Isles of War : A Retrospective Analysis

‘Isles of War’ was an MMO RTS game that was developed and published by Disney Interactive in October 2013. The overarching business goal was to expand the Disney portfolio into a “mid-core” audience that was growing in the social gaming space. Kixeye had recently launched their very successful game titled ‘Battle Pirates’. Therefore, the decision was made to create a similar naval combat strategy game. The key differentiating factors were to be the Pirates of the Caribbean IP and a unique systemically deep combat system that focused on the real-time component over the strategy component. The latter came from the thinking that boys aged between 15 and 25 would have a high tolerance threshold towards complex action systems.

We started by thinking about how we could do something new with ship based combat, a genre that’s been done many times before. The idea of a broadside based firing system was proposed wherein ships fired projectiles on their side as shown below:

This automatically gave us a basis to create lots of different types of ship that varied in combat ability based on range, radius, damage, health, velocity etc. Players would enjoy funneling their resources to create fleets that would serve different types of situations.  This also gave us a nice basis to monetize. Players would pay for premium ship upgrades etc.

In the prototyping phase we found that the core engagement in this mechanic was navigating your ships to a point where you could fire at your opponent but your opponent couldn’t fire against you:

In our exuberance to create a system where the player was in charge, we let the player control every ship in their fleet by clicking on it. The player then selected the opponent ship to fire, also by clicking and fired by using spacebar. When a player ship was not selected it would be AI controlled. The result we thought would be chaotic multitasking fun:

As they say, a plan never survives first contact with the player. This battle system didn’t work for several reasons:

1. Poor Understanding of Target Audience – “Chaotic fun” to us, was just confusing for our target audience. Turns out “mid-core” audiences vary greatly across platform for their tolerance levels towards battle systems. F2P gamers aren’t the same as console gamers.
2. Misalignment with Core Fantasy and Genre – Ultimately, the core fantasy of any MMO based pirate game is going to be world exploration, forming and battling against alliances etc. Our battle system demanded too much attention and didn’t let the player enjoy the other facets of the game.
3. Inability to Scale – The battle system would need to have AI that was tuned to different types of ships. With the new emphasis on multiple ship categories unlocked by exploring the world we didn’t have the bandwidth to support satisfying AI for all these categories.
4. Additional Battle Mode –  The scaling problem was made even worse by the need to support a second battle mode: ship versus city battles:

So, we went back to the drawing board. We needed to deliver a satisfying battle system that had a lower entry threshold barrier, focused on the strategy component instead of the real-time component and scaled systemically, i.e. without the need to look at each ship class individually. All of this while preserving the original core source of engagement and the differentiating factor of broadside firing. In this vein, new goals were established for the system:

1. The AI would need to scale systemically without the need for scripting on individual ships.
2. Players should be competitive even if their ships didn’t have the same attack capabilities.
3. Movement would have to be deterministic to support other features such as “watch mode”

Ultimately what we shipped was a flocking follow the leader styled mechanic. You can read more on this mechanic by clicking on the portfolio link below if you are interested:

 http://www.nikhilkashyap1990.com/iow-ai.html

With this movement system, all the mentioned goals were hit effectively. However, there were several drawbacks:

1.  The system was overtly predictable.
2. The system favored ships with faster turning radius: Example: Level 57 Fleet obliterating Level 70 fleet
3. Combat didn’t change as players leveled up.

While this system aligned with the higher-level goals for the game, simple additions could have solved some of these problems. One example was a ship boost system. In this system, the enemy flagship ship would burst forwards while in player range for a short duration of time. This could be implemented in a systemic manner that didn’t require scripting on an individual ship level. It could also be implemented in a manner that didn’t break the requirement for the overall battle system to be deterministic. In doing so it would at least alleviate some of the above-mentioned issues:

1. This would introduce an element of surprise that would invalidate player movement strategy and force her to reassess the board when a boost occurred.
2. The number of ship boosts available to the NPC would be dependent on the turning radius and the overall level difference between the two fleets.