This is good. This is very good: 4X is back on the radar, people.
In fairness, Wargaming are the ones putting the spotlight back on the genre today, and that might not inspire a great deal of confidence in some. But they’re bringing Master of Orion to the party, and they’re going to use PAX Australia as the first chance to reveal some details.
I already wrote about how Wargaming subtly put out feelers for the classic Microprose franchise earlier this year and they’re stepping up that effort substantially, announcing today that executive producer Randy King would be hosting a panel at 1pm this Saturday titled, “Master of Orion: Rebirth of a Legend”.
“He will be sharing more insights about the upcoming game reboot and will answer questions regarding the resurrection of this legendary title,” the press release says.
There isn’t a great deal of information known about the reboot just yet, although I can imagine what the first question will probably be: is the game free-to-play?
Fortunately, it doesn’t look like that will be the case. The main page lists two separate editions for the MoO reboot, with a Standard Edition and a Collector’s Edition to be sold some time in the near future. The Collector’s Edition grants Early Access — you can see the Steam listing here — and, as a result, the whole game probably won’t be fully released until 2016 some time.
The CE also comes with the first three MoO games, the soundtrack, “retro art Pixel ships” and an extra playable race, while the standard edition features only 10 races.
Comments
8 responses to “Wargaming Really Wants To Talk About Master Of Orion At PAX Australia”
If the booth doesn’t feature a full-sized, realistic starship, then I’m going to be so disappointed.
I’m more curious whether they’re going to be doing anything Warships-related. Last couple of years their booth was all tanks all the time. Warships is more fun to play and to watch IMO.
It turns out aliens are just really, really tiny ;D
I don’t mind Wargaming’s model at all (I’ve been playing the crap out of World of Warships recently) but I kind of expected them to try and shoehorn MoO into that model and couldn’t see how it’d work. Glad to see that it’s probably going the direction of ‘normal’ games.
Wargaming have more money than many sovereign countries at this point so I hope this might be the start of them trying to diversify their games portfolio.
It makes sense. I mean, at some point they aren’t going to be able to squeeze out another F2P game (maybe after World of WarSegways? World of WarTricycles?), so they’d want to branch into more traditional models to keep that sweet cash flowing.
Developing their own game might work, but it’s a risky proposition. Rebooting a classic title like MoO means that most of the game mechanics have already been laid out for them so it’s a better way to ease into that type of game.
Granted, if they fuck this up then I don’t think they’ll ever be forgiven.
That being said, MoO2 is my favourite game of all time, so I will be pre-ordering the collectors edition, even though I never pre-order and never buy collectors editions.
Squee!
As someone who’s volunteering near the Wargaming booth I hope they don’t reveal too much to get hyped about 😛 As a fan of 4X games, I sure hope they reveal enough to get hyped about.
After the disaster that was MOO 3, i want to see a lot more information before i start getting excited.