With Rise of Venice, the team wanted to start a brand-new IP, in a brand-new area. The Mediterranean in the 15th century shall be your playground this time, and you will play the part of an up and coming family in the infamous city of Venice – which is at the height of its power around this time. You’ll work your way up through the ranks, eventually becoming a major player in Venetian politics, and the Mediterranean as a whole. At its worst, it’s more of the same in a different geographical area, but Gaming Minds have made a number of changes that hopefully will steer their games in a new direction.
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| The coloured traders are your ‘rivals’, while white is just neutral forces that form the backbone of the in-game economy |
Most notable of these changes is the engine itself – it’s beautiful, for one thing. It’s clear the team have put a lot of effort into the rendering technology for the ‘trading’ map (or ‘world’ map). The Mediterranean is brought to life wonderfully, with deep blue seas, lush forests, dry deserts, and a lot more visual feedback added to events (for example, there’s a volcano that can go off). The most important thing though, is that the ‘city view’ and the ‘sea view’ have now been combined. You don’t need to load into a separate interface to interact directly with cities anymore. You simply zoom onto where the city is, and you can interact directly on the map. It means the cities look a bit larger than life, but that’s to facilitate ease of use.
Still, even with this combination of modes, the rest of the game will probably look quite familiar to anyone who’s played a game like this in the past. There are 22 resources available in the game, 20 of which are produced, and two of which are imported at certain trade ports. The economy is entirely self-contained, so everything is produced, bought, sold, used etc... within the game and much like Patrician you can build up your own trading and production empire, earning trade licenses to trade in more and more places as you go up. Venetian’s political system plays a big part in this game. Venice is controlled by the Council of the Ten, who are the ten most influential families in Venice. A general goal is to gain favour with these members, and eventually become famous enough to join their ranks, perhaps even become ‘Doge’ (their de facto head of state). You’ll also have a family to take care of – sisters, brothers, cousins, wife, children... they all need looking after and keeping happy, and they can perform tasks for you to help your cause.
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| Naval combat returns, although it's still as ‘basic’ and arcadey as ever – the trading sim is where most of the focus is |
As good as it’s looking at the moment though; there are a couple of things that raise small, yet notable concerns. For example, the map is kind of... empty. With only 25 cities present in Rise of Venice, there’s a lot of land mass that doesn’t serve a purpose. Greece, Italy, the Middle East... it’s like nothing else exists. Further to that, there’s not a lot of background interaction. For example, in Patrician IV you’d have towns come under attack by historical powers of the time – this was to simulate that there was a wider political context to just the Hanestic League making some money. Same goes with Venice – they weren’t just traders in an isolated bubble, they routinely had a rivalry with Genoa, even Pisa, the great empires of the 15th century would be fighting each other, which would affect trade. A lot of this doesn’t seem to be reflected in the game (apart from the frictions between Venice and Genoa, apparently).
If you’ve been following GamingMinds (and Ascaron before them) titles up till now– then we reckon Rise of Venice will continue their domination of your time. The myriad of improvements to customisation, the UI, even the combined city & trade view, should prove a suitable base for newcomers to try their hand as well. Make no mistake though, this is a pretty hardcore trading sim, and there’s only so much you can do to make it less scary. We’ve only had a brief presentation so far, but hopefully we’ll get some hands-on impressions to relay to you before long. Rise of Venice is due out on September 27th, 2013.
Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing how the end game holds up.
