I miss my MoM.
For those of you on my friends list still reminiscing over "Master of Magic" (and you know who you are), here's an upcoming game to keep an eye on:
Elemental: War of Magic
I've been playing a lot of Civ3 recently, and pondering the fact that that while the whole Civilization series is really excellent, it still doesn't quite hold up to MOM for me. Which led to me thinking about what made MOM better. These were some of the bigger points to me:
1) The distinct categories of magic (fire/earth/nature/air/life/death/arcane) were amazingly unique while still being well-balanced. This meant the game wasn't lopsided even when I only had access to one or two at a time, but there was huge replay ability in seeing how each possible combination would interact in combat against an enemy wizard or as modifiers on the different armies. (And after *years* of playing I eventually stumbled on things like the champion adamantium halfling slingers, which finally did lopside things, but it wasn't obvious how to get there...)
2) The strongest units were only available through magic, were very difficult/slow to produce, and were almost epic in scale compared to mundane units. Since each wizard could only access their own colors, I could only have uber-units from my own color. Which meant, as a game got longer, and these uber-units slowly started appearing on the map, they really felt like some epic shit was going down. More so, I started to feel a worshipful allegiance to those units that were "mine" and a dread hatred of "theirs". (And an extra special dread hatred of the computer-controlled stack of 9 demon lords with the super ability of "crash the fucking game".)
3) I got attached to my heroes. They started out as weaklings and just kept leveling and leveling and eventually started pulling some crazy shit out of nowhere. I would send them off on ludicrous quests to collect artifact weapons, and then sprint them back to the front lines to help save my armies from near-death. (I have very fond memories of Warrax taking down ridiculous odds thanks to his ability to run faster than anyone and launch fireballs til the cows come home. And doom bolt. Motherfucking doom bolt.)
4) The magic system was flexible enough to let me do empire wide sweeping changes, or let me focus all my power on one peon to turn him into Rambo. I could play it either way, and it wasn't a foregone conclusion which was better. (Speaking of unplayable lopsided tech trees ruining games: Ascendancy anyone?)
Anyways, I had been thinking all this up just over the past few days, and decided to look up Masters of Magic online and see if the intellectual property has landed in anyone's lap again. (There have been about 2 or 3 failed attempts at a sequel in the 15 years since it came out.) I rather quickly found references to this Elemental game, and then stumbled on this blog from the developers of Elemental, in which they discuss game development and what they're working towards and such. And they happen to hit on several of my list items above.
And the graphics look oddly stylized but awesome.
And it's being made by the same guys who made GalCiv2.
And now I suddenly have a game to look forward to.
Part of me wants to pre-order in case the company is in financial troubles. I don't want this project to fall down like so many other MOM sequels and clones have. Age of Wonders is excellent, but the more the merrier.
Elemental: War of Magic
I've been playing a lot of Civ3 recently, and pondering the fact that that while the whole Civilization series is really excellent, it still doesn't quite hold up to MOM for me. Which led to me thinking about what made MOM better. These were some of the bigger points to me:
1) The distinct categories of magic (fire/earth/nature/air/life/death/arcane) were amazingly unique while still being well-balanced. This meant the game wasn't lopsided even when I only had access to one or two at a time, but there was huge replay ability in seeing how each possible combination would interact in combat against an enemy wizard or as modifiers on the different armies. (And after *years* of playing I eventually stumbled on things like the champion adamantium halfling slingers, which finally did lopside things, but it wasn't obvious how to get there...)
2) The strongest units were only available through magic, were very difficult/slow to produce, and were almost epic in scale compared to mundane units. Since each wizard could only access their own colors, I could only have uber-units from my own color. Which meant, as a game got longer, and these uber-units slowly started appearing on the map, they really felt like some epic shit was going down. More so, I started to feel a worshipful allegiance to those units that were "mine" and a dread hatred of "theirs". (And an extra special dread hatred of the computer-controlled stack of 9 demon lords with the super ability of "crash the fucking game".)
3) I got attached to my heroes. They started out as weaklings and just kept leveling and leveling and eventually started pulling some crazy shit out of nowhere. I would send them off on ludicrous quests to collect artifact weapons, and then sprint them back to the front lines to help save my armies from near-death. (I have very fond memories of Warrax taking down ridiculous odds thanks to his ability to run faster than anyone and launch fireballs til the cows come home. And doom bolt. Motherfucking doom bolt.)
4) The magic system was flexible enough to let me do empire wide sweeping changes, or let me focus all my power on one peon to turn him into Rambo. I could play it either way, and it wasn't a foregone conclusion which was better. (Speaking of unplayable lopsided tech trees ruining games: Ascendancy anyone?)
Anyways, I had been thinking all this up just over the past few days, and decided to look up Masters of Magic online and see if the intellectual property has landed in anyone's lap again. (There have been about 2 or 3 failed attempts at a sequel in the 15 years since it came out.) I rather quickly found references to this Elemental game, and then stumbled on this blog from the developers of Elemental, in which they discuss game development and what they're working towards and such. And they happen to hit on several of my list items above.
And the graphics look oddly stylized but awesome.
And it's being made by the same guys who made GalCiv2.
And now I suddenly have a game to look forward to.
Part of me wants to pre-order in case the company is in financial troubles. I don't want this project to fall down like so many other MOM sequels and clones have. Age of Wonders is excellent, but the more the merrier.