How Age of Wonders 4 struck a perfect balance between innovation and tradition

An interview with Triumph Studios’ Lennart Sas about Age of Wonders 4’s record launch

Age of Wonders 4, which was released on May 2, 2023, on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, has certainly lived up to fans’ expectations. The turn-based 4X game in a magical fantasy setting is sitting on a score of 83 on Metacritic as well as a ‘Very Positive’ rating on Steam at the time of writing, having received praise both from critics and the public.

Our own Age of Wonders 4 review called it a “power fantasy with unlimited possibilities” and hailed the focus on player freedom, creativity, and decision making.

Triumph Studios’ Lennart Sas, game director for Age of Wonders 4, tells GLHF that the team is “really happy. This has been the biggest Age of Wonders launch in history, in all its 25 years.”

Published by Paradox Interactive, the masters of grand strategy, and developed by Triumph, Age of Wonders 4 manages to stick with the series’ roots and innovate at the same time, striking just the right balance between the two approaches.

“The difficulty when you make a sequel is always: to what degree do you stick to the roots and listen to your core audience, and to what degree do you innovate?” Sas says. “Every developer making a sequel has to make a call there.”

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

In the worst case scenario, a developer can lose their core audience if they stride too far from the previous games, he explains. However, there is also danger in a brand becoming stagnant, so developers constantly have to balance those two aspects.

During the creation of Age of Wonders 4, this balancing act was on the team’s mind all the time. They looked at older entries into the series and determined a couple of features they wouldn’t touch, as they are “the pillars of what makes this game, the reason why it ever came to popularity.” Aside from this core, though, everything was on the table – and some of the changes made were “quite radical,” Sas says.

Triumph would then prototype these ideas and get them into the hands of some hardcore fans of the series, “who are often our worst critics.” Sas continues: “And then we can say, ‘Okay, if they didn’t entirely hate it, then maybe with these new features we can attract a broader audience.’”

The focus on customization in Age of Wonders 4, which allows players to create their own rulers and factions to play with, has been one of the big hits among players – it was also a result of the team being bold and correctly weighing the risks in the above context. “We knew that some of our core players from Age of Wonders would hate it, because they’re all about the lore,” Sas says. “They like fixed factions. But we also knew that a lot of people would love it, right? So that balance is a tough call. You can’t please all the people all the time.”

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

What’s important, Sas stresses, is that “we as a franchise can keep growing, [...] because game development becomes more expensive, whether we like it or not.”

Fans have also been happy with the sheer amount of content in Age of Wonders 4 – while some sequels in this genre can feel a bit barebones compared to a predecessor fed with a couple of expansion packs, Age of Wonders 4 feels very system-rich right from the start. Sas says that a new approach to development alongside the team’s commitment to “not sell people a skeletal game” – though there are plenty of skeletons in the game, no worries – has made this possible.

“In Age of Wonders: Planetfall, we had incredibly dense and rich factions,” Sas explains. “We spent a lot of effort on making a single species in that game, like five to six years to create one species with the unit line-up, the city graphics, the combat maps, the hero customization, and everything. It was so much work. No modding outfit was able to create a new species for that game. At the same time, people felt sort of trapped within that faction.”

For Age of Wonders 4, the developers went in a different direction: “Let’s open everything up and let’s make things modular.” That meant that the individual content pieces the developers had to build became smaller, could be tested easier and earlier, and then combined into bigger chunks. This not just eased life for the team, it’ll make it simpler for modders to create content as well – Age of Wonders 4 did launch with Steam Workshop support, after all, with the devs themselves being the first to upload mods (one of them takes spiders out of the game for arachnophobes).

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

This approach is making itself known in another way. “I think we can deliver a massive amount of value to players more efficiently,” Sas says. “That’s why our expansion policy with those DLCs is also super aggressive.” Four content packs, one releasing each quarter starting with Q3 of 2023, have been announced already. Players can purchase them all in a combined Expansion Pass, which costs more or less what a single “classic” expansion pack would cost.

“I mean, even the first one, which is a $10 pack, is going to do something really cool,” Sas says. “You can be a dragon, which you can fully customize: change heads, wings, proportions. I don’t think any game ever did that.”

Dragon Dawn, the first content pack, will indeed add dragons as a third ruler type alongside the base game’s mortal champions and wizard kings, and will introduce the lizardfolk species. It’ll hand players new Tomes of Magic to play with as well.

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

“In our cosmology, dragons were part of the creators of worlds,” Sas says of our lizard overlords. “They were the creatures that basically controlled the flow of raw materials, like the lava, metals, and minerals. So they sculpted the initial worlds, and then came the giants and the elves to populate them and create more things.” Dragons will be represented in different colors to reflect that, which in turn attunes them to different affinities in Age of Wonders 4’s important Affinity system. There will also be upgrades of some sort for the dragons, but Sas stops himself from saying too much about what’s to come.

Personally, he’s most excited about the last DLC pack that’s announced at the moment, which will dive deeper into magic and the multiverse-aspect of Age of Wonders’ setting. “I think that’s something we can do something really cool with,” he teases.

In the more immediate future, the developers are focusing on helping those players who had technical difficulties at launch. They released a hotfix on launch day and are in the middle of developing another patch when we speak to Sas.

Next up will be a round of balancing, he explains: “People are just getting to grips with all the gameplay systems and all the combinations that you can build. Of course, at one point, people will find exploits, which are maybe too good to be true, which we might need to nerf a little bit.”

The team won’t just crush anything powerful, though.

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

“Some of the exploits are actually desirable, because people like finding them. ‘Look at me, I’m so smart. I’ve discovered this and I’m going to use it to win the game like this,’” Sas explains. “And part of this experience is that people use creativity in order to create their own challenge. They set up a scenario, determine the level of threat in the game, and then try to solve it. And maybe a particular exploit is a way to win.”

Technical improvements and balance adjustments will be provided in continuous free updates, which Sas says could “maybe” include “smaller features” as well.

One area ripe for expansion is the game’s siege system, which could benefit from additional map layouts, among other things. The team already has a couple of cool ideas floating around, Sas reveals: “We’ve discussed making province walls, so you can have a huge wall outside of cities like the Great Wall in China. Where it will lead, we don’t know yet, but there’s lots of these [ideas].”

The Rally of the Lieges is one of my favorite mechanics in Age of Wonders 4, so I take the opportunity and ask how it came to be. Sas explains that one of the goals with the game was to open different playstyles that were not exclusively focused on conquest. Naturally, that led to a look at diplomacy and vassal cities as well as the idea of recruiting units from this system. That brings up a different question, though: “How can we create a system which doesn’t undermine your own production system?”

Triumph Studios / Paradox Interactive

The Rally of the Lieges was a good way to get powerful assistance from allies while maintaining the need for consistent unit production in the players’ own cities. It works the other way around as well, of course, as you can send strong armies to defend your allies through the Rally in a very simple manner.

What informed basically every one of Age of Wonders 4’s systems is the “premise of role-playing the ruler of a fantasy empire. We always had the idea that players represent themselves on the map like the sort of heroic king from the middle ages that could govern an empire and at the same time charge into battle. That sort of stereotype.”

Sas explains that the team, throughout the history of the series, has “given the player more agency step by step. But I think the jump to Age of Wonders 4 is the biggest.”

Every decision the player makes is reflected and represented in the game in some way. “The game is about you. It’s not the game trying to force itself on you.”