A Taste of Cyanide

[grrm]

Two of the game designers from Cyanide's studio in Montreal flew down to New Mexico on Friday to give me a look at their GAME OF THRONES RTS game (that's Real Time Strategy, for those of you who don't speak Gaming), which is now done and will be rolling out Real Soon Now

Comments

[sikariy]

we are waiting for the Dance with dragong in Russian edition!
thank you for your greatest book!

[strayth]

Wonderful news. RTS is a good route, the only alternative I could imagine would be a Total War sort of turn-based / massive battle strategy game. Ty wasn't kidding, this does look cool.

[megmca]

Very exciting. I wonder if they plan on balancing it for competitive e-sports.

[grrm]

Ah... my naivete is showing, but I'm not sure what that means...

But there will be a multiplayer version available. Up to eight can play at once.

[eeepeeep]

E-sports is competitive computer gaming. There are tournaments with cash purses for the winner.
Balancing it just means making sure that there is no one way to victory that makes all the other possible choices pointless.

[1001smile]

Wikipedia about electronic sports:

"Electronic sports, abbreviated e-sports is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments.

There are a number of titles that have a professional gaming scene. The top players can make a living playing the games on the marketing value they gain as a result. Hundreds, thousands and even millions of dollars in prize money are turned out each year for competitors in these titles."

What makes a good e-sports game (article): http://riflesready.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-makes-a-good-esports-game/

[spitphyre]

I know that there are going to be people replying that they're sad it's not an MMORPG and they want to see an RPG game made. To them I have to say: I worked on an RPG in a low magic world. It doesn't work very well. An MMO in ASOIAF would involve a lot of boring classes with nothing to add and a couple of classes that are just TOO powerful. Knowing what I know about game creation and what I know about the books, RTS is the PERFECT game genre for the series. Almost all of the motivation for most of the characters involves battle planning and strategies to keep their house moving ahead. Give this game a chance and trust me when I say that an MMO would be greatly disappointing.

[grrm]

There is a RPG coming... see my post.

An for a MMORPG... that's possible as well, although HBO now controls those rights, so any MMORPG would be based on the TV series, whereas the two Cyanide games are based on the books.

[spitphyre]

Meh, this makes me sad. I wish people would stop thinking that just because it's fantasy it works as an RPG. The pen and paper world of RPGs is more versatile since you can futz with rules once you get the game home but RPGs for console and PC only work in certain circumstances. There's only so many ways you can make a character level up and they all resemble the big named games because of this. It's HARD to make a character that doesn't have a ton of magic at their disposal balance out in skills with the characters that do, it's hard to make that progression interesting enough to engage players, and it's hard to make it realistic. And if they manage those then chances are it doesn't fit in the source material's canon very well. I know that many a fanboy and fangril is going to be scratching their heads at the logic behind alternations in the last game I worked on.

Having said that, at least you got paid for it :P And I'll probably buy it.

[lyea]

I have to say that as soon as I started really understanding and grasping the enormity of the world, I started to wish I could live in it myself.

To me, RPGs allow you not only to exist in another fantasy world but to manipulate it as well. It becomes more real in a different way.

I would wish for an RPG similar in structure to the original Dragon Age.

[emil_miljkovic]

I'm really looking forward to this game. Since I read ASoIaF I wanted to play something in that setting, and though I'd like an RPG more, I will have to make do with the RTS until the other one comes out :D