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Real Time Strategy (Games) Role Playing (Games)

Stardock Developing MMORTS Game 61

Posted by Zonk from the massively-multiplayer-online-real-time-strategy dept.
John Callaham writes "Computer Games Magazine has learned that Stardock, developer of Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine, is now working on an unnamed massively multiplayer real time strategy title that will be free to play." From the article: "...the development team is trying to solve the problems that have kept other similar games from being as popular as other MMO titles. When asked to describe the gameplay Wardell said, 'I like to call it The Sims meets Total Annihilation.'"
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Stardock Developing MMORTS Game More

Stardock Developing MMORTS Game

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  • Total annihilation (Score:2, Informative)

    by Xavier CMU ( 829477 ) *
    For many players, the sims has already met total annihilation [theinsanedomain.com].
  • Basically any DnD Computer RPG acts like "The Sims meets Total Anniliation". Creating your character, tweaking stats, strategic placement in battles, it basically seems like a neat way to say something that has been done 30 million times before.
  • Stardock, developer of Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine, is now working on an unnamed massively multiplayer real time strategy title that will be free to play.

    Free? Wait a minute, I'm confused here. Why would they make this game free? Not that I'm complaining or anything, I just haven't ever heard of a for-profit company working to develop a game more complex than Frogger and giving it out for free. What's the catch here?
    • Two comments. First, there several other examples of "free" MMO games. Second, it's probably not really free, as in you will have to buy things in game to improve your user experience (like in Project Entropia).

      For other examples, check out:
      - Project Entropia http://www.project-entropia.com/ [project-entropia.com]
      - Guild Wars http://www.guildwars.com/ [guildwars.com]
      - Roma Victor http://www.roma-victor.com/ [roma-victor.com]
    • I suspect that it will be free to play after purchasing the game. So no monthly charges, just a flat fee to buy the game initially.
    • Anarchy Online is free for the next almost a year. However, they are embedding advertising in the game world to recoup their costs.

      http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/25/ 0448233 [slashdot.org]
    • Probably in-game advertising.

      There's already free graphical MMOs out there, supported by ads and "premium" paid subscribers (ala runescape).

    • Re:FREE!?! As in beer??? (Score:3, Informative)

      by 17028 ( 122384 )
      Free to play, the same way Diablo is free to play online, I would guess. You buy the game and the online service is free.
    • Apparently yes, free as in beer, here's some additional comments from Brad... www.mmorts.com [mmorts.com]

  • Free With Ads? (Score:3, Funny)

    by GweiLeong ( 846704 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @04:09PM (#12093236)
    So... we'll take our +4 Holy Sword of Pepsi into Chryslertown and go on a killing spree inside the IPod store?
  • Hey, Brad! Long time no hear!

    Going to develop this for OS/2, also?
    You DID say that as long as OS/2 was around, Stardock would produce their products for it...

    *nudge nudge wink wink*
    • Way back when, I was one of those guys that bought their OS/2 software, and it was great. I loved Galactic Civ, and the Object Desktop. OS/2 was a LONG way ahead of Windows at the time. I wonder how fast it would run on current systems now. :)
      • Well, I've toyed with the idea of picking up eComStation, but I can't really see any particularly good reason why -- it's desktop is still way ahead of anything that's on the market today, free, gnu, or otherwise.. but there's still the fact that there's virtually no software.
        • I wonder why IBM with it's facination in Linux now doesn't open source the workplace shell code for OS/2 and port it to Linux. It would make an awsome desktop, or at least a baseline for further work.
          • yeah.. sigh.. i've been advocating this for years and years and years.. but.. everyone i knew at ibm is long gone.. i was pretty involved with the Os/2 V4 beta test people.. but I think they are all elsewhere now.

    • Brad responds (Score:2, Informative)

      by FrogBoy! ( 108685 )
      Why make it free?

      Go and look at the Alexa.com ranking of WorldOfWarcraft.com (646).

      The cost in these kinds of games is due to the massive network, IT, bandwidth and database resources. But we already have massive resources in those areas that are barely tapped for our non-games software.

      BTW, by free we mean freeware. That means not adware or something.

      Secondly, as someone pointed out, games like The Political Machine helped increase our overall revenue by a significant percentage because of all the new
      • Hey Brad!

        Really, I was kidding about the whole OS/2 thing, I understand that business wise, it no longer makes sense to support OS/2, and that the promise of continuing OS/2 development kind of came to a natural death when IBM dumped us all :(

  • I think they sucked enough money out of me. I did enjoy playing the original Entrepreneur game - that was their one hit.

    They made a sequel to this game that got rid of the open ended technology advancement and replaced it with an overly complicated tech tree.

    They tried a download style system (Dragoon net or something) and that did not work well at all. THeir Windows Blinds program seemed nifty but slowed your machine down to a crawl.

    Still, good luck in getting into the MMORPG realm. My experience is the

  • ...as in www.Planetarion.com free, fist year or so is free (admittly PA was free for quite sometime) with lots of Ad banners, then when you're all hooked start charging.

