Galactic Civilizations Interview

Developer Stardock and publisher Strategy First are preparing to bring back a classic space strategy title for a new generation of gamers. Originally produced as a game for the now defunct IBM OS/2 operating system, the Windows remake of Galactic Civilizations will be released to stores later this year. HomeLAN got a chance to chat with Stardock's lead designer Brad Wardell to find out more about his plans for the remake. HomeLAN - Galactic Civilizations is a remake of your previous OS/2 game of the same name. Why did you decide to go back and revisit the game? Brad Wardell - Two reasons really. The first reason is that I?ve been wanting to play a game that really has a lot of strategic depth but is still reasonably easy to play. It seems like strategy games have either become incredibly complicated spreadsheet type games or really action games with some strategy elements. I want a game that is straightforward to play but has a lot of depth. The second reason is that I wanted us to wait until Stardock was big enough to do it right. After all, modern games are very expensive to make. The days of a couple of guys getting together and cranking out a great game are nearly passed. Now you need an entire team of graphics designers, animators, network developers, software developers, producers, etc. It?s only been recently that Stardock?s gotten to the point of having that kind of staff available. HomeLAN - Once you made the decision to remake the game, what were your main goals while designing the title? Brad Wardell - I wanted to make a game that was extremely replayable but was still relatively simple to play. I wanted us to make it a game in which players would be experiencing a huge number of different strategies to choose from without getting bogged down in micro management and tedium. HomeLAN - What's the hardest thing you have had to deal with in developing the new version of Galactic Civilizations? Brad Wardell - The fact that the game industry has changed so much is one of the hardest things we?ve faced thus far. The OS/2 version of it I made essentially by myself out of my college dorm room. Despite that, it got major coverage from the media. Now, it?s much harder. The bar is much higher and there are a lot more games to compete with. Gameplay often gets lost in the quest of creating games that give great screenshots and using technology buzzwords. That?s been the biggest challenge we?ve run into really. We?ve had to really balance ensuring that the game is visually state of the art without compromising the game play we want to provide. HomeLAN - What can you tell us about the playable sides in the game? Brad Wardell - The way we approach it is that you are the leader of the human civilization near the dawn of the 23rd century. Humanity is yours to mold. Your entire civilization is essentially like an RPG character that you can gain new abilities and attributes for during the course of the game based on the decisions you make. So you can make your civilization evil and brutal and nasty or gentle and peace loving and lots of combinations in between. This allows you to interact with the other civilizations that are similarly complex. How they react to you is based on how you behave yourself. So it?s a lot more than the standard ?build units, conquer enemy, rebuild, and repeat.? HomeLAN - What types of technologies and professions can a player use in Galactic Civilizations? Brad Wardell - Because there are many different victory conditions, you can take many different paths in your technology researching. You are not really meant to be able to research all the technologies in the game because you have to make choices in what path you want to take and those paths will make you stronger and stronger. Let me give you an example of what I mean since we?re play balancing this week: You can take the path of a diplomat by researching all the diplomacy technologies you can. These technologies not only give you new improvements that you can build on your planets but actual abilities for your civilization in the area of diplomacy. Because the game is single player, the diplomacy features in the game can take into account your diplomacy abilities and have the alien civilizations react to you in specific ways. The more diplomatic you are, the more you can manipulate the AI to do your bidding. So someone who is really good at diplomacy can actually get the AI to fight your wars for you and give you the technologies and ships you need. You can even trade money and technologies for planets (that?s a strategy I?ve been using this week ? using my diplomacy abilities to trade ships and money for technologies and then trade technologies with other races in exchange for planets). HomeLAN - You are not creating a traditional single player scenario for the game. Can you be more specific as to how the single player mode will work and why you decided to go that route? Brad Wardell - The main reason was replayability. I don?t normally like to play campaigns in games anyway but when I do, I tend to feel that when I?ve finished the campaign, the game is pretty much over because that?s where the developers tended to concentrate on. Instead, we took the cut scenes and storylines and put them into each game where the game will randomly bring up different things each game. So in one game, you may think you?re losing when suddenly the Drengin open up a dimensional wormhole and bring in the Arnor, a race of super beings who may or may not help you (depending on your ethical alignment). This comes complete with cut scenes and text and all that. You may not see such an event like that in weeks of playing but each game is designed to feel like its very own unique epic story. HomeLAN - What have you developed for a user interface for the game? Brad Wardell - We took our experience in UI design from creating software such as Object Desktop (WindowBlinds, DesktopX, etc.) and incorporated it into GalCiv. We?re using an internally developed UI technology called Pear3 that lets us ?skin? our UI. This makes it very easy for us to improve the visual appeal of the game as time goes on without having to reprogram anything. HomeLAN - What other unique and/or important gameplay elements will Galactic Civilizations have, in your opinion? Brad Wardell - One of the big things we?re working on is the Metaverse. Like I mentioned earlier, GalCiv is single player, but the Metaverse lets all those single player games be put into a larger context. Each player gets his or her own empire in the metaverse. The better they play, the larger their empire is on the metaverse galactic map and the higher their rank is. Empires can join together to form super-empires (clans) where each victory helps the rest in the group. I?m not familiar with any strategy game that?s really done that. What?s nice about this is that players get the advantages of playing on a quasi-Ladder without the cheese and nastiness usually seen when playing hyper-competitive people on the net. HomeLAN - In this age of 2.53 GHz processors and 128 meg graphics cards, do you think there is a place for a game such as yours in the marketplace? Brad Wardell - Oh definitely. The response already has been overwhelming. How many first person shooters and RTS games do people really want? There?s a pent up demand for an accessible strategy game with high replayability with computer players that play by the same game rules as the human players. Besides, I?d put our visuals up against any strategy game?s. Our graphics are just as 3D as the next game (every graphic in the game is from 3D Studio and Maia), we simply pre-render ours to get better quality. HomeLAN - There is not going to be any traditional multiplayer modes in Galactic Civilizations. Why did you decide not to offer this option in the game? Brad Wardell - The main reason is that we wanted to put the player as the center of the universe. I love multiplayer games but they sacrifice being able to put the player as the center of the action and hence are stuck having to do campaigns. By focusing on the human player, we can have dialogue and diplomacy that no other game matches. HomeLAN - Why did you decide to release the game through Strategy First? Brad Wardell - Strategy First has a really good reputation in treating developers well. And they get it. They understand that PC gamers are getting increasingly frustrated with their games being quasi-console games. They want REAL strategy games. HomeLAN - What is the current status of the game's progress and when do you think it will be released? We?ll be going into beta next month. We expect to have it in beta for several months while we incorporate features from beta tester feedback and implement the quasi-campaign content. HomeLAN - You have stated in previous interviews that you plan to update the game with new features after its initial release. What types of new features are you planning to add to Galactic Civilizations? Brad Wardell - We want to implement pirates. I.e. where you can build privateers that go out and raid your opponent?s freighter lines. We want to add more abilities into the game such as the concept of ?corruption? and ?crime?. I?m hoping that GalCiv 1.x will have the cabinet feature ? where you can pick your political cabinet which gives you abilities AND weaknesses. We also expect to continually beef up the Metaverse. HomeLAN - Finally, is there anything else you wish to say about Galactic Civilizations? Brad Wardell - Sure. We know we have a tough road ahead. We?re hoping to build our momentum by being much more responsive over the long term to the requests of our players. We?re making the game as expandable as we can so that players can extend the game on their own. We hope to build a community that will ensure that the game keeps getting richer and richer over time. source: homelanfed.com