It was finally time for us to attempt our most ambitious Ara experiment yet: a true persistent multiplayer game. The kind where the server lives online, the world continues to exist in the cloud, and each of us can sign in whenever we want to take our turn. In theory, this is exactly what Ara: History Untold was designed for — asynchronous, long‑form strategy with friends across time zones.
As is often the case though the initial setup was more complicated than expected.
The Lobby Problem
The first hiccup appeared immediately: while the game is set up to persist beautifully after it starts, there’s no way to persist the lobby before it starts. Someone has to open the game, create the lobby, and keep it running while everyone else joins.
With friends spread across multiple time zones, coordinating that is not trivial.
It got worse. It looked like if someone joined and then quit, their “joined” status didn’t persist. Meaning: all players would need to be online at the same time when the game officially begins. That undermines the promise of asynchronous play.
Fortunately, one friend discovered a workaround: if you exit using Alt+F4, your join state does persist. A strange solution, but a lifesaver. If this experiment ever scales to dozens of players — which is my dream — there’s no realistic way to expect everyone to be online simultaneously.
Still, I had to keep the lobby open for nearly a full day while players trickled in. Not ideal, but tolerable. And once the game begins, the server lives in the cloud without needing a host machine — which is huge.
Hotjoining Confusion
After we finally launched the game, we ran into another issue. I had enabled Hotjoining, which I understood as a system where a human player can take over an AI slot at any time. I wanted to test this by having one player join after the game started.
But they couldn’t. They got a “lobby is full” error.
I’m still not sure what went wrong. Maybe I was supposed to create a human slot before starting the game, which would temporarily be filled by AI until a human took over. But that would mean I couldn’t pre‑select the Civ for that player — not ideal.
There were no clear answers online. So if you found this blog post hoping for a solution… I’m afraid I don’t have one.
We restarted the entire setup and made sure everyone joined before launching.
Prestige Victory: A Mechanic I Wish I Could Disable
As I’ve written before, I love late‑game stalemates. That’s when strategy games become the most fun — aircraft carriers, massive land armies, global alliances, and tense brinkmanship. Ara’s Prestige Victory system forces an end to the game just when things are most interesting.
I looked into disabling it. The only solution seems to be mods. But mods in multiplayer are risky, and on Xbox Game Pass they’re essentially impossible.
Still, we’re probably months away from having to worry about that.
Civ Selection Limitations
Another limitation: two players cannot pick the same Civilization. Civ V allowed duplicates, but Ara doesn’t. It’s not a big issue for our small test group, but if this experiment grows, it could become a problem. People get attached to their preferred Civs.
Technical Troubles on My Surface
Strangely, the game refused to start on my Intel Surface, even though I had played a few turns earlier. It kept crashing on launch.
I tried everything:
- Setting the device to maximum performance
- Increasing virtual memory
- Closing background apps like OneDrive
- Using the game’s preset lowest graphics settings
Nothing worked — until I discovered that manually lowering each graphics setting (beyond the “lowest” preset) allowed the game to run. I’m hoping this doesn’t mean the game will become unplayable later when the map fills with units and cities.
The Game Begins
Despite all the hurdles, we finally launched our persistent multiplayer world. Our Civs:
- Spain
- Greece
- United States
- Argentina
- Egypt
While the group is typically competitive, as we look to learn the mechanics, we agreed to play this first game as a co-op experience against AI players. Ara doesn’t allow players to start as allies, so we agreed to role‑play cooperation. Once we meet in‑game, we’ll exchange open borders and look to come to each other’s aid in times of crisis. This is a test run — we’re trying to understand whether Ara has a future in our gaming group.
What Comes Next
Now that the world is live, I’ll continue posting updates as we learn more about how Ara behaves in a long‑form, asynchronous multiplayer setting.
If Ara can deliver on its promise, it could become a staple of our gaming group for years.