A common concern with Sins is in the storyline, or lack thereof; the original game's intro movie set the stage for a rather massive, political-styled campaign, but the actual gameplay has never really touched on this plot further. While admittedly this can be something of a challenge for 4x games in general due to their focus on freeform gameplay, are there any plans to take a more plot-minded approach for players to use in exploring the Sins universe, such as a special objective-oriented campaign mode? And to this end, will we ever learn more about the Vasari's mysterious enemy?

This is definitely a challenge for 4X and RTS games and is one of the main reasons there wasn’t a campaign in the initial release. Our experiments during the initial development just weren’t working so we put it hold. There was a lot of debate here about simply chaining some of the maps together but that’s exactly the kind of single player campaign that most of our team skips when we play other RTS games (most of us are RTS fanatics).

In addition, we argued the longevity and value was higher if we did a really good job of the sandbox mode so we designed and released a free map editing tool, provided lots of custom maps, lots of random maps and even included a customizable in-game map generator. I can’t promise there will be some sort of plot-driven campaign in the future but I can promise that the various plot questions will be answered in a fashion that does them justice.

You have a hands-on approach when dealing with the community. Does fan feedback help a lot when implementing new features and deciding what does and doesn't work? The beta forums are littered with suggestions and I imagine it's tough to filter through everything.

Fan feedback is invaluable and we’ve been taking advantage of it since a year before Sins launched and we are still doing it over a year past launch. I probably shouldn’t have said “taking advantage” because it’s really a win-win; people’s complaints get addressed, they get a legitimate feeling of being involved in the development, we develop some great relationships, we get a better product, and the fans get a better game.

The masses can find bugs much faster than we can with our limited size and by analyzing their feedback in aggregate; it’s a lot easier for us to tweak things like balance and game direction. The problem is filtering out the signal from all the noise. Our process is pretty simple yet effective; we just made a habit of reading the forums regularly and copying important links and comments to text files. Every so often those are consolidating, prioritized and tasks are assigned. Two years of the process make it second hand. Also, because we’ve developed fairly long term relationships with a lot of the forum members, we have a pretty good idea that when so and so says something, it’s really important we listen to what he or she is saying.

Getting off topic for a second --all we hear is that the PC is a dying platform and that if you shun console development you are doomed to fail. How are you guys making it work?

If everyone is moving to the console or releasing substandard PC ports that leaves a niche for us to fill. And it’s not really important to us how small that niche is relative to the console market. That’s just about bravado, not business. The question that’s important to us is, “Are there enough people willing to pay for a high quality, PC specific real-time 4x space strategy game such that we can make a decent return on investment?” In order to maximize that, we needed to make a fun game, keep our budget reasonable, make the game very user friendly, stable, scalable to run on a wide variety of machines and kept out things like DRM that only serve to annoy our legitimate customers and do nothing to hinder pirates. Basically, we tried to do all the good things people expect from a PC centric title and get rid of all the annoyances of PC gaming. We obviously didn’t succeed 100% in either direction but in following that approach we did as well as we could given the resources at hand.

It had to be pretty humbling to see Sins up there with Call of Duty and The Sims and even WarCraft in terms of sales on the weekly sales charts – passing the 100,000 unit mark in less than a month. Did the sales surprise you at all? As hardcore as the fan base is, the 4X genre wasn’t supposed to be the cash cow it used to be.

By the end we grew to nine and those extra four were critical in bringing up the polish and quality level. We had our doubts that ‘4X’ was worth any cash at all let alone a cash cow but we had pretty reliable data that real-time strategy was still relatively popular. We had a whole bunch of theories on why the combination would work. Just to name a few, we thought the real-time spin on a 4X game would attract people who wouldn’t normally play deeper and/or larger scale strategy games; we thought the scale and zooming feature would be new and have a “gee-whiz” factor (we hadn’t counted on Supreme Commander beating us to the punch but kudos to them); we felt it would be appealing and somewhat nostalgic to the aging demographic with more disposable incomes that had grown up on the classic 4X space games in the early/mid nineties and as I mentioned above, we really felt the PC was a very under-served market (and still is). We definitely missed the mark on some of our theories but we hit enough of them to keep us alive and in this risky business that makes us very happy.

Developing a popular game is obviously a goal and I’m sure all of the (well deserved) accolades tossed at Sins was a rewarding feeling -- but with that comes the added pressure when you start adding on to that design. Is there a fear when developing an expansion like Entrenchment that you might disrupt the balance that made the original a hit? Sort of messing too much with a good thing.

There is definitely an added pressure to modifying anything. I guess we kind of accept that games (particularly PC games) are always under pressure to evolve because they are close to the forefront of the whole interactive media, mass and instant communication thing our culture has going. There is always going to be a tidal wave of people that expect to be able to voice their ideas, provide input and give you immediate and constant feedback.

They have all come to expect that information products are malleable, never in a finished state, cheaply delivered, and should change over time to provide improvements and new experiences. If you don’t go with this flow you are probably going to be more damaged than if you make a change that breaks something (within reason) - but only if the community knows and trusts that you are still working on it. This sets up a relationship such that if they are willing to accept minor setbacks and continue to provide feedback, the long term results will be a net improvement.

When you launch a PC game you need to expect that many people aren’t just interested in buying the singular product; they want the entire experience surrounding it. We tried our best to meet these expectations and by most opinions we have a healthy community and the latest version of Sins (v1.13) is considered very balanced. Entrenchment is definitely going to change the balance and it may be worse in the short-term (though the ongoing beta has done wonders and it will be light years ahead of the original Sins balance). Regardless, the cost of stagnation is higher than the cost of potential short-term balance issues so forward we go.

What’s next for Ironclad? Any plans to branch out into another genre?

Oh the question that I can’t answer! We have another Sins micro-expansion in development and we also have a whole new strategy game in progress but it is way too early say much about it. We just hope we learned something from Sins and can use that to make the next game even better.

We'd like to thank Blair for taking the time to chat with us -- Entrenchment is available now -- right now -- so go -- shoo -- go play!

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .