Master of Orion is coming back

Ryom

Ryom

[H]ard|Gawd
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This is the series that defined the 4x genre and remains the gold standard to this day, 22 years later.

Wargaming bought the rights to the Master of Orion franchise during Atari's bankruptcy sell-off. They plan to create something that isn't a sequel but a combined re-make of the classic MoO1 and MoO2 games.

They have an announcement trailer out that doesn't really show anything, but does make me smile a little.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtQhNef17zw

As Master of Orion 1 and 2 are easily my favorite games of all time I'm beyond excited about this. I have Andosbox setup to run MoO2 on my smartphone and tablet, and it looks amazing on oled screens despite its age. This seems like a company with credibility behind their name and I'm hoping for the best.

How many more MoO fans we got here at [H]?

 
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I played a shit ton of this back when I was a kid. I only played two races and spent many nights fine tuning my strategies. Excited for the remake to see how this holds up now that I am an adult!
 
I'd be entirely pumped if we didn't have a recent explosion of of space 4x games. I'm still excited for this, but after seeing all these other games come and fail, I'm worried this won't be any different.
 
Big fan. Just hope they can manage to make a good game and not screw it up. There may be a lot of 4x games out there but I don't feel they have come close to Moo2. IMO of course.

I haven't played stardrive 2 yet and I hear it does well.
 
I played so much MOO and MOO2 back in the day I wonder how I had time to eat/sleep/breathe.

Didn't care for MOO3 all that much, but give me an updated version based around the first two and I'm sold.
 
Hopefully they can do justice to the original MOO. There hasn't really been a great 4x space game where you can really customize your ships and have fun battles in recent memory.
 
MoO was the shit back in the day, never actually played a whole lot of the 2nd one for whatever reason. The 3rd one sucked. Not sure I have much faith in wargaming.
 
Wargaming on Master of Orion: "This is a passion for us"

"Because we own the IP," Keeling said, "we can actually use all the original storyline, all the original races, completely freely. ...[We went] back and contacted the original [SimTex] team. We brought in several of them as consultants. Their job is to make sure that we stay on point. We got the original producer, original art director, the original composer is doing the music for the new game, a couple of designers as well. So yeah, we've got people onboard that are very relevant to the process."

Then read the comments for player feedback. Interesting stuff.
 
Yeah those comments from the developers are bugging me. What I'm gathering from them is that the game will be dumbed down significantly to broaden the appeal and ease production. The big one that caught my eye is the removal of tactical combat, which just seems insane to me.
 
Tekara said:
Yeah those comments from the developers are bugging me. What I'm gathering from them is that the game will be dumbed down significantly to broaden the appeal and ease production. The big one that caught my eye is the removal of tactical combat, which just seems insane to me.
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Same here. Ditching tactical combat is pretty big. MOO revolves around ships, ship design, and combat so getting rid of the option of tactical combat is a disappointment. I really hope they don't dumb the game down.
 
Tac combat was the only reason I really stuck with the game as a kid. Being able to build crazy ships that could take out 10 enemies by itself on a single turn; making huge fleets that wouldn't even fit in a single battle that would take 20-30 minutes to play out.

I realize now that there's a lot more to these type of games, but that's certainly what made it the most enjoyable for me.
 
I'm not holding my breath. How do they know that 90% of players used auto calc? Sounds like total bullshit to me.

"One of the reasons Keeling is confident that he and NGD will get this right is because they're not treating the original games' design as holy writ. He uses ship design and tactical battles as an example.
"I think that was a mistake made by some of these [later 4X] games," he said. "They thought that was a key feature that was going to bring a lot of people in. [But] you can only focus on so many things. If you focus on everything, it becomes too complex. It's unmanageable. Unwieldy. If you do a deep-dive on only a few things, they have to relate directly to what the player is doing. So while there are a lot of players that played tactical battles, there's not that many. It's about 10% of the players. So if you deep dive on that, you're wasting a lot of resources [that could have gone] to something that's really more important to the gameplay.""
 
Most strategy games you never want to use auto-calc because it does a much worse job than you could have done. Only a few games have done it right where it gives you the option to replay the battle if you're not happy with the results, otherwise you're stuck having to reload a save.

