We haven't written much about Ara: History Untold, a new historical turn-based strategy PC game that's been in the works for a few years now. Part of that's because its publisher, Xbox Game Studios, hasn't put much fanfare behind it; it wasn't even mentioned in Microsoft's not-E3 extravaganza last week.
But perhaps both we and Microsoft should be putting more of a spotlight on it, given that it now has a release date: September 24, 2024. The game will be released on Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC simultaneously.
The date was announced during an Official Xbox Podcast interview (and accompanying blog post) with Marc Meyer, president of Oxide Games, the studio developing Ara. The podcast covered more than just the release date, though, with Meyer offering up some new gameplay details—particularly about how multiplayer will work.
But first, here's a quick primer on exactly what Ara is since we haven't covered it previously. Essentially, it's a new spin on the classic PC game Civilization. As in that game, you lead a society from sticks and stones to the modern age. You explore a randomly generated world, build cities, research technologies, manage armies, and conduct diplomacy turn by turn along the way.
The game promises a mix of familiar mechanics and new ones. You can generally assume most of the familiar mechanics will come by way of Civilization or other popular 4x genre titles like Stellaris—things like leaders with different traits and building specific structures within cities, including wonders of the world.
In terms of what's different, the game offers a more robust simulation of what the citizens of your society are doing as they trek around the map and react to phenomena like weather or illness. In fact, the game's evolutionary approach to AI was the topic of a dense but compelling if-you-understand-the-concepts talk at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year.