Ara: History Untold gets September 2024 release date

Microsoft’s turn-based 4X strategy game is nearing completion

Oxide Interactive / Microsoft

Oxide Interactive and Microsoft have announced that their turn-based 4X strategy game Ara: History Untold will be released on September 24, 2024, for PC. It will be available via Steam, Microsoft Store, and PC Game Pass.

Like Civilization, Ara puts you into the position of leading a nation from the Stone Age into the Modern Age, having you manage its expansion and development along the way with classic elements meeting fresh mechanics. Like Millennia, which came out earlier this year, Ara has strong city-builder elements integrated into its 4X gameplay, such as intricate production chains allowing you to create goods for use in cities or to recruit units.

Ara is quite the looker, too, allowing players to zoom all the way in and observe their people as they hustle and bustle around towns and farms, earning their daily bread.

While the game allows you to customize a leader and nation from the ground up, it comes with a variety of pre-determined rulers – some of which are genre-staples and some which are more surprising and spice things up. George Washington and Nefertiti aren’t exactly unknowns when it comes to being world leaders, but Greek poet Sappho is definitely a new face on the block.

You can check out a new deep dive into Ara: History Untold below:

I’ve been hands-on with Ara: History Untold at Gamescom 2023 and was very impressed with what the team at Oxide was putting together, some UI and control issues at the time aside.

With the announcement of Civilization 7 for 2025, the market for turn-based strategy games is really heating up – and Ara with its beautiful visuals and fresh gameplay ideas could make a splash when it comes out later this year.