If I wanted a 4x space game without tac combat I'd play GalCiv 3 (after it gets patched).
 
I loved tactical combat :/

Impossible difficulty, Antarans attack, tactical combat, that's where it's at.
 
MrAgmoore said:
So while there are a lot of players that played tactical battles, there's not that many. It's about 10% of the players. So if you deep dive on that, you're wasting a lot of resources [that could have gone] to something that's really more important to the gameplay.""
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I'd like to know where they are getting these numbers. I don't know anybody who ever played MOO that used auto resolve. Except maybe end game where the human player quite often so outclassed the computer that even auto resolve couldn't fuck it up.

In any case, i still frequently play MOO to this day. Didn't care for MOO2 as much, and MOO3 was an abortion.
 
That "diplomacy" screen was a little troubling, with the Mrshann making constant cat references... The colony screen music definitely got some feels outta me though :)

edit: I'm hoping they keep the diplomacy via hologram, that was always neat to see in MoO2, the holograph and the species music leitmotif with the current mood.
 
Lol, daaaamn. Someone with the reigns to the budget nerded the fuck out on the voice talent :p

Michael Dorn, Mark Hamill, Dwight Schultz, Alan Tudyk, John De Lancie, Kat Cressida, John Kassir, Robert Englund
 
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Hum, MOO was my absolute favorite game growing up but like others have mentioned I LOVED making cool huge ships or a billion small fighters and steamrolling enemies in fights so the tactical combat removal is a real disappointment

On the other hand, Silicoids and Psilons for life.
 
Hmm... Repulsive Lithovores may again threaten the universe (who needs diplomacy or plants when you have a giant fleet of planet destroyers).
 
darrpara said:
Hum, MOO was my absolute favorite game growing up but like others have mentioned I LOVED making cool huge ships or a billion small fighters and steamrolling enemies in fights so the tactical combat removal is a real disappointment

On the other hand, Silicoids and Psilons for life.
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haven't been much paying attention but no tactical combat??? bah humbug
 
kledar586 said:
haven't been much paying attention but no tactical combat??? bah humbug
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It's real time, though they haven't said how it will work or really given much detail at all on it. Guess we'll find out how it works on Friday.
 
I really didn't like how they handled the combat in the Endless series of games and if its like that then yuck, why wont they let me fight my own battles, since when did playing games become a chore in people's minds?
 
kledar586 said:
I really didn't like how they handled the combat in the Endless series of games and if its like that then yuck, why wont they let me fight my own battles, since when did playing games become a chore in people's minds?
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I agree. I liked Endless quite a lot but I just couldn't get over the combat.
 
Seelenlos said:
Hour long interview. I'm encouraged by the fact they are giant nerds. However I disagree completely on the combat choice.
Strategic eXpanse #26: Chris Keeling of Wargaming
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I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. I want to see it in action and try it out. I do understand their rational behind the change though.

Tomorrow it sounds like there might be some livestreams for the game. I know Quill18 is planning to do a stream in the morning.
 
Hey the combat is tactical or simulated when Quill18 was playing.

The game looks really fun! I am super interested in it now.
 
darrpara said:
Hey the combat is tactical or simulated when Quill18 was playing.

The game looks really fun! I am super interested in it now.
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Yeah. It looks like they have the right idea with how to handle real-time combat in the game. I'm sure I will want more tactical options and more ability to control how the AI acts, but what they haven currently looks fun.

The tech tree is interesting too. It's very Civ style, but I like that they kept choices in at some trees. I wish there were choices at every tech, but I can live with the route they went.
 
Derangel said:
Yeah. It looks like they have the right idea with how to handle real-time combat in the game. I'm sure I will want more tactical options and more ability to control how the AI acts, but what they haven currently looks fun.

The tech tree is interesting too. It's very Civ style, but I like that they kept choices in at some trees. I wish there were choices at every tech, but I can live with the route they went.
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Yeah, I wish the tech tree had harder choices or choices at every tech but from what I have watched the techs are usually pretty key choices. I am not sure I will go in for the early access mainly because there is a HUGE slew of 4x games coming out and in it's current state I am not blown away. I do like some of the choices they made such as starlanes. The lack of "governor" npcs gives it a more MOO1 feeling which is nice.
 
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