How to get your dream project - corporate politicking.
After my successes with Rise of Rome and The Conquerors, I was a shoe-in
to do the expansion for Age of Empires 3. But I had a problem. The
natural assumption everyone had was that this expansion would be Asian
civs. I did not want to do Asian civs because it was stupid - 1600s
Japan, India, China & Korea were emphatically not in colonizing
moods. And believe it or not, I do care a little about historical
verisimilitude. (Mainly because I think it makes the game more fun, but
still...)
So what I wanted to do was to turn some of the Native Americans into
playable civs. Why? I think Indians are awesome and I wanted to see them
as more than the minor allies they were presented as in the original
game.
But how could I do this? MicroSoft expected Asians. The suits in charge
at Ensemble expected Asians. The other leads on the project expected
Asians. And the rest of the non-lead team members expected Asians.
Here's how I went about it. (Oh yeah, if you thought the Warchiefs was
dumb then you're a bad person with bad opinions. So there. But you may
still find something useful in my tale.)
First, I had to convince MYSELF that the Natives would be cool. I wanted
to give them a new and interesting ability and make them undeniably
cool. I worked on this for a while, coming up with the Firepit idea
(which lets the Indian villagers dance for special powers) and the
Warchief unit, which is way different from the European Scouts because
the Warchief can "convert" wild animals on the map to his team which is
super-fun. I also decided the three civs would be the Sioux, the Aztecs,
and the Iroquois, which would be interestingly different. Later on they
changed the name of the Sioux to the Lakota but I want you to know that
I actually PHONED the Seven Council Fires and was told in person by
native representatives that Sioux was a perfectly good term for them.
Though of course Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota also worked. I stuck with
Sioux as being more inclusive. (I assume the name was eventually changed
because of white men activists, not natives, because it was white
Seattle natives who thought it should be Lakota back in the day.)
The Aztecs wouldn't have gunpowder or horses, the Sioux would be heavily
cavalry-based, and the Iroquois would be kind of a "high tech" Native
civ. Anyway I was an easy sell, because I'd been thinking about this for
a while.
Second, I took all the other leads (consisting of the producer, the lead
programmer & the lead artist) out to a long business lunch and we
hammered out all the details. Basically I proselyted how cool the
natives would be, and how much neater a horde of screaming charging
Sioux would be than a stand of Mughal archers. And by the end of that (3
hour) lunch I had them all convinced. I'd answered their arguments,
presented ideas they liked, and got them on my side.
Next step - the team. Now that all the leads agreed with me, we met with
the team - programmers, designers, and artists first as individual
groups then all together and made our case for Indian civs. The artists
were the easiest ones to convince, once I started talking about Jaguar
Warriors and Lakota lancers, feathers waving in the air. So colorful.
The designers were fairly easy too because they liked the challenge it
presented. The programmers, always hyper-conservatives, were the
toughest, but they fell to our eloquent arguments as well. Everyone was
enthusiastic now and loved the Warchief idea.
Now I went to our superiors at the company - the guys who approved our
paychecks. And here was the argument I gave them. "The whole team loves
the Warchief idea. Surely it's better to put us on a project that we
love, rather than one we only reluctantly acquiesce to?" And because the
management at Ensemble Studios wasn't a pack of morons, they bought it.
They then fought for us against the Microsoft drones (who WERE, of
course, a pack of morons) for our team vision.
And in the end, we were victorious in getting my idea approved. But now
it all rested on my being able to produce what I'd promised
design-wise. Obviously the programmers and artists were capable of
making whatever they were asked. It was mainly on me.
And I succeeded. The first civ I did was the Iroquois, because I felt
they were the most like the Europeans. They used gunpowder & horses,
etc.
From the first moment they were tried out in the game they were a big
hit. I think the main reason everyone loved them was because they were
able to produce swarms of little crappy siege weapons (battering rams,
etc.) which are of course Real. Fun. Nothing warms the cold black hearts
of Age of Empires players like destroying peaceful villages.
Once everyone was playing the Iroquois (and fighting over who got to be
them in our playtests), the Warchiefs were In Like Flynn. The whole of
Ensemble Studios was bought in.
A few weeks later I brought in the Aztecs, who THEN became the most
popular civ I think because of all the cool specialized warriors -
Coyote Runners, Eagle Scouts, Priests, Jaguar Knights, Puma Spearmen,
Arrow Knights, Skull Knights, etc. They were just so colorful &
cool. And their home city looked awesome because Aztec architecture.
The last civ I created was the Lakota, and everyone was so excited to
try them probably they were predisposed to love them on sight. And they
were. Having a giant army of cavalry is super fun though of course they
had to have anti-pike units as well, which they did because the Sioux
had lots of rifles. Plus I gave them invisible units, including the only
invisible cavalry unit in the game.
Anyway the Warchiefs was doing great and everyone seemed happy. Until MicroSoft struck back.
They sent in a team which was whining because in Age of Empires III
though we had native americans, they couldn't be wiped out. But in The
Warchiefs, if you were playing a native civ, obviously you could be
annihilated. Sort of the whole purpose to playing an RTS, right?
But no, the all-white-dude contingent they sent to complain about this
terrible injustice was concerned it would send a bad message.
I didn't have to say hardly anything - I'd prepped everyone at Ensemble
Studios so well that they fought on my behalf. No one wanted to give up
playing the awesome Native civs. And the best part came when to thwart
our MS foes, we presented them with the document that THEY HAD SENT US
when we first did Age III, in which Native elders from Washington state
complained that the natives in Age III COULDN'T BE KILLED. They said,
"The natives in Age are not in power of their own destiny. We want them
to be their own independent civs and live or die based on their skills
and strengths."
Which is of course EXACTLY what we'd done. We had fulfilled, almost to
the letter, what the actual Native Americans desired, in a document
which MicroSoft had prepared after Age 3 came out.
So we got to have our way. It probably helped my case that this was in
2005 - Lord knows what it would have been like if this had happened 20
years later.
Someone is probably going to say, "But Sandy, later on you guys DID an
Asian expansion for Age 3." Well actually, no. Ensemble Studios didn't
do it - BigHugeGames did The Asian Dynasties a year later, and they did a
great job. And really, it was the obvious next expansion. I didn't
object to doing Asians, but if we were ever going to do Native Americans
I stand by the fact we would have had to do it first.
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