November 8, 2007
Official Trailer
This is the kind of city you could end up with if you choose to play as a robber baron.
Watch | Download
Scheduled for release later this month, SimCity Societies is a city-building game that promises to offer a much more hands-on approach to urban planning than previous games in the series. For example, previous SimCity games let you place zones designated for residential, commercial, or industrial use, but Societies will task you with placing individual buildings. This will not only give you more freedom to design the appearance of your city, but also to impact its residents in ways that simply weren’t possible previously. How you decide to use this newfound power is entirely up to you, of course, and there’s no reason why you can’t put personal gain ahead of the population’s happiness if that’s what floats your boat. Think you might make a good robber baron? Here’s a brief look at what you can expect from SimCity Societies if you choose that path, courtesy of the game’s associate producer.
Robber Baron
By Daniel Alioto
Associate Producer, Electronic Arts
Polluted, dirty, overpopulated, and crime-ridden downtown regions toil away while the fat cats sit behind their walls, as well as police forces, bathing in money. Workers are getting very high unhappiness levels from their work but are receiving, in turn, very high levels of happiness at their “venues,” which causes large mood swings. Limited venue space can create rapid happiness problems if something goes wrong.
These smoggy cities with cracked streets are packed with people–generally with many more people than there are jobs. There is little regard for the health or safety of individual sims and high salaries for employees are almost nonexistent. However, the upside is that simoleons are abundant and the player will have no lack of funds to continue creating the city. Only amongst high turmoil will the production of simoleons come screeching to a halt, which is entirely possible in a city likened to a powder keg.
As a player, you might feel somewhat like a corrupt politician or mob boss, sitting safely behind hired shields and racking in the cash while the sims are breaking their backs knowing that they are expendable. They also know that if for some reason they did lose their jobs, there would other poor souls eagerly waiting in line for them.
The favored homes and venues of the industrial profile used to create a city like this are also breeding grounds for criminals. Making sure to have enough police stations around is going to be important. While you may not care if your city is crime-ridden, you certainly don’t want to let it get too much of a hold on your simoleon production. But just in case it does, you can use your police stations’ special SWAT ability to send out the riot police to round up the criminals and rogue sims. Of course, such an action isn’t free, but with many other industrial buildings offering additions to the treasury as a bonus to the daily grind of the sims, you shouldn’t worry.
SimCity Societies is unlike any previous game in the series.
In SimCity Societies, a city like this looks and behaves as you would imagine. Choked yellow skies and decreased visibility due to smog, with vandalized building textures, as well as an abundance of litter, mar the cityscape. From the music and the lighting right down to the weary sims and their vehicles, this city looks and feels just like a middle-American 19th-century industrial city.
Robber Baron Buildings
These buildings are mostly associated with SimCity Societies’ industrial profile, whereas pollution and poor living conditions are the theme. Injured? Sick? Unable to get to work? We don’t care! We can pack ‘em in so tight that we have enough people to replace the sick and injured at any time! Cracked streets and yellow skies are the norm here. With criminals roaming the streets in droves, this is not a nice place to live! But do you care? No! You are making a lot of money off of your high-population workplaces, as well as their special abilities, which include a production drive and an efficiency drive. The following is a list of buildings associated with the industrial profile:
Brewery Workplace
Colossal Foundry Workplace
Corrupt Police Station Workplace
Dept. of Public Works Workplace
Firing Range Venue
Foundry Workplace
Liquor Store Venue
Loan Shark Workplace
Machine Shop Workplace
Meat-Packing Plant Workplace
Motorcycle Shop Venue
Nightclub Venue
Off-Track Betting Venue
Oil Refinery Workplace
Pawn Shop Workplace
Racetrack Venue
Soup Kitchen Venue
Speakeasy Venue
Steel Mill Workplace
Super Coal Plant Power
Sweatshop Workplace
Temperance Union Workplace
Textile Factory Workplace
Underground Casino Venue
Union Hall Venue
Unionized Steel Factory Workplace
Vigilante Group Workplace
Vocational School Venue
Welfare Center Venue
Check back for a full review of SimCity Societies in the not-too-distant future.
