I totally get you, but that’s kind of a fundamental gameplay change. In my experience the whole game is about crafting neighborhoods (or blocks) that corral the walkers.
Taking a look at the RPS screenshots, yeah, they are clearly new graphics made to look very, very close to the original.
Given that the graphical style is very close, and I don’t really have a problem with the GOG version’s graphics or UI, for me it comes down to whatever it is they mean by “improved mechanics”.
Well just going by the small hints that Simsem (one of the devs) has been dropping on the Impressions Games reddit. One of the improvements you can expect to see is the ability to play the game with Zeus\Emperor’s global labour pool. So depending on if you want the original experience or prefer how Zeus\Emperor handled buildings finding workers, you can tweak the experience to your liking.
Expect we’ll hear more about some of the other Quality of Life improvements and other such things in due time before the release date.
When the logos came up at the start I knew Triskell sounded familiar, but wasn’t sure from what. Googled it to learn that these are the guys that made Lethis, the steampunk game modeled after the Impressions games. From the thread here about Lethis, I learned that I am apparently in the minority of people who enjoyed it. While I admit that it didn’t quite capture the magic of Zeus or Pharoah or any of the other Impressions Games, I thought it was good for what it was, and a pretty decent homage.
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how this remake turns out. Assuming they’re not going to make any major gameplay changes, I am optimistic.
I’m hoping they take a couple core mechanic upgrades from Zeus/Emperor, primarily having universal labor instead of the taskmaster walker (or whatever he was called) which required you to have housing in your industrial loop.
Pharaoh: A New Era is part of the Steam Next festival. Thus, you can download and play a demo of the remake for the next week.
Nice catch thank you!
Gave this a whirl for the first few tutorial missions and it sure is Pharaoh! Looks sharp, and the UI is a bit unfinished, but there are some real improvements. I’m disappointed that they aren’t updating the labor system to something like Zeus, and that they haven’t added conditional roadblocks like Emperor. There are some curious additions, like showing the tiles that walkers will enter and leave buildings (but not letting you change them. There’s a nice Nilometer that visually shows the inundation that’s coming.
Didn’t get to make a monument yet.
There’s also a demo for this which looks highly related:
I played the demo of Builders of Egypt last time they put it up on Steam. It was very disappointing. Hopefully it’s improved in the time since.
Last time I checked, at least the global labour pool from Zeus and Emperor was still on the agenda to include as optional gameplay feature. Almost like having your cake and eating it too. Satisfying the purists who don’t want a thing changed whilst having options available for people who do want quality-of-life features such as the global labour pool.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t made it into the demo for Steam Next Fest though.
Someone remind me to avoid the Steam forums for the game during Steam Next Fest. Similar to Age of Empires 4, you have a loud minority of people complain about the aesthetic of the game’s remade visuals being too cartoony. A shame when painterly aesthetics all get tarred over with the “this looks like a mobile game” complaint.
I can understand the remade visuals being a shock to the system. Before playing the demo I too had my reservations on how much I would like them. However, after playing an hour on the Steam Next Fest demo I don’t really have too much issue with them, and the aesthetic choice has grown on me. Definitely looks more painterly, like it was done with a paintbrush or something, than what I would traditionally associate as a cartoon style too.
Browsing the screenshots, it looks like the original Pharaoh but with 20 + years experience of making things look good.
I am downloading the demo now :).
edit:
played 1st mission. It feels very much like Pharaoh. The Humans and animals (well the ostriches, as they are the only animals I have seen so far) do have a strange, cartoony look and animations that don’t quite vibe with the generally clean aesthetic.
One nice thing I noticed is that when you place a building, there is a green arrow and red arrow that tell you where the workers will exit (green) and return (red) which is a nice little feature that shall help with planning.
Coming out on February 15th. Happy belated Valentine’s Day.
Trailer in the link as well.
I’ll play that as long as it is a good remake. I tried to play the original Pharaoh a couple years ago and it looked so bad I didn’t get past a handful of missions. I was having trouble seeing what the different resources were and it wasn’t worth the trouble. If I can play the original game and have it look good, I’ll give it another try.
Will Grumpus the Elder come back and make new city layouts for us?!
The original game still looks quite good, I think, except the resolution it runs in is low and not widescreen. You can get widescreen high-res fan patches, but you have to be able to tolerate how it breaks the UI a little. It’s always totally playable, though.
Anyway, if this is actually good, then we won’t have to worry about broken UI anymore!
I got it confused with Children of the Nile. I played that in 2014 (I thought it was more recent) and I couldn’t identify the resources and stuff because it looked so bad. Now I’m kinda bummed. Pharaoh may still be a good game - I’m sure I played it way back when, but I really wanted a good looking Children of the Nile because that seemed pretty fun if I could tell what I was doing graphically.
Yeah, I liked Children of the Nile, but it didn’t make itself easy to like in a number of ways. Personally I’m glad we’re at a point where we can admit that the 2D games often looked way better than the 3D ones, and it’s okay for games in this genre to be 2D. Maybe they won’t look like Anno 1800, but they’ll look really nice.