Off topic: How are games failing you?

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Agema

Westwood had many great games under their belt, but towards the end the wheels were falling off their wagon. Possibly because...

According to Wikipedia, many of the staff at Westwood were very unhappy with the EA takeover, left, and created Petroglyph Games. So check them up.

That's funny, because they did Empire at War, which had some really cool concepts (and ALMOST sated my desire for a remake of Rebellion), but ultimately got very repetitive, very fast.

Oddly, I met a number of gaming industry people in my time in WoW, including a couple who claimed to be working on that title. According to them, it was an offshoot of Westwood - but they were pretty tight lipped about most things. They also stated that they were not part of the "old guard", and apparently their co-workers (for SOME reason) didn't talk much about the glory days.

Their new project is Mytheon which is a free/micropayment MMO. Quite a departure from the old days.....

[Agema]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

Oddly, I met a number of gaming industry people in my time in WoW, including a couple who claimed to be working on that title. According to them, it was an offshoot of Westwood - but they were pretty tight lipped about most things. They also stated that they were not part of the "old guard", and apparently their co-workers (for SOME reason) didn't talk much about the glory days.

The really top brass at Westwood (and hence the major old guard) got very good positions within EA. I dare say pre-takeover their day-to-day input to titles could be relatively low, but their overall creative direction might have been considerable.

* * *

I was disappointed with Star Wars Rebellion. It was hopeless at reflecting that the Empire was a vast Behemoth and the Rebels a scruffy element skulking around the fringes, although the empire working by repression and the Rebels by hope, freedom and diplomacy was implemented. The battles were well done, but it took so long to get a fleet anywhere I could never manage to actually get a decent engagement where two big battle fleets met in a galaxy-deciding blaze, just a series of hopelessly one-sided skirmishes.

[JimMorrison]

Hmmmm. I remember (it's been yearrrrrrrs) that with the Rebels, I fared best if I gobbled up rim systems as fast as I could with my amazing diplomants, while keeping the Empire running around in circles with Han+Chewie and my other awesome saboteurs running interference within the core. If done right, eventually I was zooming into the core with insane fleets of something like 5 Bulwark Battlecruisers, with support. Though my first strike fleets would tend to consist of just 10-12 Nebulon-B, as they had an excellent combination of firepower and maneuverability, with 2 fighter squadrons apiece, and IIRC could carry some ground forces as well.

As the Empire, it seemed a fairly simple feat to get a couple battlegroups of Star Destroyers up, and bombard the living hell out of any dissenting core systems, hammering them under the iron fist of the Empire with ruthless efficiency. The key here was to get a very strong economy going, because it takes a lot of manpower to bring the rim systems under your thumb, with so much distance between the clusters.

I don't know, I thought that there was a great combination of diplomacy (fighting for influence on each world), subterfuge (few games have had such engaging covert ops components), and gorgeous (for 1998!) space battles. I definitely rank it as one of my favorites of all time, and probably the best game to ever be associated with Lucas Arts (though Ballblazer was SWEET back in the day oh yeah, and Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken!).