From RPS, Please, please, please for the love of god be good. If this works out, I’d love to see Gorka Morka follow it. I loved the specialist games GW came out with.
I’m EXTREMELY wary of new games workshop games now. After Relic, I haven’t seen any good takes on the world.
edit: ouch, from the publisher of such hits as Farming Simulator, Etherium and SHERLOCK HOLMES - CRIMES & PUNISHMENTS. There is the Wargame: Red dragon also, but I know nothing about that.
Well it’s a new Canadian developer, so I’ll misplace all my hopes on the fact that they can hit this out of the park on their first try.
Focus is a neat kind of B-tier publisher. They published the Game of Thrones RPG, the Wargames, the Blood Bowls, and the Sherlock Holmes games, as you pointed out (which are pretty great). Definitely not AAA, but some good stuff in their catalogue.
Looks interesting. From their website:
Pick your warbands from iconic Mordheim factions - Sisters of Sigmar, Possessed, Skaven, Mercenaries from the Empire, and many more - and lead your troops to battle. Recruit new units, equip them with enhanced gear. Evolve and customize your warband with the experience gained from each successful mission, transforming them into a terrifying force on the battlefield.
Devise the best strategy to annihilate your rivals. If you fail, some of your units might lose a limb… or worse. Keep in mind that in Mordheim: City of the Damned, a dead unit is lost forever! Consider the environment when formulating your battle strategy, exploiting the unique buildings, ruins or the layout of the streets. Deploy your troops carefully and anticipate the actions of your adversaries to set up ambushes! Organize ingenious battle plans where the talents of your units will be as important as your own luck during key moments of combat.
Loot items and weapons hidden in the ruins, or steal those of fallen opponents. Survive the dangers that abound in the City of the Damned and collect as many Wyrdstones as you can, but remain ever vigilant. Mordheim is one of the most treacherous places in the Warhammer world!
In these epic battles where fame and glory await, your strategy will definitely be your best ally! Visit the four corners of the City of the Damned to complete multiple missions in the solo campaign, or challenge other players in enthralling multiplayer modes.
Riches and infamy await you late 2014 in Mordheim: City of the Damned!
As far as I can tell, the only game the studio has released to date is Farming Simulator (FUCKS GIVEN: 0).
Mordheim was one of my favorite discoveries back in the day. It was what finally got me to transition into all of those miniature games I saw folks playing. It was a great skirmish game, with solid tactics and a campaign structure. So on the one hand I am thrilled.
On the other hand, Warhammer licensing choices is starting to look a lot like many Star Wars and Star Trek ones. Good properties are continuously being thrown to the under skilled or under caring dev teams to frustrate fans time and time again. This is especially insane considering the iron grip Games Workshop maintains over all of its property or even images of property.
Sad Chaplain is sad.
Farming Simulator 2013 is actually a pretty decent game. Very grindy, of course, but it’s not as bad as you’d guess from those videos of earlier versions of the franchise.
The Farming Simulator series is developed by Giants Software, the studio making Mordheim is Rogue factor:
Located in Montreal, Canada, Rogue Factor is an independent video game development studio created in 2013 by a team of industry veterans. Focused on making high-quality and innovative games, its first project is based on a famous Games Workshop intellectual property taking place in the Warhammer world.
But if it does well, we could see Necromunda too! Necromunda, Mordheim and Gorka Morka were my favorite GW games just due to the smaller scale skirmishes and campaign system. Having your troops level up and deal with their injuries was sublime. I was working for GW(US) when Necromunda and Gorka Morka released, the studio campaigns were some of the best gaming I’ve ever had.
Definitely more interested in Necromunda/Gorkamorka.
Dear Focus Home Interactive & Rogue Factor,
Please don’t make a game inspired by Mordheim, please recreate it making changes only where absolutely necessarily or overwhelmingly beneficial to the digital format, provide a clean and simple UI, and effective multi-player features.
If you do this, I do hereby pledge to buy the base game at full price plus all the expansions and DLC you can muster.
Yours sincerely,
Guy waiting for a digital version of a table-top Warhammer game since he stopped playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle 20 years ago.
It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take … despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.
It seems that Rogue Factor is staffed largely by former Cyanide studio members.
I am GLAD the game is being developed/distributed by smaller companies. It greatly increases the chance that we will see a faithful recreation of the base rule set. A AAA dev might make a fun game, but it wouldn’t be a direct conversion of the board game.
Not sure how to feel about that. Cyanide has a track record of doing straight tabletop copies, but in the worst way imaginable.
The funny thing, I think, is that Mordheim is an ideal product for GW to create a lot of new tabletop gamers, and make a killing in the process.
