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Master of Orion Remake ? :O

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
So I have been watching people stream new MoO a bit more and graphics (except for alien models being too cute), sounds and atmosphere are cool and UI is nice and usable, but I am afraid that strategy parts will suffer.
 

CrimsonAngel

Prophet
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
Messages
2,258
Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I see we are in full edgy mode. Yes yes we get it you want you kodex kool points for saying how above it all you are.
 

Baron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2010
Messages
2,887
I never played the MoO series but am a big fan of space empire games. Turn based strategy, spread sheets simulators, or FPS cutscene heavy Bioware romances... I don't care; if it has ambient electronic music and lets me exterminate rare and exotic life forms either en masse or one at a time, then I'm on board. (Note to Urdnot Wrex, there won't be a cure for the genophage, buddy... not while I'm captain of this ship.)

One thing I've always hated though... Earth inspired aliens. Races built on cats, birds, bears, lizards dogs or spiders (Wizardry 6), pretty much half the races in Stardrive 2.

It's like fantasy game designers who, with a complete blank slate to do something creative, decide to add elves and dwarves because it's familiar. I get for a sequel that the designers have to include the rubbish of the early 90s, but surely a bear-like creature can be some hulking alien monstrocity that rubs up against the asteroids he passes... not just a talking brown bear in Nazi garb.
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
I never played the MoO series but am a big fan of space empire games. Turn based strategy, spread sheets simulators, or FPS cutscene heavy Bioware romances... I don't care; if it has ambient electronic music and lets me exterminate rare and exotic life forms either en masse or one at a time, then I'm on board. (Note to Urdnot Wrex, there won't be a cure for the genophage, buddy... not while I'm captain of this ship.)

One thing I've always hated though... Earth inspired aliens. Races built on cats, birds, bears, lizards dogs or spiders (Wizardry 6), pretty much half the races in Stardrive 2.

It's like fantasy game designers who, with a complete blank slate to do something creative, decide to add elves and dwarves because it's familiar. I get for a sequel that the designers have to include the rubbish of the early 90s, but surely a bear-like creature can be some hulking alien monstrocity that rubs up against the asteroids he passes... not just a talking brown bear in Nazi garb.

Why are you wasting your time playing shit like Stardrive when you still haven't played MoO and MoO 2, either of which have a solid claim to being the best space empire game to date?
 
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Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet

It looks bland and soulless. Not loving the absolute polar opposite direction they've gone with the mood of the game either. MoO2 was more srs. This game, on the other hand, looks like a childrens cartoon. The way the races look like, how they speak, the way they are animated, it's like they used cartoons and pixar as a reference guide. They completely bastardized and emasculated the races, just like they did the gameplay. This is a completely worthless game since it doesn't build upon the previous entries but instead is just a modern and stripped down version of them. Just like every other modern remake or reboot.
 

kris

Arcane
Joined
Oct 27, 2004
Messages
8,835
Location
Lulea, Sweden

It looks bland and soulless. Not loving the absolute polar opposite direction they've gone with the mood of the game either. MoO2 was more srs. This game, on the other hand, looks like a childrens cartoon. The way the races look like, how they speak, the way they are animated, it's like they used cartoons and pixar as a reference guide. They completely bastardized and emasculated the races, just like they did the gameplay. This is a completely worthless game since it doesn't build upon the previous entries but instead is just a modern and stripped down version of them. Just like every other modern remake or reboot.

from what I seen I got a clear CiV vibe. CiV isn't bad, but it sure could be called "streamlined" and "bland".
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
I have not played MoO2 for a lot of years so just by watching streams on new MoO I cannot really say if it is streamlines and by how much. Just based on graphics and art it is stupid to call it streamlined.

Also MoO2 like most games was not perfect. Each major change needs to be valued separately and decided if it is a good change. I know people don't like changes but not all changes are automatically bad.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet
I have not played MoO2 for a lot of years so just by watching streams on new MoO I cannot really say if it is streamlines and by how much. Just based on graphics and art it is stupid to call it streamlined.

Also MoO2 like most games was not perfect. Each major change needs to be valued separately and decided if it is a good change. I know people don't like changes but not all changes are automatically bad.

Looking at videos and digging up what people have said on the steam forums this is what I've gathered:

-no turn based combat, it's real time with pause
-no governers
-lack of race traits, for example there seems to be only one government type. No feudal, dictatorship, unified or democratic.
-tech trees are simplified
-haven't seen or heard anything about ship building
-music is crap and bland
-only a lame planetary view of your planets, no growing town as you build stuff

Feel free to correct me where I'm wrong, but based on what I've seen and heard I fail to see any reason to fork over 46€ for a lesser game. Who gives a shit if MoO2 is not perfect? It's the closest we've ever gotten to perfection within the genre. Saying that MoO2 was not perfect is not an excuse for its sequel to be less ambitious.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
- I prefer real time combat with pause for this game. I goes faster and plays similar to Sword of the Stars that I enjoyed a lot (but SotS had more complicated combat which is a minus for this MoO)
- Governors might be coming, game is still in EA. Did governors give bonuses to planets you attached them to?
- I didn't notice races have no traits, I assumed they are going to keep something similar. If that is true and not coming later, I agree that will be worse. Lack of government types could be bad or good if there is enough other things to manage
- tech tree is like Civ games, I don't mind that. I don't see this as bad
- I seen on stream you customize your ships and upgrade their stuff when you research new levels of same stuff
- I like the music :)
- I like the planetary view, graphics are nice

Also everyone can still be changed before now and release (expect adding turn based combat).
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
Well I do consider Birth of the Federation best 4x space game but I would not call that bad taste :)
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
Matter of taste, I guess. When you have so many fleets, that you might as well battle every turn or so, it just gets tedious and old pretty quickly. Ofc there is autoresolve.
Furthermore, I can't remember any 4x game which had well done, turn-based combat system apart from original MOO's.
 

