Empire of the Ants – Everything You Need to Know

PREMISE

Part adventure game and part real time strategy title, the upcoming Empire of the Ants is making some intriguing promises. In the campaign, players will take control of a lone ant, 103, an ant of the warrior caste. As you might imagine, you will be tasked with helping with the management and growth of your ant colony, which will involve plenty of combat, exploration, and more. More on that in a bit.

A FAITHFUL ADAPTATION

Exactly how faithfully will Empire of the Ants stick to the source material? According to Tower Five, the game is being designed as quite a faithful adaptation of the novel. Speaking in an interview with GamingBolt, game director Renaud Charpentier also revealed that Tower Five has been working with author Bernard Werber “from day one”, and that Werber “understood very well what we were doing and we could benefit from his direct feedback all along the project, both on the narrative and the global world around the main action.”

COMBAT DETAILS

On your microscopic journey throughout Empire of the Ants, you will be partaking in a fair bit of combat as you look to expand the reach of your colony. As you’d expect from a strategy title, the different units that will be available at your disposal will be key to whatever tactics you form, with unique units bringing different strengths and benefits. Beyond that, players will have to also keep an eye on upgrading their nest and outposts, spying on enemies, balancing between different strategies, and more.

EXPLORATION AND ENVIRONMENTS

Exploration will also be an important part of the core loop in Empire of the Ants. Players will be looking to uncover secrets, forge alliances, and what have you, and will be doing so in a location that’s presented as “huge epic battlefields or intricate jungles to explore and get lost in” through the ants’ tiny lens. Speaking with GamingBolt, game director Renaud Charpentier said about the environments that players will be exploring, “The trick is the scale of 103, the ant you play all along the game, a 1 centimeter war machine of chitin and pheromones. Adapting the camera to that, the sound design, the controls, you get to feel that this small deadwood branch is in fact a giant arch bridge over a raging river. Out of the microscopic, you evoke the gigantic and the contrast is pretty strong.”

WILDLIFE

Ants will rule the roost in Empire of the Ants, as the game’s name may have given away, but the game won’t be their exclusive domain. Players will be encountering a variety of different species as they explore the forest, and many of these will be helping you and forging alliances to join your cause. Speaking on the subject, Charpentier told GamingBolt, “You will discover dozens of them, some crawling, some running, some flying… But the most important ones are those composing your armies and they go far beyond ants. From legions of small aphids to huge elephants that are in fact snails, many other insects will fight for you or against you, including some exotic (and ecologically invading) species like the Asian hornets.”

SEASONS

Empire of the Ants isn’t necessarily billing itself as the ultimate insectoid battle simulator, but it is nonetheless looking to inject authenticity into the experience in some interesting ways. For instance, the game will feature a seasons system, with changing seasons impacting different species in different ways.

Here’s how Charpentier explained Empire of the Ants’ seasons and how they will impact gameplay while speaking with GamingBolt: “We wanted to embrace that fully at a gameplay level so we considered three separated climatic characteristics: luminosity, temperature, and humidity. They each directly influence the simulation. Luminosity influences your economy, temperature influences your legions and humidity influences your pheromones, [which are] the ‘powers’ you can use on the battlefield to influence your legions.”

NO DAY/NIGHT CYCLE

Though it features different seasons, Empire of the Ants won’t feature a dynamic day and night cycle- though you can expect different missions to be set during different times of day, which in turn will have other (largely minimal) effects. What exactly should you expect on that front? Speaking with GamingBolt, game director Renaud Charpentier explained, “Night and day as cycles didn’t really fit with our heroes: most insects are either active during the day or more rarely, during the night. So instead of a full cycle which would not have made much sense, or forced to interrupt battles during the night, we went for specific missions set during the night or in extreme light conditions. Including missions that are not during the night or the day as they are fully underground where no daylight is ever present.”

DIFFICULTY

Empire of the Ants is seemingly not going to feature any difficulty options, with developer Tower Five instead adopting a scalable difficulty model. What precisely does that mean? Well, in a nutshell, players will be able to tackle the game’s objectives in non-linear fashion, which means the difficulty of the missions will scale with you, so that you’re not forced to tackle missions in any specific order prescribed by set difficulty requirements.

CAMPAIGN

The story campaign in Empire of the Ants will undoubtedly be what the bulk of players will be diving into first and foremost, but exactly how extensive can we expect the experience to be? According to Charpentier, depending on how you play, the campaign can be anywhere between 15 and 30 hours long. “It really depends on your skill level and which missions you decide to play to progress forward as you always have the choice on that,” the game director told GamingBolt. “Probably something around 20 hours. Maybe 15 if you really rush through it, probably above 30 if you take the time to explore and search for the many secrets this world has hidden to the hurried eyes.”

MULTIPLAYER

Though the campaign is clearly going to be the main attraction in Empire of the Ants, the strategy title will also offer multiplayer modes, as you would expect. Three modes will be available in total, with two being competitive modes in the form of 1v1 and 1v1v1. The third option will be for private matches, where players will be able to customize rules in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, cross-platform multiplayer will also be supported.

VISUALS

Something that Tower Five and Microids have stressed repeatedly with Empire of the Ants is the game’s much touted photorealistic visual and technical ambitions. As per the developer, Unreal Engine 5 – which is what the game is built on – had a big role to play in its graphical strengths. “Unreal 5 was instrumental in reaching the visual look we were aiming for from the start,” Chapentier told us in an interview. “In fact, we experimented with a very early version of Unreal 5 to prototype the documentary look we were gunning for. So the new techs the engine offered, like Lumen, Nanite shaped the way we produced our graphics and allowed us to reach what we wanted with a fairly minimal art team.”

Interestingly, the decision was also made to not develop the game as a cross-gen title so that it could achieve its technical ambitions. “In the process, with our publisher, we took the decision to focus on the PS5 gen of hardware and not support the previous generation, that allowed us to make technical choices which are not backward compatible but allowed us to effectively reach the look and feel we wanted.,” the director said to GamingBolt.

PC REQUIREMENTS

With all the talk of Empire of the Ants’ photorealistic visuals, what kind of a rig exactly are you going to need to play the game on PC? Well, at least on the lower settings, things aren’t too crazy. On minimum settings, you’ll need either an i5 9400 or a Ryzen 5 2600, along with either a GeForce GTX 1060 or a Radeon RX 580, and 8 GB of RAM. Meanwhile, on recommended settings, you’ll need either an i5 9600 or a Ryzen 5 3600, along with either a GeForce RTX 3080 or a Radeon RX 6800, and 16 GB of RAM. On either setting, you’ll also need an SSD and around 70 GB of free storage space.