This is from the developers who posted over at the Octopus Overlords forum and asked us to help spread the word, sounds interesting as all Master of Magic remake news always does at least at the beginning.
"Hello there! If you’ve been waiting years for a genuine successor to Master of Magic (as I have) you’re in luck. We the fans and developers at Wastelands Interactive have decided to create one. Work on the project started nearly a year ago in a 2D development environment. As it evolved it was moved to a 3D environment and the basic game mechanics have started to take firm shape.
I think it’s not necessary to explain here what is MoM, so it’s enought with this list of features:
Master of Magic Spiritual Successor
D20 System - Units, Spells and Heroes will all draw from the D20 rule set during the battles.
4X deep playability
Hero Units - Recruit heroes to lead your forces into battle
Twelve Spell Circles
Unique Races
Multiple victory conditions
much more
We’re working to develop a rather new and in-depth magic system for Worlds of Magic. The world itself will span a number of planes and a majority of the content will be created procedurally. No two games have to be exactly the same (although they can be if you want them that way). We’re adding new features every day, and we would truly appreciate any suggestions. What did you like most about Master of Magic? What do you feel is a must for the new game? What would you like us to add? Is there anything else we should consider?
Every contribution will be MUCH appreciated. It will be my pleasure to ask any question here, and you can find more info on google, as I’m not able will be able to post links :P. Thank you!"
Looking at their games done, all of them are 2d hex based wargames, which I imagine don’t need exactly a big budget.
They want to jump from that… to a complete Master of Magic remake, in 3d??
That implies several different races, hundreds of types of units if we include monsters and other creatures, and hundreds of spells, features like create your own wizard, magical items, etc.
With what budget exactly??
edit: exactly from this
to a 3d game with stuff that have to be modeled, texturized, skinned, animated, particle f/x for the spells, etc. It would be more believable if they would say they are just doing a fantasy hex-based 2d wargame, like Fantasy General.
If they copy Mom and give it a new graphics wrapper, folks will whine that they didn’t fix…oh…admantium based hobbit heroes or something.
Lord help them if they change a single modifier from the original. Then…“Oh, it’s good, but they didn’t really re-make Mom. Somebody needs to do that.”
Good luck to them and everything. I would love another good game.
Since no-one has actually managed to make a modern day version of MoM, thats pretty much empty talk and conjecture.
Also, bear in mind this is a spiritual successor, meaning it can be anything from an FPS to a faithful follow-up to the game.
The thing is, many have found during development that the ideas MoM is based on, are harder to implement than it seems. If it was easy, we’d seen carbon copies by now.
AoW did pretty well in making a game close to MoM, and they didn’t get bashed for it at all. Actually, its one of most loved TBS games these days.
Well, yeah WarrenD, but I’m tired of indies promising a MoM remake without understanding that one of the main features of MoM apart from being a fantasy 4x TBS, was the epicness and vastness of the game, and you can’t do that epicness with the type of stuff that indies usually make: a small, focused game, limited on unique content.
And of course big studios with the budget that the project needs is not interested in doing fantasy TBS.
That’s the reason we haven’t still a good MoM remake. It’s doing a more expensive Civilization because it’s like making an almost Civ and then saying “hey let’s add several different races with their own units and buildings and tactics, and dozens of creatures and monsters, and hundreds of spells, and heroes, and magical items”.
Maybe if a studio recognizes that and chooses to make it old school, in painted 2d, at higher resolutions than the original, but in 2d, and with “limited animation” (it’s not like we need detailed animations for the units, it’s a tbs, in the end we skip the animations or use them with a fast forward setting).
Unlike, say, X-Com, MOM isn’t a great candidate for slavish re-creation - I loved it to death, but it was always buggy, imbalanced, and had poor AI.
What people remember so fondly about MOM is not the game itself, but their visions for what the game could have been – and of course everyone’s vision is different.
Since they can’t see what’s in my head, l say they should just make the best damn game they can and I promise not to worry about how closely it follows MOM.
I know what you mean. On the other hand, I’m glad these guys have several wargames under their belt, so at least they have experience developing strategy games. That gives me a little more faith than a team that’s never shipped a game, but like I said I don’t personally care how similar it is to MoM - I absolutely love the game and all but I think people get a little carried away with the Digital Jesus treatment it gets.
I did see on the forums they plan to ship with four races (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Undead) with others being developed post-release as DLC. I think shipping with a smaller subset of races that are more fleshed out is the better way to go but the proof will be in the pudding.
(1)
Ditch 3d and stick to something similar to what we see above with the 2d hex-based wargame. I can’t tell you how disappointed I’ve been in the past few Civilization games and their 3d terrain and units that do nothing more than make it very difficult to see what the heck is going on and where things are. Give me back a boardgame looking board please.
(2)
Make sure the broken stack-of-doom that was a sure win in MOM isn’t possible. MOM was horribly broken, mostly due to this.
(3)
Make sure end game turns aren’t like doing my taxes. I don’t want to move 1,000 units, manage the budget for 200 cities or click on 500 things for one turn due to end game overload.
Unbalanced strategies were wonderful in MoM because there were so many of them. I see your hobbits and raise you undead war trolls. Or how about flying, invulnerable, invisible paladins?
They just need make the AI good and update the UI to something with modern standards.
I’m no expert but multitudes of unbalanced strategies and making the AI competitive seem to me to be mutually exclusive goals. I’d think you need to embrace one or the other.
But why? As long as the AI is able to make use of (at least some of) the unbalanced tactics as well, things should be golden, no?
An important cornerstone of MoM was the crazy (yes, and sometimes unbalanced) stuff you could do or totally ignore.
I actually thought it was a pity that, in later versions of the game, things like flying, invulnerable, invisible paladins became much less viable because the AI had a tendency to spam Dispel Magic spells, which would force you to re-enchant all the units again, with all dispelled spells. It was doable, but extremely annoying.
Edit: I realized I own at least one game from those devs: Time of Fury. My faith in this MoM remake just pulled a Felix Baumgartner.
EDIT: I don’t know the technical term for that type of map. But you could shuffle all the map pieces, pick any four, put them together any old way, and they’d magically make a coherent whole map.