-If Its Games
November 8, 2007
To most people Web browser-based games entail finding a way out of an utterly obnoxious room or punting an adorable penguin as many furlongs as possible until it lands, typically in the most gruesome fashion conceivable. However, the indie game gurus at GarageGames are hoping to change that perception with InstantAction, an online portal that promises “console-quality” games aimed at a hardcore audience.
Cyclomite will be an InstantAction launch title.
Eschewing the casual-game formula, GarageGames is building InstantAction out with games that emphasize high production values. Rather than being based on Adobe Flash or similar programs, GarageGames has created the technology to enable either its proprietary Torque engine or any other game engine to work in a browser. For its users, GarageGames has built up extensive usability features including leaderboards, friends’ lists, and stat tracking.
GarageGames has already signed on support from both established developers and up-and-coming indie talent. In October, Bungie cofounder Alex Seropian’s Wideload Games announced it would be contributing a launch title to the service titled Cyclomite. Currently, more than 12 games are in development, and while GarageGames wasn’t willing to confirm rumors that InstantAction would feature a Starsiege Tribes successor, a first-person shooter is definitely in the works for the service.
Backed by media conglomerate IAC, GarageGames plans to roll out InstantAction in January 2008. Beta testing is currently underway, and those interested in participating can sign up through GarageGames’ InstantAction placeholder site.
To get a better idea of how InstantAction will deliver hardcore games through a casual-friendly medium, If Its Games recently spoke with GarageGames CEO Josh Williams.
If Its Games: So what is InstantAction all about?
Josh Williams: We’re doing browser games, right? Normally when you think of that, you think casual games because that’s all that exists in the browser right now. What we’ve been working on in the background for a couple of years is technology at GarageGames that lets you do higher-end stuff in the browser. Basically, we can do console-quality, near-console quality games focused on core mechanics, action-oriented gameplay–multiplayer stuff with full 3D shooter graphics in a browser. We have a couple games up and running in InstantAction alpha, which we’re trying to launch in early 2008. We’re going to try to push it as early in ‘08 as we can.
IIG: As far as the service itself, what kind of features are you all building in to it?
JW: Already everyone has a profile on the site, along with a friends’ list. With that friends list, you can go through and track what games your friends are playing. We have real-time presence information, so you can see who’s online, who’s offline, and what they’re playing when they are online. You can invite friends to come into your party.
One of the cool things on the site is that when you have a party of players, you can move from game to game on the site together as a group. Normally, of course, you’d go navigate through one game’s lobby system to hook up with your friends, and if you wanted to switch games, you’d have to pop out the disc, put in another disc, go through another lobby system, and hook back up with people, or at least people who have that game. This way, it’s more like a virtual couch where you’re playing together, moving from game to game. We make the whole process of inviting people to play really easy, and another thing we do is provide a URL, a link, that you can send through e-mail or instant messenger that anyone can just click on. When they click on it, they’ll either join your party, or if you’re live in a game session, they can actually join your game server if it’s not full. The idea there is to make joining a game online as easy as watching a video on YouTube.
We have tons of other features, such as the whole idea of leaderboards and stats tracking for games will be in there early on, and over time, since this is a site online, we’ll roll out more features. In the future we’ll plan competitions and have official support for groups and clans and that sort of thing.
IIG: So the main thing you’re trying to convey with this is that it’s not just Adobe Flash-style games.
JW: Right. The reason you don’t see real high-end games in the browser right now is that there’s no real technology to support it. You can’t do much other than single-player, 2D stuff in Flash. There’s [Adobe] Director, but that’s not great for making high-end games. It’s not really improving the technology. The technology we have allows you to develop a game as if it were for a desktop like normal. You don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re in a browser when you’re developing a game, and you can use any engine technology you like. Of course, we make the Torque game engine, but you don’t have to use Torque to make games for InstantAction and have them run in the browser and integrated with our backend system and platform. It took us a couple years to figure out this tech, but basically we allow you to render in the browser and have nice smooth user input and controls in the browser, as well as hook up to the backend features and services like the friends list and profile and all the stats tracking stuff through an API. When you develop for a console or platform, you get a development kit for that platform. We basically view this as a new platform for gaming–like a console for the Web. You get a development kit for this platform as well.