  • Total Annihilation... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pudding7 ( 584715 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2005 @06:04PM (#12094683)
    ...being the best RTS game ever, of course. Never understood this fascination people have with Starcraft and C&C. To me, those games were like junior high. Dumbed down interfaces, limited units and command options, etc. TA was grad school. Insane unites, complex commands and unit construction...
    • I preferred the starcraft, the TA units just seemed pretty uninspired, also both sides were pretty much the same. Also i like being a squishy alien.
    • Here, here. I've been waiting years for Chris Taylor to stop f'ing around with Dungeon Siege (better than Diablo yes, but still Diablo) and get back to doing a TA sequel. Total Annihilation was a groundbreaking game, from storyline, UI (*especially* UI), graphical style, personality (which is hard to do, given a bunch of robots), and gameplay. No one has still really been able to successfully copy TA's intuitive context-sensitive UI yet. R.I.P. Cavedog. I'm not quite sure how they plan to be like TA, but S
      • The reason Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games have not created a sequel to TA is because they don't own the rights. I don't quite remember who has them, but I believe it is the publisher of the original game.
        • Well, he's always spoke of a "spiritual successor" to TA, rather than a direct sequel. You can't copyright gameplay anyways, so you could make the same damn game if you did it from scratch with new models and names for stuff.
    • Simple as that. You can make the world's greatest FPS/RTS game/Turn-based strategy game/Puzzle/Flight sim/RPG in the world, but if its too complicated to figure out or handle or manage, the mass majority of gamers simply won't like it.

      Doom 3's flashlight turned the scaryness factor up threefold with the darkness yet people bitched (No run and gun?! Flame on!.) Warcraft 3 has on average three or four new spells to manage per tier (sentinal, defend, canniblize, pillage are all abilities for tier 1 units so y

    • Insane unites, complex commands and unit construction...

      When I was a kid, we invented a variation on chess. There were, like, twice as many units, some of them moved using dice, some units could come back to life I think at one point we raided a stratego box for playing peices. We might have even used the Stratego board.

      This game was much more complex than chess but it was not a better game.

    • Re:Total Annihilation... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pxtl ( 151020 ) on Thursday March 31, 2005 @10:54AM (#12100324) Homepage
      Wrong. TA was not more complex - it was simpler. That was why it was good. No spells to limit how much you can control at a time. No weapon energy to distract you from handling large groups. No worrying about whether units are moving or attacking (they do both). No need to "attack to position" - they do that automatically. No relocating your base to handlde depleting resources. Harvesting resources was just building a building. No artificial unit caps.

      The improved commands were just consolidating things - unlimited queues for units, starting orders, construction buildigns, construction workers. Simple things like the "guard" command made the gameplay so much easier to manage.

      Many games increase complexity by adding more spells, more complex units, things like formations, bizarre terrain, etc. TA did the opposite - everything in the game is simple, and the emerging gameplay is so much more mindblowing than StarCraft.

      Just spread your army like the plague, and try not to panic when shit happens.

      Again, careful simplicity brings emerging complexity - compare Lisp to C++, Go to Chess,etc. Where in "complex" systems like C++, you learn a long list of specific rules, strategies, combinations, etc. simple but well-designed systems allow you do do just as much in a more elegant fashion.

      TA is such a simple system. Yes, the list of units is nauseatingly long compared to StarCraft - but each unit is simple and pure in function, and generally knows how to do its job whether or not you babysit it.
    • but it did lose some focus with all the downloadable 'official' units released post core contingency, IMHO a few of them were not as balanced as the original game and created more problems than they solved.

      For example in a tournament game years ago (can't believe I still remember this!) on one of the islands map I was Core and had total control of the seas and air and was building up for a final strike against the Arm player: however he invested all the little he had left in building the downloadable Arm a
    • My kids and I are gamers. We've seen games come and go with a few that remain fun for a decent amount of time. But TA? I bought the game in 1997 by recommendation from a friend, and it is still played to this day.

      The original with the Core Contingency and Battle Tactics was great. Loved it. I don't know about you TA games out there, but I think my favorite unit was the Brawler (or bee as I liked to call it). The AI was terrific, the units looked great, the multiplayer gameplay was a lot of fun. In 2
  • Why not World Accessable Real Time Strategy?

  • problems to overcome? (Score:2, Informative)

    by roberto0 ( 242247 )
    I think the real hornets' nest here is how to combine a RTS with an MMO. Whether you're playing TA or WC3 or C&C, the overall gameplay is similar: 1) collect resources
    2) produce units/tech
    3) battle

    Each game takes a finite amount of time, there are limited resources, and once the game is "won", it doesn't matter how many units/resources you have left.

    Other games like CIVIII may make players weigh greater the costs of battle, but there is still an attainable goal or "end" to the game.

    In most MMORPGs
    • Sounds a bit like Time of Defiance [nicelycrafted.com]

      The battles last from about a week to four weeks IIRC. Your units continue to gather resources and build queued objects while you're logged off. You can even setup email notification and automated responses to keep your empire running while you're dealing with real life. Been around a couple years at least. Tried it myself for awhile and found it to be pretty fun.

    • What if it takes resource handling out of the picture? For example, each player gets number of points to spend churning out units. As you (or members of your allied forces) capture towers, or enemy tower, or what have you, all the players on one side get more points to spend. You can work it similar to the way Planet Side handles capturing things, i.e. you can capture a technology building and equip your units with better weapons. Or capture an airport and suddenly you get longer range, better air-base
  • Highlander mode. One big freaking free for all, where people are located around a globe with all sorts of resources to be had. Everyone builds up, but when people get eliminated they need to wait for a new game to start up. Being eliminated and respawning would be hard to do in something like this.
  • Am I the only guy here who remembers C&C: Sole Survivor?
    T'was a fun game, if you could get a lan of 15+ people playing. Nowadays all those retards play is CS: Source.
  • great! Now I get to watch my soldiers sleep in and miss the APC, then wet themselves in the living room then proceed to light on fire when they try to cook a meal in the food processor. . . Thats just how I want my RTS games!!!

  • Boneyards (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Supurcell ( 834022 )
    Total Annihilation had the best multiplayer system of any RTS game. The Boneyards. You had a galactic map with the Arm and Core controlling half of the systems. Player registered as either Arm and Core and they fought it out on the contested worlds. At the end of the day, whichever side had the most wins would get control of the planet. This would go on until one side controlled the entire map and then there would be a new map. This system really gave me a feeling of accomplishment when I contributed in wi

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