Andrew Whitehead feels bad for being so excited about so many upcoming reboots
So this one came out of nowhere. Arguably the finest galaxy-conquering simulator ever made, Master of Orion is back and looking better than ever after more than a decade long absence.
Right off the bat Jacob Beucler, director of global operations at Wargaming, made it clear how much his team and developer NGD Studios love the first two Master of Orion games, and that they all pretend that the third game never happened – a statement that should definitely please diehard fans.
Another surprise was that despite being published by free-to-play powerhouse Wargaming, this is a regular full-price retail release and not a micro-transaction based browser game or anything weird. “You won’t have to pay per turn,” joked Beucler.
For the uninitiated, Master of Orion is the grandfather of the 4X genre where your path to victory is tied to your ability to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. Explore the galaxy, expand your empire, exploit people and resources, and exterminate whoever stands in your way.
Every new game starts with you choosing one of 10 races which fans will recognise instantly from the original game while also probably noticing that that’s three less than the second game.
“This game has all the original races,” said Beucler, “we’ll get that down first and look at the Master of Orion 2 stuff later.”
Races have their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses – for example Humans are expert negotiators while the mechanical Meklar race can survive on toxic planets. For this particular demo we were shown the Alkari, a birdlike race that feature expert pilots and but also hate planets with high gravity.
What fans loved about Master of Orion is the different ways you can achieve victory. There’s the classic enemy eradication route, but there’s other options such as a technological victory that you gain through research, an excellence victory you get by being elected the supreme galactic ruler, an economic victory for getting really rich and a diplomatic victory for playing nice with all your space friends.
How each of these can be achieved is too complicated to get into now, but the point is that to win you’re going to have to play smart, not just aggressive. Plus you’ve got 500 turns to claim victory and if you’re absolutely on fire in one game you can win in all five ways at once.
“If you wanted to play a really quick game of Master of Orion, and you’re really good at it, it’s going to be a two hour game,” said Beucler. “The first really big game I played on here though took me about 10 and a half hours, and that was me trying to do it all.”
The first time you play any 4X game you’re going to be overwhelmed, and frankly back in the 90s games weren’t designed to hold your hand. But there’s no reason to continue that tradition so the new Master of Orion is all about accessibility.
“What we’re doing with [Master of Orion] is not making it less complex but more accessible,” explained Beucler. “Look at it this way, when we did World of Tanks on the Xbox 360 we heard ‘you’re just going to dumb it down to work on a console’. And no, we didn’t.
"[We are] actively making decisions to reinforce the hardcore but also allow the game to be accessible to new users born after 1993.”
Watching the demo closely the user interface, to my eyes at least, looked just like it did back in Master of Orion 2 but with a cleaner and more streamlined design. Getting into the action, Beucler launched a scout ship his home planet and headed toward the nearest star. Suddenly half way to it’s destination an anomaly was discovered.
Keeping the scout on its original path a frigate was then launched to investigate this new mystery and discovered the remanets of a ship that was home to a couple of hundred credits.
Earning credits is vital to victory and is done by collecting taxes and trading with other races as you discover them on your journey to galactic domination. Both of these income streams need careful management as you don’t want to piss off your own people, nor do you want to give too much or receive too little from another empire that could become your enemy in a very short space of time.
One element making a very welcome return is the Galactic News Network and their humorous observations. It’s easy to forget that for all the seriousness of the gameplay these games also had many lighter moments that help lighten the mood when you’re dealing with planet ending armadas threatening your homeworld.
“They’re going to report on silly stuff, but they also report on real-time events,” said Beucler. “So right now they’re talking about a supernova which is a world-ending event. If it happens to your homeworld that’s a real bummer [and they’ll report that].”
I’ve always had a lot of respect for how Wargaming handles their properties so I wasn’t surprised to see them do the right thing with this much-loved series.
“I can tell you that for the president of our company Victor Kislyi the original is one of his favourite games of all-time,” said Beucler. “So when the [Master of Orion license] came up he bought it. He bought it so he can bring it back and deliver that same experience again.”
You always want to have your critical eyes wide-open during previews but it’s hard to not be genuinely excited by this game. Master of Orion, the 4X series certain gamers still talk about like it’s the Citizen Kane of gaming, is coming back and looks set to be absolutely brilliant.
Get hype, humans.