IIG: If this is console-quality gaming, what kind of specifications will people need for their computers?
JW: This really comes down to the specifics for the game. When we say console quality, I want to be clear–not many PCs can run Gears of War or Halo 3 like on their Xbox 360, and the whole idea with InstantAction is to get people up and running quickly. We don’t want to have people sit through 3GB of download before they can actually start playing. We’re not trying to create 60-hour epic games. But we can take full advantage of PC hardware. As for minimum specifications, it is going to be title specific. We encourage developers to make their titles fall back to as wide a range of systems as possible, but some games it might make sense to only support shader model 2.0 graphics cards or what have you. The same version of Marble Blast Ultra for Xbox Live Arcade runs on the 360 as on the PC. We’ve added 11 new multiplayer maps exclusively for InstantAction. So it’s the same game running on the 360 that’s running on the PC browser. When we originally ported it to the browser for InstantAction, it required shader model 2.0 hardware. Now we’re working on fallbacks for it so that even though it won’t look as nice, it can work on a wider range of hardware, and any developer can do that.
IIG: So I guess this all adds up to a different way of thinking about browser games.
Far-future gaming.
JW: Right, exactly. All those Flash games are really simple, they’re little toy games, but it’s awesome that there’s so much creativity out there and really the thing that makes those games so popular even though they’re so simple is that you can get a link, click it, go play and waste five minutes. If you had even better gameplay, better graphics, more compelling content that’s just as accessible, those games would really break out and take off.
IIG: While developing and optimizing these games for browsers, have you found one that’s stood out above the others?
JW: No, working in the various browsers isn’t too much different. We want to roll out with support for XP and Vista, Firefox and Internet Explore. And we want to support OS 10 too as quickly as we can. We’re trying to support all the popular browsers and OSes.
IIG: So once people get into these games, how are they going to be paying?
JW: There again we can be pretty game-specific. The fact that we’re online lets us do all kinds of different stuff. If you’re doing a normal game, you’ve got to stick with charging a price for the retail version or downloadable version, and then maybe a subscription fee or something. What we’ll do with each game is take a look at what makes the most sense for that particular title and really what works best for gamers–what people are going to like the most. For some games, we might just stick with the unit sales thing where we’re charging $10, $15, $20 or whatever it is for a title. If we’re updating a game all the time, and it makes sense for that particular game, then we can do subscriptions. It might make sense that we give a game away for free, the initial version, and then sell add-on content or level packs or what have you. The cool thing about being online is that we can be pretty flexible with it, we can try different stuff and really customize it per title and figure out what works best for people that play.
IIG: Will people be able to pay a standard flat fee and have access to all of the games?
JW: We thought about that, but that’s not how we’re thinking we’ll launch it. But basically we want to talk with people who are coming to InstantAction and spending time there, playing games, and figure out what’s the best model for them. If some kind of bundle package works, then we’ll do it. But we’re not looking that way to start.
IIG: What’s the turnaround time for developing these games?
JW: The development cycle for these games is typically about 12 months. Some games that we have in the initial portfolio were already under development with developers that we had relationships with already. So they might have already had six or nine months in to them, and now there’s only another six or nine months left to do. A lot of the titles are close to completion now, and are slated to be complete when we launch in early January or in the coming months thereafter. So a typical development cycle can range anywhere from 6 to 18 months, is kind of our target range.
IIG: Is it cheaper to develop these kinds of games?
