As you take a peek at our first two unique nations you can begin to see the contrast: the industrial Vinci with their Leonardo da Vinci inspired machines and steampunk cities; and the desert Alim with their Arabian Nights theme—sandstorms, genies, and tall glass spires. "Cataclysmic" is also a useful word to describe what we want to do visually—we've redesigned our graphics engine from the ground up because we want to make a game that gets our players as excited about our graphics as they have always been about our gameplay. The gameplay themes which players loved in RoN will be back in expanded form for RoN: Rise of Legends—national borders, cities, color-coded tech tracks, massive armies, and of course the open-ended strategic decisions of our "Conquer the World" engine. There will also be many new gameplay features that weren't seen in Rise of Nations. So come take a look at what we've been up to, and keep checking back as we reveal additional details about where we want to take real time strategy gaming next!

So we've got the Alim and the Vinci—what other unique nations will you have?

Ah, well for example we have the adv… HEY! You know I can't talk about them yet! What's wrong with you people, anyway? What I can tell you is there will be another technology nation and another magic nation, and that they will all be as different from one another as the Vinci are from the Alim. There are strong gameplay differences between the nations which go well beyond the differences in appearance.

So, did you name your main hero Giacomo before or after that horse won the Kentucky Derby?

Long before, and fortunately we leaked it to reporters in time to establish that! :) In fact, when at the last minute we heard there was a long-shot horse by that name in the race, some of our programmers decided to "throw their money away" by placing bets out of sheer moral support and because of the utter coolness of the name. Heh heh, next party's on the programmers. And of course it never hurts that now people will be more familiar with the correct pronunciation (JOCK-uh-moe) of this awesome appellation!

So is this Rise of Nations 2?

No – to me that would imply doing a history game. This is a new direction for the franchise that could easily become its own series. We find tons of inspiration in this new fantasy world, much like we do in history and the real world. We plan to keep making innovative games that inspire us, so you'll have to stay tuned to see what we come up with next!

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