Gaming in 2016 ?

Tags

AdVenture Capitalist, Armored Warfare, Ingress, Marvel Heroes, Master of Orion, Pokemon Go, World of Tanks, World of Warships

What will gaming bring me in 2016 ?   I’m not sure, but here are my guesses :

Games I’m Playing Right Now :

Ingress – At some point I’m going to be completely done with the game and cease to log in.    Changes in game mechanics might tweak that.   For instance, better key mechanics, such as unlimited key storage or use of keys inside the capsules you’ve purchased; or real defense, that actually stops an attacker flat, or server priority for defense instead of offense.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic game, but it just looks like for me, Doc Burbank, I’m done.

Marvel Heroes – A name change is coming in a few days and it will magically be Marvel Heroes 2016 !    This amuses me, because you usually associate name changes with big feature changes.   I’m aware of nothing new coming besides the changed name and the usual game tweaks.

But Gazillion is impressive.   They apparently took a total turd at launch time, and much like Everquest 2, improved it over time until it’s becoming a real gem.    Achievements.   Danger Room.   More heroes.   Midtown Madness.    Cosmic Levels.    More currencies than you can shake a stick at, which after a while, you get used to and enjoy having.    I really like this game, although my interest waxed and waned over the last several months.

Best guess is this will get played to some degree all year.   It’ll probably cost me money for something – Heroes, Bank Slots, or Costumes.   God help me if I start buying costumes, you could blow hundreds of dollars on that stuff.    I remain about $40 invested in the game, but I’m tempted to buy more.

World of Warships – This is fun, but I’m very low on ship slots and not that interested in spending more money.     And so this killed the game for me.    I haven’t logged in for a month or so…. but I’d like to.     Unified accounts (like were originally promised) would probably revive my interest and convince me to spend “Wargaming Gold” on new ship slots and continue playing.

And the other reason I don’t play this is because, simply put, I’d rather play tanks.

World of Tanks – More tanks to play and unlock.    Marvel shouldered this one aside again and I assume I’ll be putting in matches once again soon, after the Marvel winter event.    Best guess is this gets playtime in chunks throughout 2016.

Adventure Capitalist – This barely counts as something played, but oh well.   I enjoy accumulating my quattorquindecillion’s worth of money.    But given the low level of daily play (1 minute?) I will probably continue logging in for the entire year.

Games On My Radar :

My Steam Library – Just like the rest of nerd gaming-dom, I have a large library of games I’ve lightly or never played on Steam.    I was not the slightest bit tempted to buy anything over the Holiday sale.   Far too much has been purchased and not played, and yet, odd as it is, it was enjoyable to search out all those bargains and buy them.   If I never play them, I got some amusement out of the whole process and learned something new – the joy of buying things for its own sake.   (My wife knows all about this phenomenon….)

Star Ruler 2 comes to mind, along with Wasteland 2 and Dino D-Day (Ridiculous idea !  Fun as hell !   Will the game match up at all?)  as games I’ve not played for any good reason.    Cities : Skylines is the one I want to play the most, and yet, I’ve never logged in and played the game.   City builders have been so dissapointing over the years after Simcity 4’s massive goodness – and irritating problems – and yet the premise still seems fun.

Regicide sounds interesting as I continue to wait for a Battle Chess game to pass across my radar, but I was after a sub $10 price point.   It’s at $10 during the Steam sale.

Star Wars : SWTOR – this has gone free-to-play, and I admit, I’ve read very little about it.   But I am intrigued enough to perhaps try it out in the free-to-play world.   If I had to pay for it like at release time it would be a definite no go.

Armored Warfare should get another try.    Maybe they can improve the queueing time to the point I’d actually like to play.   I don’t know.

Games To Be Released :

Pokemon Go – This sounds like it might be fun.    Travel to different spots in Meatspace, and collect various Pokemon.    Fight virtual battles.   Level up your Pokemon at a Gym, and acquire powers.    Trade with other players, not a very exciting concept, since in practice this usually doesn’t work that well and ruins a game.   Maybe this will be different.   Expected release date is “2016”

Master of Orion – Can Wargaming move forward and publish this one well ?    Did they pick the right studio to develop with NGD ?   Time will tell.    The real question is, was it just the first really good 4X in space so it’s remembered fondly, or is there something about the experience that will stand out during a remake ?   I really, really hope it’s the latter, although I’m enough of a fanboy that I bet I’m buying the thing on release day no matter what.  No release date is hinted at.   Hopefully it’s 2016 sometime but you never know.

Now, I can look back next year and see how well these ideas stacked up with whatever happens during the year.

Master of Orion 4 Moving Forward

Tags

Master of Orion

Any check up on Wargaming would not be complete without reviewing the granddaddy of space based strategy, Master of Orion.    First created by Simtex in 1993, recreated by the same group in 1996, and disastrously turned over to Alan Emrich in 2003, I’ve been waiting forever for this to re-emerge.

The risk is, MOO was the perfect game for it’s time and can’t really be recreated.    This is certainly a possibility given the massive numbers of space-based games created since, none of which has captured my imagination like MOO.    Then again, I haven’t seen anyone put the “Big Ships Vs Small Ships” together in a balanced way since – including MOO2 – or really capture the ability to conquer via ways other than destroying all your enemies or unifying the galaxy peacefully.