JW: I think it is, partially because we bear some of the brunt ourselves, in terms of helping out with certification and QA when we work with developers. Also, for instance, with Marble Blast Ultra, it has a user interface that’s all done in a Web page. If a developer chooses to make their game that way, we often help out with a lot of that work too. Also, it’s just really fast and easy to develop these sorts of interfaces for the Web. It’s easier than doing it the traditional way. The rest of it is pretty standard PC development costs and timelines. Although, of course, if you leverage good technology, you can save a bunch of costs and time that way, whether that be Torque or any other valid PC engine.
IIG: You mentioned Marble Blast, and GarageGames has done several other casual-style games such as Minigolf Mania and Tube Twist. Where do you all stand with casual games on InstantAction?
JW: Most of the games that are on GarageGames’ online store won’t be coming to InstantAction. You’re right, the games we’ve done in the past or published in the past were basically targeted at the audience that was playing downloadable games online, which has been mostly casual stuff. We’ve never done Bejeweled-style total puzzle games or Chess stuff or whatever. We’ve always had higher-end 3D stuff at least, but yeah, Minigolf Mania is a good example of a 3D game that’s still very casual. That’s not our goal with InstantAction. We kind of had to do those games in the past because there wasn’t a platform like InstantAction that allowed us to do really compelling, core-oriented stuff online. And now there is. We really do see our main audience as core gamers and X gamers. Probably folks like you and I, who like to play core games, don’t have as much time as we used to. But for me, if I can just open a URL and start playing a game for five minutes…and maybe that turns into an hour or something at work…then I’d play them, a lot.
Take a break and hope in a tank.
IIG: So with that rumor circulating of GarageGames working on a game in the vein of Starsiege Tribes, InstantAction is more geared toward these type of gamers. Have anything to say on that game, by the way?
JW: We’re still sticking with our official “no comment” response for now. But, we are working on a FPS, and that’s all I’ll say for now.
IIG: OK, so going back to how the games are smaller and quicker to develop. They seem like they might be geared toward the indie development crowd. Is that where most of the games will come from, or are you trying to attract bigger, more established developers?
JW: Yeah, we’re attracting a lot of bigger, established developers. Of course, we want to support indie developers because there’s tons of creativity there, and at GarageGames our philosophy’s always been about helping foster independent games and game development. So certainly we’re already working with some indie teams, and I’d say that’s in the category of undiscovered talent–really creative, effective teams that have great game ideas that are getting them done, so we’re definitely supporting that. But we’re attracting a lot of pro talent, too, in established studios. A couple of weeks ago we announced Alex Seropian and Wideload Games would be doing a game for InstantAction, and we have other bigger-name developers that we’ll be announcing in the coming weeks and months.
We have over a dozen games in development for InstantAction, with three or four of those being developed internally and the rest are all external–second- and third-party stuff from a mix of big-name developers. There are people who are at big studios who are sick of working on three- or four-year grinds and being just a cog in the wheel of a hundred-man team, who maybe are veterans and remember several years ago when it was still fun to make games. And they can take this as an opportunity to focus on fun gameplay, work on a project for 6, 12, 18 months, making sure the gameplay is really fun, making sure it looks sweet, get it out and find an audience, and then maybe update it over time since its online. That’s a thought that appeals to a lot of developers, too; that they can have a direct connection to their players and audience, iterate quickly online, tweak, make it better, create new content, whatever it is, which is much better than having to go dark for three years, start doing prelaunch stuff, then launch on year four, and then do an expansion pack 12 months later.
IIG: So do you think we’ll see big-name studios doing side projects on InstantAction. As in, while we’re waiting for Gears of War 2, or whatever, Epic Games would put out some fun game in the meantime?
