I started in to the Master of Orion series in junior high. A
friend handed me some bootleg disks and told me to give it a try. I know,
bootleg is wrong and I did buy all of the versions later on. But MOO1 was my
introduction to 4x gaming and I’ve loved it ever since. Oh yeah, we called it
MOO. Acronyms are cool, and calling a space game MOO is freaking funny.
The series was a big part of my teen years. Nostalgia has me
excited for this next installment.
I’m excited because some of the original development team is
back including the original lead designer, composer, and art director. This
promises that the heart and soul of the series remains intact. Moreover the company that took over the title has announced that this will not be a free to play style game like their World of Tanks game. The microtransaction model would never fit this style of game, it would just kill it. So happy news that we have a proper retail game.
I am a little wary of the game though. Can this fill my expectations?
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| Psylons are my default race. |
I was originally glad when I heard the team would be completely
ignoring MOO3. The third installment in the series had a user interface that
even the most masochistic of accountants would hate. The AI was terrible and
the game was just riddled with bugs. In short MOO3 was not a good game. But by
ignoring this installment I think the designers of the new Master of Orion game
are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is something that MOO3 did
so amazingly right: Character development. The alien races are beautifully
designed and detailed. They had rich back stories. More importantly they
weren’t childishly cartoonish. I’m a little tired of simplistic racial designs
of animal-person hybrid aliens. The bird-man Alkari, the Cat-Alien Mrrshans and
so on are too simplistic. I want a rich back story. The original two games came
up with bland racist alien archetypes. Russians/Bulrathi, Gnolam/Jews, humans/Caucasians.
MOO3 actually moved away from “all people of a certain race are this way
because sci-fi racism.” Instead each race acted a certain way because of
histories of wars, slavery, genetic engineering, or even religion. The AI had storied reasons for hating each other not just "birds and cats don't get along eh!" This is
creativity the genre desperately needs.
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| Arrr space pirates! |
Another thing I liked from MOO 3: terraforming. It was looked at
differently. Each race had different biological needs so therefore each race
had a specific ideal environment. Planets with little value to you could be a
perfect place for your neighbour for a farm colony. Another race could
sweep in to take a planet of strategic significance and begin terraforming it
into their ideal but your inhospitable wasteland. The first and second
installments ignored this about alien life. Ground combat modifiers could apply
to each races environmental needs. It added to the costs of taking over alien worlds. It's thematic and a factor I felt brought more to the game.
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| Are those star lanes? NOOOOO!!! |
The other thing I worry about is star lanes. For those who
don’t play 4x games star lanes are essentially highways in space. The game
either forces you to travel along star lanes or as in MOO3, travel outside of star lanes is
obscenely slow. It’s just not how space works. It doesn’t make sense in the
medium of a space game. The sole reason star lanes exist is they essentially
make programming a game’s AI easier. I hate them. The only way I could see star
lanes as being something thematic is if they were some kind of tech players
could research and build, something reminiscent of the trade lanes in the old
Freelancer game. A series of gates players could build to make travel between
two systems faster. Essentially this could eliminate FTL (faster than light)
engine requirements within your empire space. Great for defensive ships and for
freighters (freeing up internal space) but then you would need a separate class of attack ships for moving
outside of your space. This could be an early tech that would later be replaced
by wormhole technology or efficient FTL drives. It could have an upkeep cost,
and could create bonuses in trade if you constructed them to another race’s
planets. What I’m getting at is I don’t want star lanes unless they are made
more thematic.
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| In other news: local nerd writes blog post! |
I am happy so see random events will be coming back with the
Galactic News network. It was always fun to see a space creature moving to
attack another player, or having to reevaluate a plan of moving ships when a
creature begins eating ships in hyperspace. I found this factor highly thematic
and the challenges they presented made the game more interesting for me. It was
also satisfying to have GNN announce that you had colonized a number of star
systems far outreaching anyone other empire. It was a fun and quirky way of
delivering some random challenges to the game.
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| I like the look of this cleaner tech tree design |
The best part of the MOO series was the optional nature of
play. A player could chose from several races or customize one of their own. A
player could customize their ships, and could chose which technologies to
research. The player had a myriad of options on how they wanted to play the game. Trade, alliances, treaties, diplomacy and a galactic council all
added flavour to the game in such fun and diverse ways. This created a highly replayable game you could battle in time and again against either your friends or the computer.
One thing that I'm eagerly awaiting is news of the Guardian of Orion. Will it still be there? What will it look like? How powerful will it be? Will there still be a derelict ship to claim? Oh and will there be Antarans? I liked the random attacks, and the techs to be gained from boarding their vessels. I would love for them to return but I don't want beating them to be a win condition. Make it a hard to claim/hard to return from planet. When your ships come back they appear randomly on the map, and anyone with the right tech can attack it from anywhere they have the gate.
For those who want a taste of the original Master of Orion it is available for free play on archive.org. Also for those who wish to follow
along with the release of the new game the official website is here.
Until next time you know I’m just going to get more excited
as that release date just keeps MOOving closer.
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