Interview: Mark Terrano - Lead Designer (05/29/98)

Interview with Mark Terrano Lead Designer for Age of Empires II on the last day of E3 pointing out dedicated gameplay fine tuning, hollow victories, chill-out time in the beginning of Age II, reforestation, Age in Space, Heavenly compliments and love and humility at ES.

Alexander I: What was or is the most challenging development problem that ES has run into while developing Age of Empires II?

Mark Terrano: For Age II I think the balancing of the units is always our biggest challenge. We want to spend all the time that we need so that there is no clear victor for every map. Every civ has its strengths and its weaknesses, that's really the challenge: it takes a lot of gameplay and we try to spend a solid six months on just getting the gameplay right, just getting the units balanced and the civs balanced against each other. I think, to our credit, despite the rushes and everything, there are still on every map no clear winners, no best civ that everybody always plays and I think it shows in the time we spent on Age I.

Alexander I: OK Mark, you brought up a very interesting point about the rushes. Of course you know from the forums that there have been a lot of questions about that. I'm not certain about it but it would seem that half the people are concerned about it and the other half really like it.

Mark Terrano: Yeah, the people that rush like it and the ones that don't are concerned! We don't think a rush strategy lets you explore the full potential of the game. We would like for a lot of the combat to take place in the third age and the fourth, the Imperial Age, where it really does get interesting, where we have a lot of variation in the units-a lot more things to destroy. Now the raiders may be a little earlier, they may be at the end of the second age, peaking towards the third age. I think that none of us are really fans of rush victories. They are a kind of victory but they aren't as satisfying as having a full build up and then destroying someone else. Well, being destroyed and destroying someone else [that way] we think means that people can really play the full game. So, to combat some of these things we have some new units that will be mostly offensive units and some stronger buildings early on, some easy-to-put-up walls-but they are easy to knock down too when you have some more advanced units-so it's a little bit more defensive game in the beginning to combat some of the rush strategies. We'll also play rush strategies with that in mind and try to make it a fun game for everybody.

Alexander I: OK, that sound good. Actually, I always personally think that one of the 'winning strategies' of Age I or II is that so many different people from so many different walks of life, different gaming walks as it were, can actually play the game and enjoy it at a particular level, their own level.

Mark Terrano: Yes, I think we have kept that focus on a lot of different ways to win. We have even improved this in Age of Empires II by improving the economy. So, if you were an economy player in Age I there are a lot more things you can do in Age II. You can buy things from the market, speculate if the price is going to go up and you can have a supply later in the game. You can manage your resources in Age II. We have resources that replenish, so if you need trees and you have chopped down your trees in one area, they don't grow back. If you chopped down half the trees, over time those trees in that forest will grow back out again.

Alexander I: Oh, I didn't know that-that's amazing! Environmentalism!

Mark Terrano: Well, the trees keep growing, if they didn't come back it would be a pretty bare place!

Alexander I: But there is no tree planting yet?

Mark Terrano: No.

Alexander I: Now, I was wondering, there has been a lot of talk about the expansion pack which for reasons known and unknown has been delayed, what is your best guesstimate as to when it would be released?

Mark Terrano: Well, Microsoft has said that it is due out this holiday season 1998. Age II will be out Spring 1999.

Alexander I: We have Age I, Age II is under development and quite far along…any plans for Age III?

Mark Terrano: We didn't really start to plan Age II until we were almost done or almost at the end of Age I. We had all of the things that we couldn't put in that we really wanted to. We already had a feature set started for Age II before Age I was actually finished. We at a point cut off development so that we had plenty of time to test the game, build the AI, things like that. So there were a lot of features on individual wish lists that didn't make it in. We started with that feature set for Age II; probably when we reach the end of development for Age II next year we'll be looking at Age III. So we love historical games, we love that RTG strategy so we can look forward to lots of Age games from Microsoft in the future.

Alexander I: According to a head calculation here we have gotten up to about 1500 with Age II; will the next one be up to 2000?

Mark Terrano: 450 to 1450. We can be pretty tricky, there's no predicting what the other time frames for the other games will be. I really couldn't talk about them.

Alexander I: Age in Space?

Mark Terrano: Uh, I can't say.

Alexander I: This is a bit of a tricky question. You would do well to consider it before answering. How do you personally think that the Heaven websites have helped ES?

Mark Terrano: I guess I was the first person really to hear from Heavenweb. I was the webmaster for our little tiny site and Mike McCart dropped me a note saying hey, would you put a link on your site to us and it grew from there. Early on Heavenweb was the best, the only fan site first of all, and had our best coverage of fresh information and a lot of new stuff. They have always been providing the best service to the Age community by having the facts, the chat areas, things like that. Heavenweb has really been our key fan site and our better website and I think Heavenweb provides for the other fan sites. But we really love the Angels and all the volunteer work that they have done. When Angels show up we treat you guys right.

Alexander I: That you do.

Mark Terrano: The drinks are on us.

Alexander I: And the food, and the food.

Mark Terrano: We really appreciate all the hard work and it shows. Anyone that goes to Heavenweb can really see that it is a great site. We all enjoy it and having that consolidated fan input. We ask what are the top 10 features from everybody's wish lists, we really consider all those, we read all our e-mail, we read Heavenweb, we read the Microsoft Age of Empires newsgroups so we listen to what our fans want.

Alexander I: That's very true you can see it in Age of Empires II very clearly and that is one of the most important things that makes ES special and the game too.

Mark Terrano: Thanks. At ES we are all gamers, we make the kind of games that we love. We are pretty humble about it, we are fans of other people's games. We just love games.

Alexander I: I can certainly agree on being humble about it. That is a good thing as it keeps your mind on the work and those fabulous games.

Mark Terrano: We keep making games that we love to play that hard-core gamers and other RPG gamers as well go for. We make games we love and that other people love too.

Alexander I: In your own opinion: what makes Age so successful?

Mark Terrano: Our key vision has always been we want to take the best parts of Age I to make it approachable and a game that Age players will love right out of the box. There's not a big learning curve if you are an Age I player: the build up and the resource gathering strategy is the same but we have added a lot of depth on the economy side and we have added a few things on the combat side that really change the game. Such as formations. Once you start to play around with formations it really is like a whole different game. So we have added to the tactics, we have added to the growth and development of the game. We have added some civs that really play differently with the raiders. We kept all the gameplay that certainly all the Age fans really enjoy and we have just extended those areas that we felt could be improved. There is a new look to the game. I think that the artists have completely outdone themselves this time: all new buildings, all new units, tons of new art, new terrain. It's just fantastic.

Alexander I: Thank you very much for that information. I really appreciate your insight. I'm sure it will circle around the world.

Mark Terrano: Considering the number of people visiting Heavenweb, I'm sure a lot of people will know soon.