JW: Yeah, when you start thinking about it, there’s all kinds of things you can do. One of the things when we work with a developer, even when we fund the development, we work with the developer such that they own the IP. So, one of the cool things that people can do with InstantAction, and we already have people doing this, is they can take their favorite game ideas, the IPs they most want to work on, and put it out on InstantAction. There, they can develop the core idea of it, make it look sweet, but still have the short development timeline and really get that core gameplay feeling really good. Then, if it does well and people like the idea, they can grow it into a bigger project. Whether that be another version for InstantAction and other platforms, or whether that be a boxed product for consoles or retail PC. That’s a really smart way to leverage the Web, and InstantAction is a great platform for that kind of stuff. And yeah, we already have developers that are thinking in that kind of line, and I think we’ll see that a lot.
IIG: About this time last year, GarageGames cofounder Jeff Tunnell wrote an article essentially conjecturing how much money can be made off of Xbox Live, and it turned out that indie developers are getting, not really fleeced, but they have to pay a substantial amount to Microsoft through distribution fees and what not. Is this something you all are trying to change with InstantAction? As in, are you trying to make it more profitable for indie developers and help them get more exposure?
JW: Yeah, we’re trying to do all those things. Of course, we’re not taking potshots at Arcade or anything. Say whatever anyone wants to say about the rates and where they’re moving now, but it’s still been good for indies over all. Arcade is another platform that helps establish digital distribution in the minds of publishers and of gamers, which is great. It’s another platform for distribution that gives developers more options, which gives them more power ultimately, so it’s been a good thing over all. But for us at InstantAction, we want to go a lot farther. Not only do we offer great royalty rates to the developers that we’re working with, but even when we fund a title, again we work with the developers such that they own the IP. We also do something else that is really rare, if it even happens in the industry when we fund a title. We don’t make the developer work for advances on royalties. We actually pay them a fee to cover the cost of development, and then they earn royalties from day one, right from the first unit they start selling they get a royalty on. So that’s been a big thing for us. In building InstantAction and taking on our investment at the company, not sacrificing those ideals was primary in all our planning and strategizing and discussions for this stuff.
IIG: So do you see Xbox Live or PlayStation Network as services that can coexist with InstantAction, not as competitors?
JW: No, we don’t see them as competitors. As a couple of examples, we take good titles from Arcade and PSN, and potentially even Wii Ware in the future, and when it makes sense, we can bring them to InstantAction. Likewise, when there’s great games from InstantAction, whenever it makes sense, we can take those to console partners as well. We have great relationships with Microsoft, Nintendo, as well as Sony. If it makes sense for a particular title, we can do a console version, and already with a couple of the games we’re funding for InstantAction, we’re going to help bring to console platforms. Just thinking about it as a gamer, even if I wasn’t involved in InstantAction, I’d still check it out and play games there, but I’m still going to have my Xbox, PS3, and Wii, even if I don’t always have the time to actually open them up and play them.
IIG: So you’d say that something that would appear in InstantAction would be comparable to something they’d find on Xbox Live?
JW: Compared to the Xbox Live Arcade portfolio, most of the games on there wouldn’t even make it on InstantAction. That’s not to be disparaging to anything on Arcade, but there’s a lot of casual titles on there. We’re not looking to do Hexic HD or something for InstantAction, that doesn’t really make sense. We wouldn’t really be differentiating our channel from some of the other stuff that’s out there. Marble Blast Ultra is, for our example, kind of the minimum spec. So Marble Blast is multiplayer and single-player, entirely physics-based gameplay that’s got 3D, shaderized graphics–fairly complicated game. Arguably, you could say it’s one of the most complicated games on Arcade, or at least it was for a while. And that’s kind of our min spec for InstantAction.
Marble Blast Ultra will be the minimum spec.
IIG: What kind of effect do you think InstantAction will have on the indie community at large? Do you think it will help raise awareness? Do you think it will get indie developers more on the map?
JW: Yeah, we think it will help raise awareness, certainly. Also, again, it should be a great platform for games and game distribution, and a good business model that way. Every time there’s another platform that comes out that’s successful and works with indie developers, it puts more powers in the hands of developers. The games industry used to be ruled totally by console manufacturers and a couple of publishers, and then there were more and more publishers, and now there are more and more platforms. In the end, its platforms and publishers competing for content. And there’s always a million game ideas and a bunch of people who want to make games, and that’s great. But essentially, it’s easier today to be an indie developer than it ever has been, and we definitely want to help that. Yeah, we hope it has an effect on that and, of course, push the industry forward more.
