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Countdown to What?

July 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · 5 Comments · Tilted Mill

Tilted Mill now has a countdown meter on their website. It is now at nine days, and has a picture of what I think is a dryad.

Let the speculation commence.

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5 Comments so far ↓

  • Scott R. Krol

    Commencing.

    Fantasy city builder?

    Ancient British city builder? (Mayhap she’s a druid instead of a dryad…) Of course, since there wasn’t really much city building in ancient Britain I’m leaning towards fantasy city builder.

    Or maybe they’re getting out of the city building genre and doing something completely different…

  • JonathanStrange

    A fantasy city builder could be interesting. Would it make the fantastic seem mundane if you needed mana miners and magical streetcleaners? Could cool special FX distract from the banal city budget meetings? Hmmm…

  • Scott R. Krol

    Aren’t all city builders though the same just with different window dressing? Back in the day I ended up reviewing all the Impressions’ city builders and to me it all boiled down to what theme you liked best as the gameplay was always pretty similar.

    And since it’s still going to be a while before Majesty 2 hits I think a fantasy theme could carry, even if it does involve magical streetcleaners.

    What would be cool is if you had different fantasy races and instead of simply graphical changes each race played out differently for building their cities. Heck, it might even scratch the Dwarf Fortress itch for that game with a better UI…

  • Troy

    If someone stuck a good UI and proper tile set onto Dwarf Fortress, they would sell many thousands of copies, I think. No AAA city builder comes close to its emergent behavior. But that would run against the roguelike ethic or something. If I was EA, I’d buy those guys, though. And give them whatever money they wanted. Because it’s not that far from being a Middle Earth Sims game.

    As for all city builders being the same, Scott, I know what you are getting at. A lot of that is the legacy of Impressions being the only game in town for a very long time. You had their historical city builders (which had some minor differences between them) and the SimCity or Settlers games, both of which are quite different from the Impressions series in very important ways.

    Which is why Children of the Nile was so great. It was a very distinctive game design, and Tilted Mill’s return to a pseudo-Impressions model with the otherwise excellent Caesar IV was a step backward in my mind.

    Gamasutra has an interview with Chris Beatrice in which he talks a bit about the upcoming enhanced CotN. I have a few questions for Mr. Beatrice, myself, and I’ll let you know when I get some answers.

  • Mark

    The new graphic looks very much like an Orc. Never been a big builder fan, but this has peaked my interest.