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Four Add-ons Planned For Sins of a Solar Empire
With the first add-on pack for Sins of a Solar Empire arriving in just under a month, publisher Kalypso Media has announced that three more add-ons are on their way as well. Gamespot has an early look at the first add-on, Entrenchment, and a couple of additional screenshots are available at Shacknews. The game's creative director, Craig Frazer, also explained their reasoning for making small expansions rather than large ones: "If PC gaming is to survive, the industry will need to be open to change. We went out on a limb with our anti-DRM stance and it paid off really well. We tried an unusually long beta period and that worked as well. Micro-expansions are just another experiment we are trying out to improve the market. These small expansions give us the opportunity to provide highly focused, high quality content within a reasonable time frame. Micro-expansions also reduce the development risk associated with 1-3 year cycles. With lower risk, we can be far more progressive in terms of gameplay and content."
Looking forward to play it. :)
Uh oh, $15 (approx) "Micro" expansions. Don't let EA find out about this or else Walmarts will have to double in size to handle all those Sims addons.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Should they really tell people "hey, we're making more and more expansions for you to waste your money on"?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I recall the game "Total Annihilation", a popular real time strategy game from the 90s. The publisher, CaveDog, periodically would add new units to the game (something like one a month or so). While I also like it when the publisher includes map editors, it is still good to get new material from the original developers.
I only hope these micro-expansions also have a micro-price.
What they ought to do is offer one pack of expansions that includes all the expansions released up to that point, with appropriate discounts if you already have a subset of the included content. I can't see a la carte expansions ever working.
The game is good and they are anti-DRM and very open to user feedback (eg. long beta, etc). This is one of the very few games out there worth buying.
The articles only mention three. Whats this about a fourth one?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Sounds like an attempt to milk the cash cow to me. I suspect the only way these micro expansions will work out is if they also come with a micro price.
Includes a good ground combat battle system, I will no longer worry, for I am already dead, and in Heaven.
Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
Seriously, when has PC gaming been a bigger industry than in the last few years?
$10 is the price I see for it on Impulse. Given the normal expansion price of $30-40 (for example Wrath of the Lich King is $40) that seems pretty reasonable.
I wanted to like this game, I really did, but the pacing is excruciatingly slow! You spend most of your time in information-OCD-mode, checking up on things even when you know it will take another 10 minutes until you can....click an upgrade and wait another 10 minutes. Turning up the game speed only makes it choppy and unless you are zoomed in all the way (which makes anything more than spectating impractical) every ship is displayed as a two-dimensional sprite.
Next time, if you're going to make a game that takes so long to play, you should at least make sure there are always fun things you can be doing while you wait for research and resources. 90% of the time I was sitting there "playing" I kept looking around the room, looking for something else to do.
Fixed that for you....
I understand there are lots of efficiencies to doing smaller releases, but one of the trends I've noticed lately with these "episodic" releases is that they give you a smaller amount of content and charge you more than what you'd normally pay for a combined larger release. Ie. $10 each for three micro-expansions that, if the content were to be combined and released as a single expansion would probably retail for about $20 total. Make no mistake, they may have done some things that won them points with gamers in the past (awesome game, no DRM, etc.) but this is SOLELY about increasing profit. That's what they are in business for.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'm a harsh critic, but they really need to fix the original game before people will flock to it. Just as with all games for the last few year they may have made their deadline and maybe even kept to the spirit of their original designs, but they have to FIRST make the games usable, THEN make them interesting for there to be any chance at being FUN.
UI seems to always be the part that suffers the most.
8-PP
PC gaming is.
If anything, WoW harms the PC gaming market more than it supports it. Gamers spending all their time (and money) on WoW are less likely to buy other PC games.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
...th...th-t-there's no DRM!!!!!!!! That makes flowers, paper money, and porno tapes bloom from thin air!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The plus key is your friend. Don't like the pace? Turn it up by 2x, 4x, 8x.
I play at 2x by default now, and the pace is quite brisk. Don't blame the game for your ignorance.
I guess I am the only one that didn't like sins of the solar empire, so I expect to be modded to oblivion, but I just couldn't get into it.
Quite simply there was no story so I didn't really have much of an interest in playing.