the first great leaps forward in strategy gaming, presenting players with a single year of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, where everything from troop morale to the weather played a role. It was meaty, complex and took advantage of the platform instead of trying to work around it.
Atari had been dubious at first. Designer Chris Crawford had to go through the Atari Program Exchange, which allowed anyone to submit games that, if approved by Atari, would be
sold on its mail order catalogue. It became one of APX’s most successful games, making Atari immediately rethink its position on publishing wargames.
Wargames based on the Second World War didn’t have the battlefield to themselves. 1983’s Reach for the Stars tasked players with dominating the galaxy with a powerful economy and lots of fancy sci-fi technology, not just big fleets. It had most of the hallmarks of a 4X game – explore, expand, exploit and exterminate – a decade before the term was coined. Reach for the Stars was developed by Strategic Studies Group, an Australian wargame studio, but SSI and Avalon Hill were both playing around in space as well. SSI’s Cosmic Balance II and Avalon Hill’s Andromeda Conquest
STRATEGY GAMES STILL DIDN’T VENTURE TOO FAR FROM THEIR ROOTS...
both contained 4X elements, but they were primarily focused on combat.
Strategy games still didn’t venture too far from their roots, but by the mid ’80s the landscape was almost as vibrant as it is today. At the same time Reach for the Stars unwittingly became the first 4X game, Nobunaga no Yabou launched in Japan, starting a grand strategy series that continues today. Two years later, the same developer, Koei, released Romance of the Three Kingdoms, another grand strategy affair, but this time set during a different historical period, beginning another long-running series that’s also still kicking. Koei took a holistic approach to empire-building, with harvests
and peasant loyalty mattering just as much as armies.
Not every conflict involved clashing armies. M.U.L.E. pitted players against each other in a game of greed on an offworld colony. The eponymous M.U.L.E., a cute AT-ATinspired hauler, harvested resources, which could then be used, sold or hoarded. There was room for cooperation, competition and plenty of backstabbing, making it a compelling multiplayer game for the few that bought it. In 2016, Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson developed a considerably more successful spiritual successor, Offworld Trading Colony.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Walter Bright was intermittently working on Empire, initially inspired by Risk. In 1983 he released it commercially. He sold two copies. Bright released a new version for PC the next year and Empire found its audience, along with a publisher in 1987. Like its inspiration, it was a game of conquest, but there were hints of management, with conquered cities being tasked with building various units, from infantry to aircraft, and an exploration phase where players could push back the fog of war. The latter struck a chord with a pair of strategy
designers, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley.
MicroProse, founded in 1982 by Sid Meier and Bill Stealey, wasn’t initially a strategy game developer. Its first three games, all designed by Meier, comprised a dogfighter, a platformer and a shooter. A year later, Meier released his first strategy game, NATO Commander. Like Eastern Front, armchair generals had to worry about morale and external factors, but NATO Commander had the additional wrinkle of playing out in real time.
After NATO Commander, Meier bounced between genres again, until, in 1985, he designed Crusade in Europe, his second wargame, and the first in the Command series. It was heavily based on NATO Commander, and so the legacy of Eastern Front continued. Then came Pirates! and Covert Action and even more flight sims, and along the way the games started to pick up Meier’s name. It wasn’t just Covert Action, it was Sid Meier’s Covert Action. By 1990, Meier’s name was plastered on a lot of boxes, spread across a lot of genres. He and Bruce Shelley had just finished the management titan, Railroad Tycoon. Meier was itching to do something bigger. Managing a train company or commanding an army wasn’t enough. The pair had its eyes set on something grander: the entirety of human history.
Civilization was a behemoth. It generated entire worlds on which various historical civilisations spread out and inevitably clashed. But it wasn’t always adversarial. Though Civilization may have been inspired by wargames like Empire, Meier and Shelley also looked towards more peaceful games, like 1989’s SimCity. It was as much about improving a civilisation with wonders and buildings as it was tearing across the map, wiping everyone out. You could engage in diplomacy, research new technology or reform your government. It kept people playing for one more turn, and then another. And it was almost an RTS. Meier tested it out, but ultimately found that it wasn’t accessible. Civilization had so many systems that players needed to wrap their head around, and a turn-based game gave them more time to parse everything.
Across only a few years, MicroProse released a string of games that would go on to define strategy for decades. In the wake of Civilization came games like Master of Orion, the first game to receive the 4X moniker. It did for space what Civilization did for Earth, setting a high bar for future space outings. There was Master of Magic, too, which transposed the 4X formula to a fantasy setting where wizards built cities, researched spells and squabbled over magical worlds. The battles played out on isometric maps, while the wizards were like RPG characters; they were mutable and able to learn new traits.
MEIER’S NAME WAS PLASTERED ON A LOT OF BOXES, SPREAD ACROSS A LOT OF GENRES.
In 1994, MicroProse published UFO: Enemy Unknown, or X-COM: UFO Defense in North America, an elaborate tactical game full of Cold War tension and alien invasions. It was just the latest in a long line of tactical games from Julian Gollop. Rebelstar, Laser Squad and Chaos: The Battle of the Wizards saw Gollop experiment with different settings and systems, but while their influence was visible in UFO, it proved to be much more ambitious than anything that had come before.
Players ran X-COM, a unit specialising in dealing with an extraterrestrial menace. There was a strategy layer, the Geoscape, where the day-to-day running of the organisation took place, and then a tactical layer that took over during missions. It required no small amount of mental agility. One minute you’d be worrying about funding, then next you’d be commanding a squad of soldiers investigating a UFO crash site. It was tough, soldiers got killed off or left behind, and a palpable sense of dread accompanied every mission.
The original concept was a sequel to Laser Squad, with two players duking it out in turn-based tactical firefights. But MicroProse was all about big games. Civilisations that lasted for thousands of years, sprawling space empires, wizards fighting over multiple worlds – Laser Squad II didn’t exactly fit the bill. The first change was the theme, at the suggestion of MicroProse. UFOs were very in. To match the scope of games like Civilization, Gollop and his brother Nick, UFO’s co-designer, introduced the Geoscape and more big-picture management wrinkles. That management element not only made UFO larger than Gollop’s earlier games, it became almost as integral to the series, and its imitators, as the dense tactical combat.
A Civilization sequel was inevitable. There was a hunger for strategy games, and other companies had already made successful iterative sequels. MicroProse gave it the green light. Civilization II, or Civilization 2000 as it was originally called, established the tradition of each game having a different lead designer. Brian Reynolds, who had previously designed Colonization, a Civ-style game of colonising the New World, became Civilization’s second lead designer. Reynolds made a new tech tree, expanded the diplomacy system and completely overhauled the interface.
MicroProse was bought by Spectrum Holobyte, and the new bosses weren’t very interested in Civilization II. It may have been the sequel to a groundbreaking game, but it was marketed halfheartedly. Word of mouth came to the rescue, however. The second Civ was a huge success, paving the way for yet more sequels, spin-offs and, in a strange case of role reversal, board games.
Meier, along with Brian Reynolds and future Civilization III designer Jeff Briggs, left MicroProse in 1996. Together they founded Firaxis. With its second game, after Gettysburg!, the fledgling studio charted the next step in civilisation. Briefly unable to work with the Civilization licence, Firaxis looked to the stars for inspiration. Alpha Centauri took over from where Civilization ended, or at least one of the places where it could end: people leaving Earth behind for a new life on a new world.
It was, and still is, a remarkable 4X game. Warring nations were replaced by complex factions that identified
ALPHACENTAURI TOOK OVER FROM WHERE CIVILIZATION ENDED...