IIG: Just to touch briefly on the IAC/GarageGames deal. InstantAction was cited as a primary impetus behind the deal. Has that relationship been working out well?
JW: Yeah, we’re superhappy about it. We spent a long time talking to IAC and a bunch of other people about funding options, because we’ve had this vision for creating this platform for games in the browser. But we knew we couldn’t do it on our own; it just takes a lot more resources than we had on hand to get it done. Yet, again, GarageGames was founded on very strong principals, and so we weren’t just going to do a money deal and sacrifice all that. It took us a long time to find a partner who got the vision we were talking about, and who was willing to work with us the way we were willing to work with somebody. It took a very wise company to see the value in working with a partner in this way.
We like the idea of working with IAC, and the main reason we wanted to work with them was they had the same plan, which is funny, for doing InstantAction as we did. They wanted to see high-end core games in a browser, and they just couldn’t found anyone who got it. They talked to dozen and dozens of game companies, from traditional publishers to little indie studios, and they couldn’t find anyone with the technology to do it, or really even got the vision. And when we started talking to them, it was funny because we both would say a little bit, then the other party would say a bit, and so on, and we both were talking about the same thing. And it’s been great working with them since. They’ve basically given us the resources to help get this thing done and out there and really promote it and get it in front of people after we launch. And we’ve been able to learn a lot from them in terms of building a great platform.
IIG: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
JW: When you think about games being online in a browser, one of the other cool things we can do is iterate quickly. Since there’s a direct connection between developer and player, one of the cool things we can do is that players can have a lot of input on the direction that a game goes. Developers can try stuff out and test it online. We think that’s one of the cool things that this platform will provide, too. For our games particularly that we’re developing, we really want to listen to the audience. In the beta period, we’ll be trying out early concepts for future games that we want to work on, throw up different types of stuff early on before it gets launched to private groups and get real-time feedback online and have the players help us figure out what would be best to work on.
IIG: That raises an interesting question. You mentioned developers may want to try out ideas on the service. Have you taken into consideration that people may not like having to pay for games that aren’t really “done”?
JW: We’re never going to charge for a game unless it’s polished, and great and worth paying for. That’d be a horribly bad move for us to try to charge for a game that doesn’t feel done. We’ll never do that. But, if you bought a game or two, you could be selected for access to an early game and give feedback on it. You don’t have to pay for access, that’ll be free. You should be rewarded for giving feedback.
November 8, 2007
Exclusive Footage
Humanity tries to make a last stand against the aliens.
Watch | Download
Many of the developers at Petroglyph got their start at the now-shuttered Westwood Studios, the birthplace of Command & Conquer, the seminal real-time strategy game that helped to introduce the world to the popular formula of building huge bases and armies to crush your opponents. Therefore, it’s not too surprising to find Command & Conquer influences in Universe at War: Earth Assault, the upcoming game from Petroglyph and publisher Sega that deals with an alien war raging on Earth. We had a chance to play a work-in-progress version of the game to check out how this war of the worlds is shaping up. Please note, the following contains slight spoilers to the story.
The single-player game in Universe at War is notable because there’s a single-player campaign, as well as single-player scenarios. The campaign lets you follow the game’s story, while the scenarios let you alternate between a global real-time strategic mode and real-time battles. The global view divides the world into large territories. You must capture a territory by defeating enemy forces in it. Once a territory is under your control, you can build different facilities in it. For instance, you can dedicate a territory to resource gathering, which provides you funds to purchase additional structures and units. Or you might dedicate a territory to unit production, which will let you churn out new units there. This is similar to other overarching strategic modes in other games, though Universe at War differs from most by having this all take part in real time, not in turns.
Some aliens have come to destroy us, while others have come to help us.
