Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars is taking gamers back to the classic days of gaming

THE 1990s are often thought of as a classic age in gaming, with the establishment of franchises which set the standard for years to come afterwards.

THE 1990s are often thought of as a classic age in gaming, with the establishment of many groundbreaking franchises which set the standard for years to come afterwards.

While many of those franchises are still with us, several have faded into pleasant retro memories – and others are being rebooted for the 21st century after a long absence.

European games company Wargaming – best known for its popular armoured combat game World of Tanks and for its work restoring and preserving historic military vehicles and aircraft – is among those rebooting a late 20th century title, having been hard at work on a new version of 1993 space strategy classic Master of Orion.

The original was one of the early Four-X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) strategy titles, alongside the Civilization series, and spawned two direct sequels.

The new game, entitled Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars, is being developed by NGD Studios in Argentina and released by Wargaming under the WG Labs label.

The game has been in regularly updated early access for several months on the Steam and Gog platforms for PC.

Wargaming publishing product director Jacob Beucler travelled to Australia to meet with representatives of the gaming media and discuss the title at an event on May 16 in the Space gallery at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

Gamers are a notoriously fickle lot, especially when it comes to remaking iconic parts of the medium’s history, and Mr Beucler said the process of rebooting the franchise had bought its own challenges – starting with the original game’s notorious difficulty and complexity.

“Holy cow that game was hard,” he said, recalling his experiences playing it back in the 1990s,” he said.

“I had to go and get the manual, spend three hours reading it; OK, I can start a game now.

The biggest challenge for the development team was finding the balance between complexity and playability.

“Nobody wants to play spreadsheet games anymore.

“At the end of the day it has to be fun.”

The original developers worked as consultants on the game

One way to help ensure a reboot works is to get the original developers as consultants – something WG Labs managed to do for Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars.

Mr Beucler said the original developers were strongly involved in the game and had provided a guided lesson in what had worked originally, what hadn’t, and what they’d do differently.

“We talk to with (the original developers) every day – they play every build,” he said.

“They tell us they don’t like it, they’ve told us they didn’t like it for a very long time, they’ve recently started telling us they really like it. That’s good! It’s going in the right direction.

“Getting them involved was critical for us.”

Mr Beucler said the ultimate goal was to let players of the original game relive everything they loved about it with the benefits of modern graphics and technology, while also allowing new players to experience the same thing gamers back in the 1990s had when they played the original.

One of the biggest surprises for the developers, Mr Beucler said, were the big acting names who were only too happy to be involved with the game, with well-known actors such as Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn, Robert Englund and Dwight Schultz lending their voice talents to the project.

“The thing we didn’t expect was the level of voice talent we’d get for the game,” he said.

“We didn’t plan to get Mark Hamill or Dwight Schultz.”

The team weren’t worried about the upcoming Civilization VI either¸ scheduled for an October 21 release, with Mr Beucler explaining the Master of Orion team were all fans of the series and were inspired by the potential competition.

Master of Orion: Conquer The Stars has been in development about two years and has been undergoing continuous improvement and tweaking in recent months based on feedback from Early Access players.

Mr Beucler said while the game was available as an early access title now, there wasn’t a completion date for the finished title on the cards just yet, explaining they weren’t going to officially release the final version game until they were completely happy with it – hence the extended time in Early Access.

“When you bring back an IP, especially one that matters to (Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi) and the rest of the company as much as it does, we couldn’t very well just finish it and ship it and go ‘Well, what do you guys think?’,” he said.

“That’s not the right approach for us.

“It’ll be done when it’s legendary.”

Master of Orion isn’t the only circa-1990s-era game to get a 21st century update in recent times either, with an increasing number of publishers looking to the era for inspiration.

Some examples include the recent iD Software reboot of groundbreaking 1993 demon-shooter Doom, which was released earlier this month with popular acclaim, while the 1994-era sci-fi strategy classic UFO: Enemy Unknown made a welcome return to screens in 2012 after being remade by Firaxis Games as XCOM, and in 2014 inXile Entertainment released the first official sequel to the cult 1988 post-apocalyptic title Wasteland.

Royce Wilson travelled to Sydney as a guest of Wargaming.

Originally published as Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars is taking gamers back to the classic days of gaming