[ul]
[li]Relaunch tabletop Mordheim as a living system & charge for annual rules updates for the video game.[/li][li]Relaunch the miniature lines and include coupons for a cheaper or free skin for the video game character.[/li][li]Launch a new modular terrain line, replicate it exactly in the video game, and again offer coupons with the tabletop terrain.[/li][li]Host monthly online Mordheim tourneys with both money and tabletop stuff for prizes.[/li][li]Invest in rock solid netcode & Blizzard-level interface polish.[/li][/ul]
Mordheim went up on early access today on Steam. They were [edit] doing a developer stream.
http://www.twitch.tv/focushomeinteractive/mobile
It has a very Valkyria Chronicles vibe going. Which could be great for new comers, but might deeply offend purists. And for the benefits of newcomers, Mordheim was a Wahammer universe, fantasy squad level skirmish miniature game. It had strong SRPG elements as campaigns and between game loot, injuries, skills, etc affected the following games. This is a video game rebirth of the property.
Edit, the stream was pretty short, but VoD might show up. There is no NDA so expect more streams or YouTube videos soon. From watching it, it was a lot like multiplayer X-Com Enemy Unknown with a Valkyria Cronicles real-time/ turn base hybrid for activation. I am very interested on where this project ends up.
For ease of access, here is a copy/paste of their early release build. Color me interested on procedural maps. I am not sure if a game of this sort has done that before.
Release Notes Early Access V 1
Hello Everyone,
Thank you for your interest in Mordheim: City of the Damned. At Rogue Factor, we want to develop a good relationship with our players, and in an effort to stay completely transparent, I wanted to give everyone a heads up on the current state of the game. Here is a list of known bugs for the first build of the Early Access version. You can expect this type of release note for every major release, smaller releases will probably have less rambling on my part.
Our first public release is 0.14.4.4. As a player you will have access to the following features.
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All 4 Tutorials of the game: The player will get comfortable with all the combat mechanics of the game.
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Play Skirmish games against AI or friends online: The AI is a little bit easy to beat, but playing against a friend is great fun.
Now for some stat drops.
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2 Campaign Maps with 3 different deployment each: These are the same maps which will be used in our campaign, but with slight differences.
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2 Procedural Maps with 10 different deployment types: These maps, being generated procedurally will give the player much variety as path, previously open will be closed, and even in the same deployment type, units will find themselves in different buildings etc. This is the great value, We have too many different types of building for me to count, plus props and bridges which are created procedurally to change the map.
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2 Warbands with fixed equipment and statistics: Skaven from the Eshin Clan, and Mercenaries Reiklanders are at your disposition. In the tutorials you also get the experience the Sisters of Sigmar and Cult of the Possessed. Which will be the next playable warbands.
This might not seem like much, but there is hours of gameplay time in here, especially in Skirmish playing with friends.
Now for the sad part :(
The game is not finished, we worked very hard to have the stablest release, but a few bugs which we deemed minor couldn’t be fixed in time and others were found after the last upload. Some are game breaker, but can be worked around. Then there are all the other bugs we don’t know about yet
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3 Actions not available in missions: The tutorials say push [left-ctrl] to open the “more info” pane, this hasn’t been implement yet. In the 3rd Tutorial, one message is about looting an enemy. This is also being implemented and will be available soon. The last is praying at the Idol, in Tutorial 4. We’re working on adding this for the next update.
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Some deployment types will sometimes block the loading: This is one that we discovered too late. Using deployment type “Cache” in Merchant Quarter 2 will sometimes block the game. We aren’t aware of any other ones.
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All alone Flee: The unit just disengages right now. It doesn’t run away as in the rout rules from the Mordheim rulebook, this will be implemented at a later date.
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Invisible Walls: Some buildings have invisible walls, but the unit should always have another way to go about it. We’re working on this always, but we have a very large amount of buildings for the procedural maps.
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Loading is Extremely Long: We are fully aware of this. The campaign maps (Temple of Sigmar and Quayside) load much faster, because they don’t have as many procedural elements. We are working on optimizing this, and right now the game “freezes” while loading (you might get a “application not responding” error). Don’t worry about it, the loading is still happening behind the scenes. Unity has recently made available Asynchronous loading, so we’ll be switching to that soon.
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Potential Graphical Bug and Xray: Our action cameras leave a lot to be desired, we used to have an xray system which would cut through the walls, but it seems it created a weird graphical bug (objects would render black/white, much like Sin City). We removed the xray for now and we will be working on a better solution for this issue.
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Network Connectivity: There are limited issues with network connections. We use steam P2P for all data. but during loading (which is very long, see above) sometimes the connection can be dropped. This really only happens if there is a very big difference in hardware. So one player loads the game very fast, and the other very slow. The other problems we sometimes see is with very slow and intermittent connections, when playing with another player with good high speed connections, the connection might drop.
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Other Stuff: Those are the major bugs, but there is a slew of other smaller, usability issues. From input images just show the keyboard, to edge cases when we randomly click on multiple buttons while joining and leaving a lobby . In normal usage of the game they shouldn’t happen or if they do impact very minimally the player.
That’s all I have to say about our first release. We appreciate all the good wishes from everyone and want to hear from everybody with constructive criticism and comment and suggestions. And bug reports :)
We have too many different types of building for me to count…
LOL okay
Keeping an eye on this, but it doesn’t sound cooked enough to grab now.