Alan Emrich is a gaming veteran's veteran. He's done it all, from boardgames to card games, from computer games to pen and paper role-playing. He's experienced the trials and tribulations of being a game journalist, editor, and strategy guide author. He's been there from the beginning, when games were just a collection of cardboard chits, and will probably be there until the end, when games are so involving and realistic they have to be regulated like a drug.
Now, he's working as designer and lead writer on a title that has strategy fans drooling. Master of Orion III is more than just the latest iteration one of gaming's most revered series. If Emrich and his cohorts at Quicksilver software have their way, it will be the strategy game that blasts preconceived notions about real-time strategies and galaxy conquering. Alan and Quicksilver head Bill Fisher were kind enough to chat with us for a bit about this highly anticipated project.
Sharky Games: Readers can get more detail about Master of Orion III (MOO3) from their website, but tell us in brief about what type of game MOO3 will be and what type of audience you're targeting. Will MOO3 fit into a neat genre classification, or will it be a genre buster?
Alan Emrich: The "neat" classification is a turn-based galactic conquest game. But it does "bend the genre" quite a bit. Space battles, for instance, are in real-time. Also, a multi-player game that keeps moving was a core part of the design. That we're raising the player's perspective "up" a level from mere emperor is new (emperors come and go; you use them while managing a civilization for the long haul). And that change in perspective affects many aspects of the game. For instance, you don't pick up people and "put them there" as in most games of this genre. Instead, you set policies with carrots and sticks and try to urge migration (and your people may still go somewhere else).
We also "bust" the genre by trying to fully develop "the domestic front." That is, social issues within the empire must be dealt with. There are internal threats (unrest, revolts, changes of governments) and social issues (religion, slavery, personal freedoms, and so forth) as well as external threats to deal with. We're modeling a lot these epic story kind of elements so that the players feel that they're trying to ride herd over galaxy with a mind of its own.
Sharky Games: What are your opinions of the first two MOO games?
Alan Emrich: I loved them both. Tom Hughes (another designer on the MOO3 project) and I wrote the massive tome that was the original Master of Orion Strategy Guide. We're both big MOO2 fans, also. There's a lot of gold nuggets in both games for us to mine, and a lot of new territory for us to develop.