New King's Bounty Recieves Bountiful Praise
Yesterday we were being a little conspiracy-ist theory about what 1C: Ino-Co were working on alongside Majesty. We suddenly realised we may have been missing something - 1C are publishing the forthcoming King's Bounty: The Legend, a reboot of the proto-Heroes of Might and Magic game. Except it's not it - the developers aren't 1C: Ino-Co, but rather Katauri Interactive, which is basically what The Space Rangers 2 team did next. And, to be honest, coming from the Space Rangers 2 team is I need to get a bit excited about something - but that it's just received the press award from the recent Russian KRI show is another promising sign.
There's also a little prehistory to this one too, it seems. It wasn't originally a King's Bounty Game - it was actually a project called Battlelords, which seemed to have changed titles when they got the licence. There's a long tradition of this, of course - for example, System Shock 2 existing as a new-fiction sci-fi game before EA gave them the keys to Shodan and friends. But picking up old PC licences does seem to be something of a trend in Russia - presumably this is buying a little brand recognition at what you have to presume is a relatively reasonable price.
Oh - here's a video of it in action...
Where does this leave us?
1) There's another turn-based adventuring game to look forward to.
2) We still don't know what 1C: Ino-Co's second game is.
3) I probably should do some kind of retrospective feature on Space Rangers.