One of the most exciting things I've seen in strategy and simulation games for an age is a screen that loads in when you boot up Industries of Titan. Industries of Titan is a game about making a foothold on the toxic and generally hideous surface of Saturn's moon. This screen shows that the developers of Industries of Titan are busy making a foothold on the surface of the Epic Games Store, toxicity and hideousness unknown but I certainly like the font they use. Anyway, Industries of Titan is in early access, and this is the roadmap. When I first looked at it I wasn't just excited by the thought of all these features that will be coming to the game. I was emboldened in a strange, cowardly way, if cowards can even be emboldened: here was a game that was by necessity stripped back. If there was a moment for someone like me, someone hesitant and a bit stupid, to make a success of Titan, this was surely it.
And it made me thing about strategy games and early access. The potential of this combination - a game made of hundreds of interlocking pieces, and a release schedule that allows for the game to build itself up in stages, like a model taking shape in a 3D printer. Anyway, I was thinking about all of this when I came across Old World, the new strategy game from Mohawk Games, also on the Epic Store. This is a team with experience in games like Offworld Trading Company, in which you can kill people with the futures market, if I remember correctly, and Civilization 3 and 4. And it's in early access too!
Even if you take early access out of it, Old World is pretty exciting stuff. On the surface it's a traditional 4X strategy game - here's the ancient world, pick a civ and go at it. There are differences everywhere you look - some of them, like the way units can move, with orders being a resource, are pretty fundamental to the game - but it's still very comforting in that way Civ games can be. Not comforting because of what you're doing, which is often horrific, but because of the ruminative flow these games settle into.
from Eurogamer.net
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