"We did Hatred for the sake of creating Ancestors": the history of RTS development about Vikings
Last week, on May 10, the Russian publisher 1C, together with the Polish Destructive Creations team, Hatred authors, announced RTS about the Early Middle Ages Ancestors. We talked with the CEO of Destructive Creations Jaroslaw Zielinski about the project and its history.
Tell us a little about the team, where are you based, how long have you been making games?
Our team is located in Gliwice, this is Upper Silesia in Poland. Formally, we have been in existence since June 2014, but before that we all managed to work in many companies around the world. Here you can find guys from The Farm 51, CD Projekt RED, Techland, CI Games, Artifex Mundi and many other studios.
Now we employ 21 people, but this figure is constantly changing. We are just recruiting employees, despite the fact that I promised myself when we first started that there would be no more than 15 of us.
Something went wrong.
Destructive Creations is well known as the authors of the ultra-violent action Hatred. What is the reason for the departure of the team towards strategies?
Come on, it wasn’t Hatred ultra-violent.
As for the Ancestors, this is a project I’ve always wanted to do. But when we started as a small studio, I knew that we wouldn’t be able to develop it: we didn’t have enough people, money, contacts and recognition. That’s why we decided to start with Hatred. We took up its creation just in order to get everything we need for the development of Ancestors.
The team has two action games in its portfolio. The already mentioned Hatred and IS Defense. How much more difficult is it to make strategies compared to such projects?
Creating an RTS is a hell of a challenge for us. No one in the studio has ever done real-time strategies before, so sometimes it seems to us that we are wandering in a fog, sometimes bumping our heads against tree trunks, then touching stumps and driftwood with our feet. But the result is something good, and if so, then everything is nothing more than a test to be passed.
If you want to make RTS, then you must be really devoted to this genre, otherwise you will quit development: there are a crazy number of problems that need to be solved.
The project has been developed since 2015, but you postponed its announcement until the last. What is the reason for this?
As I said, this is a very complex project. It took time to create it. In addition, in parallel with its development, part of the team was distracted by work on IS Defense, our side project. However, this did not affect the development.
I think that RTS games just need time – that’s all. Especially when consoles and gamepads are involved (the game will be released not only on PC, but also on PS4 and Xbox One).
1C acts as the publisher. How did they get out?
We’ve been hanging out with 1C at Gamescom. We showed them a demo of our game (a ready-made multiplayer part that looked like an almost finished game).
I note that the demonstration of the working version, and not sending applications and art, matters when you are looking for a publisher. You have to show the MEAT to attract the publisher.
Why 1C?
Even before Gamescom, I wanted to talk to them. The fact is that part of the team worked on Necrovision many years ago. The publisher of the game at that time was 1C.
We have good memories of working with the company. We decided that this is the best publisher we have ever worked with.
Plus, Ancesters was a great fit for the company’s portfolio: it also has a lot of strategies. This means that the guys know how to interest the target audience in our game.
We talked to other publishers, including the largest ones, but decided that it would be safer to work with 1C.
How is the work on the project distributed with the publisher?
The development lies entirely with us. We can ask 1C for advice, but we are not obliged to follow them. Our publisher is responsible for marketing, localization, participation in events and external Q&A.
Now let’s talk about the game. Tell me about her.
In short, this is RTS, which takes place in the Middle Ages (X-XII centuries).
We try to be very careful in terms of creating armor and weapons.
There is no magic, dragons, spaceships and soldiers from the future in the game. I’ve gorged myself on sci-fi and fantasy games, so I’m very happy to do something historical.
The gameplay is strictly focused on squad battles, but there is also an economy in the game, but it is quite simple.
Both the battles and the economy are well managed from the gamepad. We take care of game pacing (alternating active moments with calm ones) so that the game is not very fast, otherwise players with a gamepad will not be able to manage. And we have achieved a lot in this field: even for me now it is faster and more comfortable to play Ancesters with a gamepad than with a mouse and keyboard. To be honest, I didn’t expect that we would be able to do this.
