Wargaming announces Master of Orion reboot
But can it dethrone the GalCiv series it once inspired?
Time for something new from World of Tanks/Warplanes/Warships maker Wargaming. Time to reboot old space colonisation series Master of Orion.
Wargaming snagged the rights from Atari in 2013, and now a fresh yet apparently faithful remake has been announced. There's no official name nor date, but we do know it won't be the "World of" team making it. Rather, Wargaming has employed Argentinian developer NGD to do it.
NGD hasn't made anything we've written about on Eurogamer before. Games include F2P MMO Champions of Regnum, cartoony co-op arcade shooter Bunch of Heroes and an Adventure Time action adventure.
NGD will be backed by Wargaming's considerably deep pockets, however, and there's the promise that members of the original Master of Orion team will join the project to help. It's all being built anew from the ground up, as you'd expect.
Master of Orion is a series that began in 1993 and challenged players to lead a race to space dominance through diplomacy and conquest. Master of Orion 3 was the last game in the series, released in 2003, and was "a disappointment", according to our review.
It's a series that inspired others, notably the Galactic Civilization games - a series that grew only recently with the release of Galactic Civilizations 3. That game we awarded a Recommended to in our review. "Effortlessly accessible and customisable," we said, "Galactic Civilizations 3 lives up to its rich strategy heritage."
