Useless biographical tidbit: I have a law degree. I don’t talk about it much, I don’t use it for anything, and I never passed the bar exam so I’m not an attorney. It was a waste of thousands of dollars, though I did pick up a few techniques on how to really annoy people in heated discussions.
In my first year of law school in Baltimore, I shared a tiny on-campus apartment with three other students. It was a cramped two-bedroom hole in the wall, but I found a corner to set up a table for my gaming PC. That PC served as the perfect distraction when my roommates and I needed a break after our daily hundred-plus pages of case law reading.
Our go-to game was the original Civilization. Long-time fans of the series know the pull of Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley’s groundbreaking design – the “just one more turn” elements that kept even busy law students up past midnight, dodging Gandhi’s nukes and squeezing that last bit of economic might out of our cities. Indeed, it’s likely Civilization was partially to blame for my mediocre first-semester grades.
Civilization was genre-defining. It’s spawned five direct sequels with a sixth on the way, along with plenty of imitators. Several development teams, with varying degrees of success, have attempted to take the crown from the reigning champion.
It’s a genre I love. I play every Civilization-alike that comes out. (Full disclosure: I also spent some time earlier this year contracting with the talented team at C Prompt to help them ship Millennia, published by Paradox.) There’s always something to learn – some innovative twist on the formula that changes up the tried-and-true journey from the first human settlements to the space age and beyond.
The latest contender for dethroning Civilization is Oxide Games’ Ara: History Untold. With a team that includes ex-Firaxis developers, the backing of Xbox Game Studios, and a substantial budget, it seemed like it had a shot.
Unfortunately, the game falls short in key areas. At the same time, it has a few genuine innovations that make it worth a look. And while I recognize it’s a deeply flawed game, for the right kind of player, Ara has that “just one more turn” feel that’s elusive and missing from so many Civ-alikes.
The UI is clean and presents
necessary information well.
Fundamental Flaws
Looking at the early numbers and the launch strategy for Ara, it seems like a game shoved out by a publisher to die a quick death. There was limited advance marketing hype for the game – an appearance at a 2022 XBox event and a few previews along the way, but nothing that suggested a passionate, invested publishing effort.
Not surprisingly, early Steam numbers on the title are soft, with a current peak player count just below 3500. (That said, in the modern era, one should be careful not to read too much into Steam peak player counts. Ara is also available on Gamepass, which changes the equation.)
Early reviews from players and critics fall squarely in the “meh” category. Reviewers correctly pointed out that the game makes a strong first impression – it’s colorful and clean, with great art, polished presentation, and a solid tutorial. Yet over time, cracks in the design become apparent.
The game requires a lot of micromanagement, with key information sometimes hidden several layers down. Performance, even on high-end machines, is a significant issue; Ara makes graphics cards cry with all the bells and whistles on.
I keenly felt all the flaws reviewers cited, and more besides. The AI, though not as bad as in some games, is still bad. Diplomacy is a thin barely-there system. Leaders and nations are diverse but flavorless, the initial choice adding only a single unique bonus and several generic ones.
Religion seems to initially show more promise, with an interesting “customize your holy verses” mechanic, but like the leader system, it’s fundamentally lacking in personality. The player is presented with a massive list of religions (props to the team for creativity, and including things like Wiccan as an option), but all religions are fundamentally the same – you can pick any of the verses as you progress for any religion.
Finally, and for me most fatally, once a player pulls ahead it’s very hard for other players to catch up. Winning a game of Ara is contingent on an interesting prestige system – it’s basically a score race to the finish line, rather than the usual grab-bag of victory conditions in other Civ-alikes.
On lower difficulty levels, I was running away with the game halfway through my first lengthy run, with double the next player’s score; on my attempt at a game on a higher difficulty level, an AI did the same thing to me. I can’t say I’ve explored all configurations of the game yet, but it seems like a genuinely competitive late game of Ara would be a rarity.
And yet… and yet. Just one more turn. Ara grabbed me hard this past weekend; a bunch of hours on Saturday vanished. Because despite its many flaws, the game does several things right.
specifically one of the Triumphs
(their version of Civ’s Wonders).
