Interview: The story behind Ara: History Untold’s name and how it’s trying to fix the same issues as Civilization 7

A chat with Oxide Games’ Gabriela Leskur and Xbox’s Matt Turnbull

Oxide Interactive / Microsoft

It’s a fascinating time for fans of turn-based 4X strategy games as we see formulas that have been intact for many years be broken down and evolve in the newest wave of releases – and what’s to come is even more of a departure from tradition.

Oxide Games and Xbox Game Studios are at the forefront of this evolution with Ara: History Untold, Microsoft’s first foray into this type of strategy game. Ara is now one week away from release and we’re chatting with the game’s narrative and experience lead Gabriela Leskur and executive producer Matt Turnbull about what makes the title so unique and fresh.

Speaking of titles, though, I first want to know why Ara has such an unusual name – if you read “Civilization” or “Humankind” it quickly becomes clear what these games may be about. That’s not something that can be said for this title. Someone like myself who knows Latin will translate it as “altar” or associate it with anime ladies teasing a protagonist in Japanese, but that’s hardly all there can be to it, right?

“It took a little bit of love and attention,” Turnbull, who’s been with the project since the start, tells me. “We went through a lot of different options and ideas. We even talked about using the code name for the game at one point, but the team kind of fell in love with Ara around a few different things.”

Part of that was the fact that it means a whole bunch of different things in various languages, such as “altar” in Latin or “king” in Armenian, which reinforced the global identity of the game. Eventually, the team stumbled upon a creation myth from the people of Borneo featuring two giant birds, one of which is named Ara.

“That idea of creating a world, a place, something new and different – that really resonated with a lot of people, so between that and enjoying how it sounds when you say it, it felt like it really did everything it needed to do,” he explains.

Ara allows for close zoom-ins, showing you the daily life of your subjects. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

“The ‘History Untold’ part I think a lot of people sleep on,” he adds. “For us it’s such a big part of what this game is, because it’s all about creating these histories, telling your own story. It’s that untold story on a world that never existed.”

“I think within that is personal empowerment, too.”

In a sense, that’s Ara’s “Civilization” or “Humankind” as described above – a part of the name that immediately evokes the game's core idea. 

“I think there are many people who have dreams of how they might influence the world at large, but maybe because of age or circumstance don’t always have the access for the global impact,” Leskur further explains. “This game gives individuals the chance to imagine ‘How might the world be if I was able to be its leader?’ I think within that is personal empowerment, too.” Leskur hopes that this aspect of the game can have a positive impact on people’s lives in reality as well.

For Xbox Game Studios and Microsoft, the development of Ara is a bigger deal than it may seem from the outside. “We’ve done strategy games, obviously,” Turnbull says, naming the iconic Age of Empires series. “But turn-based strategy on this scale is not something we’ve dipped our toes into.” For the company, this foray into another niche generally associated with hardcore PC gaming is an important step to diversify its game portfolio.

Oxide was a much smaller team when it first talked to Xbox about partnering up, Turnbull says, but crucially consisted of some of the former leading members of Civilization dev Firaxis and created its own engine, which it had already used for its debut title, Ashes of the Singularity.

“We talked a lot about what their dream game would be,” Turnbull remembers. “And that turned into basically taking this genre and updating it, reinvigorating it, reinventing it, rediscovering it – not from scratch, but without any of the requirements usually associated with it.”

This freedom allowed the developers to cherry-pick elements from all kinds of directions. Turnbull says inspiration came from Eurogames, often called German-style board games – they have complex rulesets, but offer multiple ways to score points and usually feature indirect player interactions only, as opposed to the more conflict-oriented American board games.

One of the core ideas for Ara was that “the world is organic” – it has regions, which are shaped by the terrain and nature, instead of hex tiles – and that players can see the changes they make have an impact on their citizens. Turnbull names open-world games as an inspiration for that particular aspect.

Leskur adds that Oxide encourages its developers to bring the things they love about the games they play on their own time into work, leading to lots of experimentation and brainstorming.

“Within the narrative standpoint,” Leskur elaborates, “the original concept of the narrative events was to take something that we’ve started to get used to from a lot of the historical grand strategy games, which are references to literature, and try to expand that into a moral, philosophical, strategic gameplay dilemma. In our game with these narrative events, we look at the historical context, but we’re not looking to replicate history. We’re inspired by the historical context to create a ‘What if?’ scenario.”

She names Paradox Interactive’s strategy games, Civilization 5, and hit indie game Against the Storm as big inspirations in this respect.

Leskur emphasizes the wide array of backgrounds on the narrative team with herself having a background in social studies and anthropology, while others have theirs in history and even comic books. Doing the research fueling these narrative events wasn’t just about fact-finding, but also about anthropological, sociological, and ecological patterns the team could spot. The goal was “expanding outside of just what we often think of history – who won and who lost.”

“Everyone who enjoys this type of game, we want them to have a home here.”

Turnbull says that they also had an external historian come in to teach the team about how to conduct historical research responsibly and methodically. They partnered with universities and other organizations worldwide to get a global perspective, which helped “get rid of some of the things in it that were inaccurate or were misrepresenting.” 

“At the end of the day we wanted the game to be for everyone,” he tells me. The team hopes that every player of Ara will find something in the game that represents them or resonates with them. Microsoft’s insider program, which provided test access to the game to players pretty much ever since the game was announced, helped with this aspect as well, Turnbull reports. “They’ve not been shy at all about sharing with us their reactions to content.”

“Everyone who enjoys this type of game, we want them to have a home here,” Leskur says.

