Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here’s a sliver of information from Big Download, that steaming roast carcass of news. For reasons Taylor summarises as “a timing thing”, Gas Powered Games has “put the project on hold” after a year of development. Details on the game itself are still quite hazy. We know it’s an RTS featuring airships, dragons, knights, chickens and (presumably) castles that will let players take on the role of a king, but that’s all I’ve got. You can watch the latest Kings and Castles development video blog thingum after the jump. It was released back in the Octobertime and features Chris saying the studio will be taking “a bit of a break”.
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This was a good one. When I met up with Chris Taylor (of Gas Powered Games and Supreme Commander fame) at GamesCom for my Dungeon Siege 3 interview, it was our respective last days of the convention. My body felt like a trashed and soon-to-be-demolished building, and Taylor was engaged in some kind of mental wrestling match with a hangover. To make matters more awesome, most of Dungeon Siege 3 was (and still is) under wraps, so we quickly moved on to talking about riches and success, and what that meant for game developers. Have a read after the jump.
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Eurogamer has found Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor in characteristically bullish mood arguing that thanks to the enormous explosion in Steam, he thinks the PC version of Dungeon Siege III will compete with the console ones, noting that “every major player in the world buying a PC gaming company” and leading to an exciting future. Example quote…

It’s a matter of time before you’re playing a game of the quality of a triple-A game that we know and love, like a Supreme Commander 2 or a StarCraft II, in a browser experience,” Taylor said. “There’s no reason that won’t happen within five to eight years. That’s one of the reasons PC gaming breaks out in that space. No installation. No grief. No reading the box and wondering if you have a 7000 or 8000 series video card and DirectX what? It just plays. It works. Wait till that happens full on.

Lots more excitement here. We’ve got our own Chris Taylor interview forthcoming soon. Soon-ish. Whenever Quinns transcribes it, anyway.

The precision-piranha of the games press, VG247, strike again. Analysing a small fragment in a video interview with gamers.fr where he alludes to the possibility of a Demigod 2. “We’ve got a lot of interest in a sequel to Demigod” he says, before moving on hope of recouping the money they invested in the first one. And sending children to college. Go to VG247 for all the rest of the quotes, including some eye-rolls at pirates. The video’s below, with the Demigod related stuff 2:40 or so in…
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Gas Powered Games have been exhaustively videoblogging the progress of their new strategy game for a while now, but a lot of it seemed to consistent in Mr Taylor talking about farmyard animals, and I’ve kind of lost the thread. Anyway, there’s some actual footage from the game in this latest episode, which might be worth taking a gander at (gander! See, now I am at it.) Furthermore, I must implore you to judge what you see here at face value, as if it is all the game consists in. I am sure there are no other menus, features, units, or strategic elements to Kings And Castles whatsoever. It’s surely just a game about tiny men storming a bridge that eventually gets bombed by airships, and nothing more. Not like the other games that did things differently in the past. No, sir.
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Dungeon Siege III is to be created by the busy men at Obsidian. The company, having put out Alpha Protocol, now seem to be re-enforcing their previous role as a team who pick up other people’s projects and take them in new directions. After Neverwinter Nights 2 and Knights of the Old Republic II, they’re currently creating Fallout: New Vegas, and it’s just been announced they’re taking the reigns from Gas Powered Games on the RPG series.

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Oops, we took our eye off the ball there. One post about Gas-Powered Games’ upcoming Kings & Castles, and then we completely ignored it. There’s a reason for that. It involves clowns and toast crusts, and the memories remain too traumatic to share with you. Now those dark times are behind us, so I feel comfortable in bringing you more of the Supreme Commander/Dungeon Siege studio’s excellently strange video blogs, documenting both the game’s development process and Chris Taylor’s grasshopper mind.

Last time, El Taylor was talking to the animals. Some 13 installments later, he’s showing off the game – and it’s looking quite lovely. Here be dragons! Also, chickens.
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Gas Powered Games have announced their next RTS (they’re wrapping up Supreme Commander 2 right now) and it’s called Kings And Castles. Apparently it’s a “one-of-a-kind experience” that will “let players take on the role of one of three powerful kings who are vying for control of an all-new, original fantasy world.” The team plan to record and publish every aspect of development for this new title. “We’re doing something different this time around,” said Chris Taylor, Creative Director of Gas Powered Games. “We want to take our fans on a great adventure with us. They’ll get to go behind-the-scenes and watch the game come to life from start to finish.” And with that in mind, the first video-blog of the game is posted below.
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Mr Meer is out in the snowy wastes today, trying to find his homeland. So it falls to me to point out this excellent interview with Chris Taylor, following the recent Supreme Commander 2 preview.

Eurogamer Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Alec Meer, Hero Journalist: Do you feel like conventional RTS has given up and is moving on – so many people just can’t do the multiplayer now?

Chris Taylor: We’re definitely focusing heavily on our story and our single-player game, we want to make a really rich experience for somebody who doesn’t want to go online and fight other people. Should we be moving away from base-building like in some other games? I actually think base-building is really fun, and an important part of the game. Innovation doesn’t mean we move away from that. Innovation means we do things like add strategic zoom, we have really cool Experimental units and half-baked systems and systems that really make the game more lively, but not at the expense of the core RTS experience that we’ve learned.

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Well, we’re all presuming the reborn Interplay’s secret project is a Fallout MMO, as there’s plenty of proof out there and nobody’s denied it yet.

Yesterday the new Interplay website opened up, and with it came a mention of “Project V13,” the working title for a ‘next generation’ MMO. No details whatsoever on that, but what is scintillating is the announcement that they’ve hired Chris Taylor to work on it. Not Gas-Powered Games’ Chris Taylor – who perhaps shouldn’t be allowed near any kind of roleplaying game again after the disappointing mess that was Space Siege – but the other Chris Taylor, a key member of the original Fallout/Fallout 2 team.
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I’ll write up some impressions later today or tomorrow, once I’ve had the chance to play it (I’m a little wrapped in two other biggish games – silly season has started at last) but for now just a quick heads’ up (heads-up? head’s up? Gah) – Space Siege, the new RPG from Dungeon Siege/SupCom lot Gas Powered Games, has had the demo treatment.

There’s a lot of question marks over this game, and looks like they’ll finally be resolved. Will it be the same somewhat monotonal hacky-slashy formula as the previous Sieges? Is there more to space than metal corridors? Is the robot awesome? The answer to these questions and more can be found here. It is 957 Byteymegas.