There’s a variety of scenarios that ship with the game, and you can use them with any of the three alien factions. One lets you start with a single territory and you work your way up from there. Another begins with all the world’s territories split evenly among the three factions. That way, you don’t have to spend a lot of time building an empire before the battles begin. Perhaps the most challenging scenario has your territories isolated from one another, and you must try to stave off defeat while trying to reconnect your forces.
If you want more of a linear and structured experience, then there’s the single-player campaign. Considering that the game focuses on three distinct alien factions, it’s a bit surprising that the first missions of Universe at War let you play as the poor “sentients” who are already living on the planet. The prologue kicks off with the alien Hierarchy, a malevolent race that strips planets bare, invading Earth. The opening mission takes place in Washington, D.C. where the Hierarchy have overrun the defenses and are turning civilians, as well as everything else, into raw material. You play as Colonel Moore, a chaingun-wielding tough guy trying to rescue the president from the White House in a classic RTS mission where you have to guide a small group of units around the map, taking out all bad guys that get in your way.
At your disposal are conventional military units, such as infantry, rocket infantry, humvees, tanks, and Apache helicopters. You’re up against “lost ones,” which are the Hierarchy’s infantry unit; grunts, which are tank-sized behemoths; and detection droids, which are spindly tripod war machines, as you battle through to the White House to save the president. The bad news is that he’s wounded, so the second mission is to escort his ambulance through the streets of Washington D.C. to a nearby military fort. Unfortunately, the Hierarchy have brought a walker to the party, a gigantic mobile fortress that walks around on legs. While you’re given a barracks and factory to churn out fresh units, there’s pretty much no way that you can take the walker down.
Global domination is the goal of scenario mode.
Just when things look absolutely bleak for the humans, though, the tide turns. Portals open in thin air and an army of sentient robots emerges to engage the Walker. These robots are the Novus, a machine race that is dedicated to the destruction of the Hierarchy to avenge their organic creators. While the Novus are all machines, they did clone Mirabel, one of their creators. Mirabel serves as a hero unit for Novus and she flies around in Viktor, a giant mech. Interestingly, Mirabel looks human, and when she sees the sentients, she wants to make contact with them. However, Mirabel is overruled by her superiors and sent on another mission. Thus, the prologue for Universe at War ends and the Novus story begins.
The Novus campaign will send you around the world in pursuit of a variety of missions. After helping out the humans, you’ll head off to the Middle East to protect resource centers. There, you’ll need to build an army of Ohm bots, the Novus’ basic infantry, to defeat walkers. The only way to take down walkers is to focus on each of their “hard points” on their hulls, where they have weapons and special attachments. Once those are destroyed, the walker is vulnerable. Mirabel and Viktor can help in this, thanks to their missile barrage and sniper abilities. While the Viktor mech looks like it was taken out of Japanese anime, the majority of Novus’ units look completely original and like high-tech modern art. They can be deadly, though. Dervish fighters can spin and whirl in place, sending waves of energy that can damage or destroy enemies. There are also the blades, which are beefed-up infantry units that can slice apart ground foes.
It’s about the fifth mission in where Universe at War starts to open up and the initial handholding that you got from the game to ease you into it ends. Like many RTS games, this is essentially a game about resource management. You have so many tasks to accomplish, but a relatively limited amount of resources to accomplish them with, which means you have to figure out how to prioritize. Vertigo, a Novus hero unit, has to retrieve the pieces of a galactic portal that the Novus needs before the Hierarchy gets them. At the same time, enemy units are pushing onto your base, which means you have to dedicate units to defense. The Hierarchy walkers are busy tearing up the countryside, including the conduits that are used by Novus units to transport around the map quickly. Oh, and you also need to destroy a Hierarchy base that’s holding onto one of those galactic portal pieces. There’s a lot of tension in this mission and it simply feels like you have too much to do.
Universe at War’s war of the worlds begins in December.