Check it out for yourself, via a PC Gamer Article; or the game’s teaser website.   Apparently to be available via Steam, as well.

 

The new art concepts for the races are mostly complete.

Only surprise is “Two Humans”.

The re-imagined artwork is top notch, as expected from Wargaming.

No release date.   No “Early Access” availability.   Still, I can’t wait for the game to show up, whenever it finally does.

Master of Orion 4 thoughts

Tags

Master of Orion, Wargaming.net

Overlord asked what we’d like in a Wargaming version of Master of Orion.      Well, this would be my first pass at designing it.

Possibility the First : 4x turn-based strategy game.    Start out by copying Moo2 (and forgetting Moo3).

One think I loved about MOO1 was the ability to use thousands of little bitty ships to take on Leviathan class dreadnaughts.    This has tended to disappear in the latter 4x style games, so I’m hoping they’ll remember to balance the tiny with the big.

Another item is the abstraction of factories.    MOO1 abstracted all production in this all consuming number.    Moo2, I built individual items which each had a certain amount of production points or whatever.    Why should I build an isotope factory, interestellar harvester, and all of that just to get additional industry points ?     This would be better abstracted.    Same with food, and laboratories.    Don’t make me build tons of individual doo-dads on each planet, I find that boring.

What’s fun, is the idea of taking that radioactive rock and turning it into a terran paradise.    Go deep with the ideas of terraforming, and unlock this stuff before the final stages of the game.    Let me play the galactic virus, expanding the universe and creating it in my image.

Much of the other stuff is pretty obvious.     Useful difficulty levels, from Newbie to Impossible, build up over time until you war with other empires, and a fun variety of ways to win as in the other games of the genre.

DLC could include ship packs – where the game ships with, say 8, and you can use many different ones for cosmetics if you’re willing to buy.     And different lifeforms; most space games seem to assume oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres on a certain narrowly defined temperature.     What about methane breathers – or creatures floating around in gas giants ?

Possibility #2 – A MooMmo

My experiences playing Evony-type games give me pause on a grand strategy game with other players against you.     The organized groups destroy you, people who gather outside of the game in guilds and then all flood a certain area and cooperate you to death.     And how did I play these games ?   Try to get in with a bunch of players who abandoned the game early, then you could take them over.   Yeah, that tends not to be fun.

You could do some kind of loose confederation, ala realms play.    Pirates of the Burning Sea had you as French, English, or Spanish.     If you expanded into your realm as Race1, or Race2, or Race3, with some kind of war against other races, but with soft war possible within your race.     Such as becoming the leader of Race1.    These things tend to suffer from unequal distribution of players though.     And which of the classic Moo races would you leave out ?

Now what could really work would be the ideas of the multiverse.     What if you played a MMOSPG MOO ?     All worlds created on 8/10/13 would be seed XYZ.    Whoever ended their game (in a reasonable time) with the highest score, best replay, most technology, etc, would be memorialized in a high score leaderboard.   Or would get some kind of meta-points, which would increase their abilities in-game by a tiny bit.

And with meta points, you could steal an idea from World of Tanks – Crew Skills.     With an obviously much faster progression, let your warships have crew skills acquired through meta points.    Or bonuses to your race’s abilities, et cetera.

Either method, I think the trick is having the Intellectual Property gets you interest.    Without a good design you get Moo3.  So design it well and implement carefully.     Any kind of an MMO might allow you to tweak your ideas as you go along, while a single player game is a smaller one-off project.     And who’s to say it has to be one or the other ?

Resurrect the MOO franchise for the younger gamers in a single player form, and wait until later for the MooMMOSPG.    Oh I love that – a “Mooooo MMMMMM oooooo SSSSSSSS PiG”

World of Orion ?? Kickstarter kicking it ?

Tags

Kickstarter, Master of Orion, Wargaming.net

Guess who the new owner of the Master of Orion franchise is ?

Wargaming apparently won the bidding, with Stardock a close second.     Oh, I would love for Stardock software to have this instead, but it seems Wargaming outbid them.    Overlord has some comments scattered through his blog on this as well.

Now, the question is, what kind of a game are they going to build.    Can they make the franchise look good after the steaming pile of poo that Alan Emrich turned MOO3 into ?

On another note, I received a recent email from Stainless games about the Carmaggeddon Reincarnation project.    You know – it was originally funded June 2012, with a 2013 target date.     Seems there is no expected date, specifically, but it will come out Really Awesome once it’s all finished.   I mean, they said so.

I haven’t looked at Kickstarter since putting up the money for this game – and for good reason : I’m not big on throwing money down ratholes.    I’m not saying that’s what is happening with Stainless – they did manage to get me Carmageddon for the Android, free.     But the PC version is stuck in “We’re working on it” mode and the target date has slipped dramatically.      And this is with (I believe) a pretty good team working on the game.

It’s not wasted money either way – I’m either going to have helped bring the game about with my money, or will have learned a useful lesson about the concept of “micro-venture-capitalism”.