The first game from Civ IV lead designer Soren Johnson’s Mohawk Games is official: Offworld Trading Company. Ars Technica wrote a great piece introducing it.
No military units exist in this sci-fi RTS, but the constant changes in the player-driven marketplace require truly adaptive strategy to come out on top of the cutthroat corporate warfare that shapes Mars in the near future.
Soren talks more about Offworld on his blog, and the official site has some tidbits as well.
Well that got my interest. The two things that kills tycoon/management games for me is the time investment and, to a lesser extent, unsatisfactory multiplayer. If this delivers on it’s promise, it could be fantastic. Here’s hoping they have some good team modes.
Well color me very intrigued indeed. :)
This does sound interesting. Rubin play something and report back in asap! :p
I don’t even know if it has spaceships in it!
It does look interesting. A nice, complex economic sim would be welcome, especially if it were to turn out to be a sci-fi city builder type of game. Certainly they could expand the idea by adding a variety of planet types, each with its special challenges.
How the hell do they announce a game, and not have any screenshots… >.>
OMG this is going to be awweessomeee!
Yeah, consider me intrigued.
Someone order the $80 founders thing, so we can all milk $20 keys off you.
<3
How the hell do they announce a game, and not have any screenshots… >.>
They didn’t announce it, they just gave it a name. The game itself has been public since November. Soren’s been talking about it on podcasts and in interviews for ages. As for screenshots, I guess they don’t have any good in-game assets yet. There’s concept art in various places though.
They lost me at real-time.
Grats Soren! Looking forward to this one!
It’s Soren TBG123! If I had to trust any game developer to an RTS style system… he’s the one I’d want to give it to. He knows his audience - so I’m sure us old Jurassic turtles will be accounted for :)
Well, he’s asking for money, so that sounds like an announcement. Asking for $35/$80 without even so much as a screenshot is asking for a lot of faith. Personally I don’t have that much faith, but it does sound interesting. I’ll keep an eye on it.
See my ORIGINAL THREAD ;)
I usually am the one who always makes the second thread (laugh)!
I am trying to find out if I buy the preorder if I can buy extra copies later and is there a limit).
glenn
We put a lot of stress on putting gameplay ahead of everything else in the design process, so - right now - we have a very fun prototype that looks pretty strange because it’s a hodgepodge of placeholder assets, first-pass UI, and a board-gamey terrain system. Thus, we are instead going to stream our play sessions to show how the game plays instead of releasing static screenshots that are sure to disappoint/confuse. (Of course, the streams might be pretty confusing too, but you’ll at least see how the game progresses, week-by-week.)
What happens when you order the Elite edition is that you get 6 email coupons to buy extra keys for $20 each. So, you can handle those extra copies however you like.
The game speeds will be customizable, but you really do need to real-time aspect for the market to work right.