The interface makes your job a bit easier by offering a nice way to eliminate a lot of the micromanagement normally found in RTS games. A handful of buttons at the bottom of the screen lets you access all of your production facilities, so you can designate rally points and build queues without having to repeatedly move the camera from your base to the front lines.
Playing as the Novus is a fun experience when you discover how to use all of the faction’s mobility to your advantage. At the same time, you’re going to need it to defeat the lumbering forces of the Hierarchy. It’s a sobering realization when you figure out that Hierarchy walkers are heading toward your base; you need to throw everything at them to stop them. It’ll also be interesting to see how the game plays out when the shoe is on the other foot and you get to control the Hierarchy or the Masari, the third alien faction. They both play quite differently from the Novus, so you’ll need to adapt your thinking considerably. Based on what we’ve seen so far, Universe at War will deliver a lot of interesting new twists on the standard real-time strategy game. It’s going to ship next month.
-If Its Games
November 7, 2007
Today, Activision reported that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock enjoyed $115 million in first-week sales in North America. The number was an upward revision from the $100 million seven-day figure Activision announced yesterday, which itself led to the company to revise its holiday quarter earning’s forecast up to $1.05 billion and full-year guidance to $2.07 billion.
With the publisher already counting its chickens, industry watchers today weighed in on whether Activision can carry its stellar Q2 momentum through the last half of the fiscal year and into fiscal 2009. Believing Activision to be playing conservative, Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter sees growth of $1.06 million for the October-December months, and a full-year haul of $2.11 billion.
However, with the market more interested in growth than dollars-in-hand, Pachter believes Activision’s current fortunes may spell ill tidings for next year. “We think that the company has the potential to grow publishing revenues above the level we expect in FY:08, but acknowledge that the success of its lineup this holiday creates a formidable hurdle to revenue growth,” he surmised.
Likewise, Nollenberger Capital Partners’ Todd Greenwald also revised estimates on Activision’s fiscal year upward, but raises cautions on how the publisher will continue to grow. Greenwald believes Activision will be able to assuage less dramatic revenue growth with an influx in earnings growth. “We are modeling 12 percent revenue growth coupled with 29 percent earnings growth for next year, driven by a higher mix of next-gen, premium-priced publishing revenue; benefits from outsourcing development to China; and leverage on the G&A line, especially as high legal costs and RedOctane amortization expenses fade away.”
Goldman Sachs’ Mark Wienkes also believes Activision will build on earnings growth into next year in lieu of revenue expansion. In the short term, Wienkes believes this will be done primarily through administrative measures. He put it thusly: “Activision’s management team is in the process of revisiting its TV marketing campaigns, has streamlined its supply chain, and has aligned its studio and developer compensation with margin-focused incentive plans,” he said.
Wienkes also believes Activision is in prime position to capitalize on the upcoming holiday lineup. “Activision’s steadily increasing market share have positioned the company to prosper in the current cycle as its recurring Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, and Tony Hawk franchises have the scale and brands to be top tier sellers this holiday season.”
However, Lazard Capital Markets’ Colin Sebastian believes the rhythm genre remains the ace up Activision’s sleeve, and that the Neversoft-developed Guitar Hero franchise will continue to be the key differentiator in revenue growth. “While the new James Bond and Marvel titles will help to offset the gap caused by Spider-Man and Transformers, we believe the more important growth driver is Guitar Hero, given that the market for music simulation games continues to expand rapidly,” he concluded.
Adopting a wait-and-see approach, Pacific Crest’s Evan Wilson has doubts as to whether Activision’s upcoming in-house properties will be able to outperform this year’s lineup at all. Not completely ruling out growth, Wilson believes Activision may make additional acquisitions to bolster sales.
“We believe it will be more difficult for it to grow at or above the market rate than it was this year, and that growth may come in the form of acquisitions rather than organically,” Wilson said in a morning brief. “However, we believe Activision would attempt to complete an acquisition this fiscal year, although that is increasingly unlikely. To that end, we are most concerned with its ability to meaningfully grow margins.”
;)
;)
;)
;)
;)
