How Oxide survived the "nightmare" of making a simultaneous-turn 4X game
Ara: History Untold's headline gimmick is actually a couple of centuries old. In this deceptively Civilization-esque 4X strategy game, all player turns unfold simultaneously, once you've decided what to build or research, where to move your units, and so on. As Oxide Games design director Michelle Menard tells me over Zoom, this approach takes inspiration from an ancient military simulator, Kriegsspiel, which was devised by the Prussian army officer George Leopold von Reisswitz, aka the "father of wargaming", in the mid-1800s.
"It was to train their generals, it was a legit apparatus of war, it was not for funsies," says Menard. "And they basically created this massive table that had a modular terrain system. At first they used sand, but that was kind of messy, [and so] they developed a system where they had interchangeable tiles, like hills and valleys and plateaus.
"They would build out this table, literally drop a sheet down the middle, and it'd be like, OK, you guys on each side, you can't see what the other person's doing. There was an actual game master, who was the referee who you would report your moves to. He would then re-set up the board and basically call people back into the room and be like, tada! It's the next turn - let's see what people did. Was it what you expected?"