Torrasque01

Augur
Joined
Nov 29, 2013
Messages
278
Matter of taste, I guess. When you have so many fleets, that you might as well battle every turn or so, it just gets tedious and old pretty quickly. Ofc there is autoresolve.
Furthermore, I can't remember any 4x game which had well done, turn-based combat system apart from original MOO's.
As opposed to RTwP which has SotS and nothing else. Non-argument.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
Personally, I liked the ideas behind Stardrive 2 battle system. Maps were small as fuck, but the combat itself worked very nice with ship customization tool. It's far from being realistic and played on 2d plane but I had pretty good experience with it. Directional damage mattered, and that was the funniest part.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Jay Barnson on Master of Orion:

The Return of Master of Orion

I normally don’t play “Early Access” games, on the justification that I don’t have time to play the completed, released games I already own, so why would I want to play a buggy, incomplete game?

But I make exceptions. And for the early access launch of Master of Orion, the rebooting of a franchise I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing back in the 90s, I was happy to make the exception. It was just over an hour, but it felt like time well spent. Except there’s a very real danger here that it could turn into a gigantic time-sink, like its predecessors.

The early access game seems very playable thus far. A few options are missing, like a tutorial game, some customizations, or the ability to change difficulty levels. However, the game has built-in tutorial pop-ups whenever you encounter a new situation, so it was surprisingly easy to pick up the basics. While I’m undoubtedly missing out on a lot of subtleties and optimizations necessary to play a competitive game, my Psilons seemed to be expanding and destroying space pirates quite nicely.

The developers seem to have cribbed a few pages from Civilization V to streamline the interface and the gameplay. Compared to how I remember the older games, this one plays far easier and more quickly. If it weren’t for the linearly increasing complexity that comes with managing multiple colonies, I’d say it feels a little bit like a board game. A board game voiced by celebrity actors, maybe.


Many Master of Orion fans will be disappointed by the lack of tactical combat in space. I know I was. For me, that was the differentiation between the also-excellent Galactic Civilizations series and Master of Orion. But then, seeing how horribly it was handled in MoO 3, and how poorly it plays in multiplayer (everybody else wait and watch while two players duke it out in a mini-game), it’s understandable. Disappointing, but understandable.

There are a lot of 4x (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) space games out there nowadays. Master of Orion used to rule the roost in that respect. Now, I personally think the king of the hill is still Galactic Civilizations II. I haven’t quite warmed up to the sequel yet, which feels like a streamlined revision rather than a new game. Considering the depth and the complexity of Gal Civ II, and the fact that Gal Civ III is multiplayer, some streamlining was probably in order. I’ve played a couple of the other indie 4x space games, and they are respectable, each with their quirks. Some even offer tactical ship combat…


Except for the tactical ship combat, the “secret sauce” for Master of Orion, at least as well as I recall it, would be the races, the existence of the super-Gaia planet Orion protected by an ancient, automated robot space guardian, and movement limitations based on warp connections between systems (bypassed eventually by technology). So far, all of these other elements seem to be intact. So in those other respects, it feels like the original franchise.

From just my short experience playing it, it looks like the Master of Orion reboot is shooting for the simpler, more streamlined tier of the 4x jungle… which is surprising given its legacy. However, it also looks like it is emphasizing multiplayer, which makes that focus pretty critical. It may end up being king of the multiplayer 4x space strategy games.

If so, that’s not a bad niche to own.

I’m excited to see this game evolve to final release.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
Tactical combat does not equal Turn based. You can have Real Time with pause be plenty tactical.
Even real time without pause but that takes a huge amount of players skill and it is not often used.
 

Kaldurenik

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 3, 2010
Messages
895
Divinity: Original Sin
So here is my opinion of MOO4.

While this game have upgraded and improved some things, for example the UI, smooth overall gameplay with short loading times (turns) and almost no lag or other issues. The game still lack in most of the other areas.
This seem to be from the fact that they took MOO2 and then began to hack away at it until they could sell it to todays market of consumers with no attention span.
Instead of improving on MOO2 they removed feature's like: Less race traits, no turn based combat, worse research tree's.

While i like the style of the galaxy, the planets and yes even SOME of the race's most of them look overall bad with bad artstyle's and bad ship designs.
There is a bunch of things that feel like it missing like: The ability to place a colony on a planet where you have a base. Maybe its due to me playing MOO2 as of late, but it feel as if there are a bunch of buildings that have been removed.
There don't (unless i'm stupid) seem to be any way to move food from one planet to the other. There seem to be a large (story) based pointer that some race's are "war like" and others are more democracy built. Yet there are no souch things within the game.

I'm also not a huge fan of the "you have to move at the points we tell you" instead of the more free form movement of MOO. I get why they did this (multiplayer) however it seems like a overall downgrade. And yes i know there are new things so that you can make choke points but... Yeah...

Overall its a downgraded version of the older games with a few improvments but overall it's worse.
Can one play it? Yes... There are worse games out there. But if you are looking for a MOO2 game that have been improved upon with more research, race's, choices and new interesting features. Then sadly you will be disappointed.
 

Naraya

Arcane
Joined
Oct 19, 2014
Messages
1,513
Location
Tuono-Tabr
it looks like the Master of Orion reboot is shooting for the simpler, more streamlined tier

In other words: the game is going to be generic as fuck.

I'm edgy and I'm out.
 
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