Interesting Innovations
Different takes on the Civilization genre emphasize different game mechanics. Some games focus heavily on the military side. Millennia innovates with its plethora of unique age mechanics; Humankind with its quirky customized nations.
Ara focuses squarely on economy and supply chains, reminiscent of the Anno series of city-builders. In the ten or twenty actions a player performs on any given turn, 80% or more are economic tweaks.
You might order a workshop to build a plow. A few turns later, you might add that plow on a specific farm to boost production. Your capital city might be struggling with happiness. Adding furniture to their dwellings would help – but oh, wait, timber is in short supply, so first you’ll need to boost production at a sawmill by adding metal tools.
It’s a unique on-the-ground micro-intensive perspective on the economy. A lot of the time, you feel more like a logistics officer than the ruler of a great nation through the ages. Yet it’s clearly an intentional design choice, one that I found compelling and satisfying from turn to turn.
Because, as small as each of the decisions are, they matter. Adding a plow to a farm adds a tiny bonus, but over a 400+ turn game, that tiny bonus adds up. Further, since the game keeps track of an actual inventory of particular commodities, running out of something means you might no longer be able to build your most advanced military units or improvements.
A series of small decisions that slowly optimize a nation defines the Civilization genre at its core. But Ara shifts that focus from the traditional heavy emphasis on military and raw production to a detailed take on a game economy, to a degree I haven’t seen before.
Certainly, optimized economic micromanagement is not for everyone. And from a UX and UI perspective, Ara is missing important summary screens. It’s often hard to know exactly how a supply chain has broken down, and I’d love to be able to simply place a plow at every farm that doesn’t have one.
There’s an odd tension in the design – Ara wants me to zoom in and check out my people, with its fantastic ant-farm presentation. Yet most of my time is spent mulling over the spreadsheet of economic decisions, trying to squeeze more production out of a forgotten corner of my empire.
That said, I’m confident that the team at Oxide Games can build on the solid foundations of what’s there in updates and patches. Overall, the UI design in Ara is excellent, with a strong presentation and a clean look. It features all the usual staples of the genre, such as a Civilopedia of information (here called, in an old-school Microsoft term, the Encarta) and a “next action” button at the lower right that prevents players from advancing the turn until they’ve dealt with critical events.
There’s also a nifty orders panel that summarizes the orders you’ve given this turn. I don’t remember seeing this in other games in the genre (and as soon as I say that, someone will remind me of one), but it’s incredibly useful in Ara. In a game that’s this epic in scope, it’s easy to forget what I asked that first scout to do by the time I get to the end of a turn.
neatly summarizes all the
things you’ve done this turn.
The orders panel is also necessary because, unlike most games in the genre, Ara uses a WEGO system. All the players put in their orders, and then everyone moves at once. While this model sometimes leads to chasing enemy scouts around the map from province to province, overall it’s a fantastic mechanic for a turn-based strategy game. Since the AI is doing some thinking and planning on your turn, the WEGO system has the side effect of making even late-game turns in Ara process almost instantly – an area where many Civ games struggle.
Late Nights Are Back
There’s a lot more I could say about Ara: History Untold. I haven’t touched on the military side of the game, which features some interesting twists but also lacks obvious features such as retreating from battles or upgrading existing units.
There’s also plenty to say about diplomacy in Ara, which is bare-bones but does include a few nifty elements – a wide variety of different goals for wars, and a friendly trade treaty system that lets you fill in the gaps in your resource chains.
That’s Ara in a nutshell: questionable design decisions balanced by mechanics both innovative and fun; a fantastic visual look that brings top-tier graphics cards screaming to a halt; a beautiful, clean UI that’s missing several basic and obvious information screens.
Playing Ara: History Untold frequently infuriates the designer in me. But more than a lot of recent Civ-alikes, it also took me right back to those days hunched over my computer in cramped Baltimore student housing, playing the original Civilization until the wee hours of the morning.
One… more… turn…
Ara: History Untold is available on Steam and Gamepass. See you next week!