This global approach as well as the ‘History Untold’ aspect had a major impact on the leaders available in the game – just like the developers didn’t let themselves be confined by convention when it comes to gameplay, they widened the definition of who can be a leader.

“Throughout history, there have been influential people who maybe haven’t had the opportunity to be a president of a nation, but they had promise and they showed in the times in which they lived that they’re a force to be reckoned with,” Leskur explains. “Because this is ‘History Untold’ – this is an alternate history that you’re creating – we’re opening the floor to imagine ‘What if Sappho wasn’t just a lauded poet and muse of her time? What if she had the opportunity to impact and shape her nation on a grander scale?’”

This, of course, opened an entirely new can of worms – who gets to be a leader and who gets to be a Paragon, essentially Ara’s expanded take on Civilization’s Great People mechanic?

“Humans are cool.”

“It wasn’t easy to make those decisions,” Turnbull says. “These decisions are always so hard, because you have people with strong beliefs, strong opinions, strong values around everybody that would make for good arguments for and against their inclusion in the game.”

The team eventually compromised on a corpus of rules to help it make those choices – and one of them has to do with the kind of worldview Ara wants to show. “With Ara: History Untold, we’re trying to show an optimistic view of history, humanity, and of what people can do when they come together to build things,” Turnbull explains. “That isn’t to say it’s free from conflict, war, or the dark parts of history, because the game does feature those elements, but if you were to look at the game and try to understand what lens it’s being looked at through, then it would be the idea of ‘Humans are cool. They are pretty great. They are pretty amazing. They do amazing things and when they come together, they do even more amazing things.’”

Turnbull emphasizes that any historical figure who’s included as a Paragon could easily make the jump to become a leader in the future – Ara: History Untold will receive post-launch content including new leaders and the developers are open to ‘promoting’ Paragons into that position. “I like to think we haven’t locked ourselves in. We haven’t created any walls or barriers that we can’t knock down again if we want to.”

Paragons are Ara's take on Great People. They can be used as advisors, fielded as generals, or put to work as creatives. / Oxide Games / Microsoft

Leaders are central to Ara’s gameplay, because it’s their traits that make playthroughs different – civilizations themselves have no unique bonuses or units. When designing this system, the team found that versatility was the key to a fun experience. Most of Ara’s leaders are designed in such a way that they can be played in different styles throughout a single match, as long as the player keeps an eye on the overall goal of the game – collecting as many Prestige points as possible.

“We haven’t done as many of the flashy things that we could have possibly done,” Turnbull says. “The team was really focused on what’s going to create the most interesting gameplay and the most interesting segmentation between the leaders.”

Leskur brings another interesting argument to the table that supports the approach of focusing less on the civilizations themselves: “This is also creating a space for alternate history.” For her, the artistic focus on showing the passage of time as opposed to specific cultures creates more freedom for the players’ own stories – keeping things ambiguous leaves more room for different interpretations.

She cites an example from one of the games she recently played, in which she led Greece as Sappho with the Wicca religion: “That’s very different than what actually happened and so much of what you see in units, in art, in your improvements and your buildings would be influenced by the religion you chose in real life, by the dialogs you have with other nations, and because those are often unpredictable, I think there’s more of a focus on trying to bring in some cultural aspects from different parts of the world for each of the leaders, but not specifically that unique nation.”

Widening the pool of available leaders is something that Ara has in common with Civilization 7 – but it’s not the only thing. Both games are seeking to address some of the genre’s big issues.

“When they [Oxide] first penciled in the idea about breaking the game down into playable chunks, a lot of it was about targeting some of the challenges in the genre,” Turnbull explains. “We found that a ton of people who play these games never finish a game. They’ll just play the first part over and over again, because by the time you get to the third part of the game you’re just hitting ‘End Turn’ waiting to win or you’ve already lost.”

While Oxide and Firaxis’ solutions differ in detail, some of their ideas are fascinatingly close.

A game of Ara is divided into Acts, which conclude when a certain number of players reaches a certain tech milestone. At the end of each Act, several of the lowest-ranked civilizations “get lost to time,” as Leskur puts it – they lose the game and their cities vanish, leaving ruins behind. This creates free space and helps the map from feeling too cramped in the mid-game. It’s remarkably similar to the Ages in Civilization 7, which will expand the map outwards, providing players with new space in that way – same problem, two solutions.

“That’s reflective of what we’ve seen in our own history,” Leskur points out. “Certain nations, although they contributed mightily in their time, no longer exist in our time or became part of another nation.”

Turnbull adds that the Act system allows the game to shift strategically while it’s underway on top of providing clean breaks for mechanical changes – very similar arguments to what we’ve heard from Firaxis.

Concluding our chat, I ask the developers about their hopes for what players will think after their first match of Ara: History Untold.

“My hope is that players are encouraged to take what they’ve learned from their first playthrough and use it to optimize their next one,” Leskur says. “I hope that they’re also left with a sense of wonder as they get to see our living world.”

She also points to the game’s use of simultaneous turns to make multiplayer more smooth and fun as well as the game’s intricate crafting system (city-builder-esque production chains), which allows players to further specialize their civilizations and make them their own.

Turnbull echoes her thoughts, saying that he hopes that “they come away still thinking about the game and the story that they’ve told and sharing it with people, because they feel a sense of ownership about it – that they feel that this was really their world and they changed it and that they made this story come to life with their choices.”

Ara: History Untold is coming to PC on September 24, 2024.

For more on the game, check out our previews from Gamescom 2023 and 2024.