Judging by the first screenshots, the project resembles a series of Myth and Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, but at the same time you promise not only battles, but also construction. Which existing projects is the game closer to?
I would say that if we talk about the game cycle in multiplayer, the first thing that should come to mind is Company Of Heroes.
We have a base to build, there are villages on each map to capture, in which peasants work, bring resources with which you can build improved units to defeat enemies.
The battles took a lot from the mechanics of Total War (flanking attack, morale, and so on), but we implemented a lot of our own ideas. The environment greatly affects the gameplay. I’ll just give an example: when attacking an enemy base, you have to stop the offensive if it starts raining: you can’t burn enemy buildings in a downpour (the destruction of buildings works differently for us than in conventional RTS).
By the way, judging by the video, in terms of cruelty, the game will not be inferior to Hatred. Wait for the R-rating?
Since the number of units we have is ten times less than in any Total War (each squad in our game has 10 soldiers), we understood from the very beginning that we had to focus on the visual side of the battles, because here you see much more details of what and how soldiers do in battle. Therefore, there are a lot of duel animations in the game, and melee looks much more dynamic, tough and intense than in any other strategy I’ve seen. I’m not bragging, I really think so.
The game is more vivid than the intro.
Ancestors – is it more a game about a single or about multiplayer?
It’s hard to say. We are very focused in working on both modes and both are very important.
If we talk about the single, then we are more engaged in scripting, plot tactical missions, rather than simulation of multiplayer. Company of Heroes is our main source of inspiration in terms of how a single should work.
There are 4 sides declared in the game: Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Slavs. How much will they differ from each other?
Different units, different strengths and weaknesses, different buildings and technological trees, completely different UI and appearance, plus, each side has its own soundtrack and its own campaign with its own story and characters.
By the way, why did you choose these four nations?
Rather, we announced them as races in order to be able to divide them into nations within each one. For example, we have Slavs and we will tell (as part of their campaign) about the first Polish principalities, about Novgorod and so on. The exception is our Anglo–Saxons, whose history is devoted almost entirely to the kingdom of Northumbria.
How closely do you work with historians? Do they often criticize you, say that this did not happen and in general it is better to do everything differently?
The truth is that in many aspects our historical period is not well documented, so we have room for interpretations, ideas, characters.
Yes, you can find things in our game that are not in any history book or other source, but they are plausible and realistic. And, of course, there are also many real events in the game in which the player will take part. Plus, I repeat: in terms of recreating weapons, armor, combat styles and architecture, we try to be as historically accurate as possible.
Today, for many indie teams, when it comes to creating a project for PC and consoles, the most obvious choice is Unreal. But how convenient is this solution for creating strategies?
The engine has its drawbacks and we lack many things that we would like to have to develop a game in this genre, but this is the engine that we understand best. Plus, it’s constantly evolving.
Have you ever written plugins for the engine or are you using it out of the box?
Our programmers have written and changed the engine to hell so that it works for RTS. And we are still doing this and we will change a lot more.
One last question about the genre as a whole: RTS is dead today. Even classic quests appear more often today than real-time strategies. Why do you think this happened?
In my opinion, there are three reasons for this:
First: they are difficult and expensive to make.
Second: people think that the throne is already occupied (for example. StarCraft-th). This is instead of taking another throne. For example, we don’t want to compete with the titans of the genre, we are trying to do something completely different.
Third: consoles are a very important market, and people don’t think it’s a good place for RTS (because of management). We decided to make a move in the style of kamikaze, taking up the creation of RTS, including for them. Let’s see what happens next.
On Twitter after the announcement Ancestors there is a version that the novelty is a possible revival of such brands as “Prince” and “Vseslav the Magician”. We asked 1C what the Ancesters will be called in Russian and whether they have a new role-playing game about the Legends of the Forest Country in development. The answer we received is as follows: “There is no final decision on the name of Ancestors in the Russian Federation yet. As for “Prince 4″: at the moment we don’t have such a game in production, but we love the brand.”
