Saw this on PCGamer. It's not developed by Wargaming, but by NGD Studios, "with key members from the original title’s team".
A few pictures here.
Cautiously optimistic
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hopefully the game is nothing like that trailer though
Cautiously optimistic. Cautiously....
Hopefully they'll strive to remain true to the series. The series of 2. There was no 3. There was no 3 ....
the more news comes out, the less faith I have in the reboot.
Here's some impressions from a dev demo.
"The plan with the reboot is to make the UI more intuitive and fresh for modern gamers, but the game will still maintain its complexity for those who played and loved the originals."
"The original six races will be making a return to the world, the Alkarr, Mrrshan, Human, Sakaka, Bulrathi and the Darlok, meaning fans who enjoyed playing as one of them can take up the battle again, but there will be new races, such as the Silons, if players want a different challenge. Each of the races has an advantage over another, but also a weakness against another one, so it's critical to pick your race to suit your playstyle."
"When you look at how you can win, there are 5 paths to victory, Excellence, Conquest, Technological, Economic and Diplomatic, with each path offering up challenges, it is possible to win using all 5 at once, something that will test even the most hardcore of players."
"Once we left our own space, we found ourselves to be blocked by a Star Base, a large ship capable of blocking the wormholes used for travel, it was owned by the Silons, so an agreement was met, in exchange for us using their Star Bases to move around, they could use ours, it worked out this time, but had our actions been different before that point, we might not have been able to reach that agreement. Another such action could have been to declare war, which could have resulted in us winning or losing."
Why are 4x games lately so set on using choke point-like lanes?Original MOO games (1+2) had a 'go anywhere within range' approach.
Yeah, that killed my interest in this. I don't see how this is a MoO reboot, other than copying the races.
I don't understand why devs are obsessed with turning everything into a boardgame clone these days.
I *think* it has to do with control of player options, so as to simply the process of coding the game. I agree, I prefer open ended over choke points.
Forgot to post this first look video.
Yeah, they also changed combat from "turn-based tactical" to "real-time hands-off watch too blips shoot at each other for 3 seconds."
They should've spent less time making cutscenes and more time thinking about gameplay mechanics. From what I saw in an earlier video, the "key members from the original team" are actually the members of the art team (seriously). Nothing against them, the reboot *looks* beautiful, but the gameplay seems to have nothing to do with MoO or MoO2.
First look is a bit painful. GNN is a Galactic Civilizations construct (What happened to Orion News Network???).
And those robot voices are unpleasant!
I don't mind ( too much) forcing chokes, depending how they do it, but everything else just seems unfun. research, ship design, combat- all seriously dumbed down and uninteresting. Tons of full motion video, when that is the last thing I want to even notice in moo. This really does not look like a game I would play, star base Orion (ios) seems like it already did this, and better ( decent remake, but just nothing meaty enough in the game to keep me hooked). Maybe the next gameplay trailer will get me interested, but I went from guaranteed sale to 'meh', just by reading interviews and watching that trailer.
Certainly, but also, GNN was the news network of the Fallout universe since Fallout 1. Just some trivia
Just a note, the developlets mentioned that the combat in that video was auto/quick resolve. Sill not getting my hopes up.
I bet it will be even better than Master of Orion III
Choke points are far superior to open movement in my opinion.
Not because it limits the player (though it does), because it makes it easier to give the AI a fighting chance. This was my main gripe in GC2 frankly, open space and massive speeds on fleets just let you do whatever you wanted to the poor AI. SotS is a hybrid in that not every race uses the same movement, but it's also true that playing against Tarkas (or Liir) is vastly different than against Humans or Hivers. The AI(s) for those races were also easier or harder to deal with, in part due to their ability to keep their fleets where they needed to be, or to draw them out.
Do it once or twice and you think it was a great tactic to employ, do it for the 100th time and you start to curse the 'crappy' AI that always falls for the same trick.
What would be superior in my mind is a system like Starfire had, where you had different interdiction ranges, but fleets 'in system' could move opening in the system. Moving from one system to another required use of (and thus control over) a jump gate (or whatever they called it). Of course that was a board game anyway, but it used both designs effectively.
Ala the old Conflict Frontier Wars or Sins of a Solar Empire basically?
A tactical map per solar system, and jump lanes? (in some cases guardable/enhanceable by gates)
Yeah, but Master of Orion 2 had no choke points and the AI can be brutally efficient in attacking. They will strike undefended worlds and cause you no end of grief.The AI argument is a cop out.The more I see of this reboot the more I hate it...
MoO1 and 2 both had choke points in the technical sense due to galaxy configuration and range.
I don't know where you get that the AI was brutally efficient in attacking either, but perhaps there were certain galaxy settings that helped it more than the ones I played on, not that I remember what those settings were.
Of course my main gripe was always with GC2 model of open space. Which is still significantly different than what you had in any iteration of MoO.
Space Empires did it pretty well, having a sector map and each sector linked with worm holes, but the slow speeds of fleets still made for some cheesy exploits to throw at the AI. I already touched on SotS, which to me was one of the best space 4x games out there, but it still had some issues where you could abuse AI behavior with fleet shenanigans, and the AIs liked to do the 'slow train of death' ploy where they just fed a stream of fleets into destruction at some system you had fortified. Of course there were other aspects like sensor range, cloaking, Hiver teleportation, ...
But largely the open movement races there were easier to beat than the 'warp lane' races because of the mechanics of how they deployed their fleets.
I can't comment on any of the RTS space 4x games because I never played them since RTS just isn't my cup of tea.
Well I was playing the game just the other day and the Gnolams sent their fleets past my heavily defended worlds to attack my less defended worlds first. Every time I tried to counter attack they moved on, sneaky bastards.
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