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The latest video dev diary for Ara: History Untold, the upcoming grand strategy game that’s being published by Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, has been posted on YouTube. It’s also the final dev diary for 2023, and it is doing something a bit different in a kind of holiday special.
The new video dev diary, hosted again by Steven Bell, has him chatting with 20 of the game’s development team at Oxide Games. The team members are taking turns answering comments and questions about Ara that have been submitted by the game’s community. Many of the notes from the game’s community are simply how much they are looking forward to playing Ara once it is released.
However, there are a few more interesting things revealed in the video about the game itself as Bell asks some of them to talk about a feature of the game they are most excited about.
One fun little “feature” in Ara was described by Oxide’s Director of Production Satch Puri:
My absolute favorite thing is a very kind of a small feature in our game where it’s a part of our massive Living World. So animals like sheep run away from the cursor. So you can chase them into a farm and then they get stuck into a fence and then they’re there forever.
So sometimes when I’m kind of trying to take a break from decision making I’ll just look for sheep and try to just herd them into a farm and have hundreds of sheep in one farm. And that’s just my own minigame we’ve made up in this game.
More than one developer also mentioned the game’s crafting feature as their favorite part of Ara, and they are looking forward to seeing how gamers use it, and maybe even try to break it.
This will be the last dev diary entry for 2023, and Oxide will take a short holiday break before the next dev diary is posted sometime in early 2024.
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in 2024. You can join the Ara Insider Program right now to play pre-release builds for the game. Oxide announced recently that a new technical alpha test is slated to begin “soon” and you can learn more about how to participate on the game’s Steam page.
