GamingNexus: Will there be a full campaign,
a la The Altarian Prophecy? Any hints as
to what might be in store for us?
Brad Wardell: Yes. In fact, it has a dynamic campaign - you can
lose missions and go onto an alternative story.
This story is much darker than the first one and the ending, I think,
will be a bit of a shocker for players.
GamingNexus: Every race in the galaxy is
now available for play. What steps have been taken to assure a balance between the
various races? Will we still have the
race customizability that we saw in the original game?
Brad Wardell: You can still customize
your races like you did in the first game, but this time you can actually
design your own races (what they look like, what techs they start out with,
etc.). In terms of balancing, we've taken steps to make sure that each race has its
own advantages and disadvantages that don't
really alter the gameplay too much.
GamingNexus: One of the best things about
Galactic Civilizations is the support both from and for the fanbase
community. How are you ensuring Galactic
Civilizations 2 will continue in this fashion?
Brad Wardell: Galactic Civilizations II
has much more fan-base support built in.
For instance, the Metaverse stuff is much more sophisticated this time
around, with the player being able to design characters and logon with their
GalCiv account into the game right from the start.
In
GalCiv I players were kind of stuck between modding the game and playing on the
metaverse since the metaverse required the player to have the base data files
and such. This time, the metaverse uses
its own stored version of all the data.
So players can mod up the game completely.
Everything
in GalCiv II is either a .X file (standard 3D model file), a .DXPack file
(DesktopX - free download at www.desktopx.net)
for the user interface, or a .PNG for everything else. The data files are XML. So players could in theory design very
different types of games with this engine.
GamingNexus: Any word on multiplayer?
Brad Wardell: This time we did the
plumbing for multiplayer, but we didn't
actually go through and put in the multiplayer features. It was a tough call, but it was decided that
we would go for a $39.95 price point rather than a $49.95 price point and have
multiplayer as a separate addition later on if there's
sufficient demand. That way, the people
who want multiplayer can get it and those not interested in it aren't paying for a feature they won't use.
GamingNexus: Is there an expected released date?
End of February 2006.
Page 2 of 2
