Age of Booty Preview

E3 2008 Preview

Can real-time strategy games be easy enough for anyone to play, and deep enough to hold our interest when we're several hours into them? Capcom hopes the answer is yes for its new online strategy title, Age of Booty. Featuring a simple point-and-click interface, players control one ship in battles of two versus two and four versus four. That lineup is what you get out of the box. Or rather, out of the download acquired from XBLA or PSN. There's a PC version as well, and all are due this fall.

Ship controls are simple: push the cursor at any point on the screen and tap the A button to make the ship sail in that direction. The game uses a hexagonal layout that divides the environment by hexagons. This makes it easy to command your ship from the map screen, which provides the most basic view in the game. From there you will only see your own ship and the location of each base -- you will not, however, be able to see any of the allied ships.

Developed by Certain Affinity (a studio launched by one of Halo's lead designers), Age of Booty is being built with a massive online infrastructure. The idea is to get many people playing it together, since this is primarily a competitive game. There will be a single-player mode with specific missions. But you won't get much out of it by staying offline.

One of the cooler, unexpected announcements was the way in which Age of Booty will release new content. Forget about the days of downloads: during the course of development, it was discovered that you can switch existing content on and off with the release of a new Xbox Live update. This means that Age of Booty can have the majority of its content already inside when the game is released, and the developer gets to choose when you get to play it.

Now most gamers are probably thinking: "They're holding back content? What a gyp!" But they have a reason for it. They're not selling you these extra goodies, but instead have decided to make you wait to increase the game's playability and popularity. The developers believe that if you offer too many game modes at once, players will be dispersed in their choices. They would rather see gamers flock to one or two modes (two are being offered at launch) and keep things entertaining instead of having a smaller number of people across many game modes. Over time, when gamers have played the initial modes for a while, additional content will be automatically unlocked with a system update.

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