The Once and Future King? Majesty returns.
In much welcome news - in our interview, Ex-Civ4 veteran Soren Johnson noted it's a shame a spiritual heir for the game doesn't exist - Paradox Interactive announces a sequel for Majesty, planned for in 2009. Only shame is that original developers Cyberlore aren't involved, which is perhaps predictable, as they don't exist in the same state anymore. Instead, the task falls to 1C: Ino-Co, who you may know from the recent fairly-fun Fantasy Wars. Blues have lobbed up the grabs, but there's a little more on why Majesty was neat, some examination of 1C: Ino-Co and its trailer beneath the cut.
this announcement puts interesting light on a 1C press release from the end of last year. Specifically: "1C: Ino-Co (the official new company name) is working on the sequel to Fantasy Wars called Elven Legacy. This game is scheduled for a 2008 release. 1C: Ino-Co has also started working on two undisclosed projects based on world class IPs". Now, that's one of the two - but it implies there's a second one to be announced. Now, this could be from anyone in the world, obviously, but since this is an old Microprose licence (The Microsoft assets past from Hasbro to Infogrames who renamed themselves as Atari) it's interesting to speculate what other old licences could emerge from the vault. Especially because we know that, in the past, Atari have talked to Stardock about reviving old franchises in their vaults like - say - Master of Magic or Master of Orion or... well, there's a lot of names in the vault, many of which are attractive to the Paradox-ish strategy-centric audience.
In short, I don't know, but there's enough here for anyone to speculate wildly if they like. I suspect some of you will.
In terms of Majesty's merits, it was interesting in that while it looked like a traditional game - though with a lot more humour than was usual - it played with a more indirect route. Rather than ordering the units, you managed the system to do what you'd like to do, gathering heroes and similar. Hence, the Fantasy Kingdom Sim rather than WAR OF DEATH or whatever else. Add in a splash of random generation and you had a sizeable cult hit which is still available on - hmm - Paradox's Gamersgate service.
(And I suppose if you were interested in trying to decode what the second game might be, going through their catalogue trying to find old Hasbro games may be profitable. Or a complete waste of time. Oh, this groundless speculation.)
And finally, the hard facts of Video.
Yes. Sweet, sweet Video.
[Thanks to Francisco Alberto for the initial heads up]