Master of Magic Slitherine Reboot - Catch All

Slitherine/Matrix have acquired the rights to the Master of Magic franchise. First order of business: get the original from GoG soon...

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In a continuous bid to update and modernize popular strategy IPs and bringing them to the 21st century, Slitherine has acquired the full publishing rights to the Master of Magic franchise from Atari.

This is one of the most recognizable names in videogames history. It’s one of the key pillars of turn-based strategy gaming and it has created a genre of its own that is still alive and thriving today.

Master of Magic first released on MS-DOS twenty-five years ago in 1994 and it quickly became one of the most cherished games of its genre with its infinite replayability and the sheer number of customisation options it gave to the players.

“We are looking forward to working on this immensely popular franchise”, said Iain McNeil development director at Slitherine. “We know there is a high level of responsibility when we try and develop sequels or successors to popular IPs. We have proven it is possible to fulfil players expectations with the likes of Panzer Corps when it comes to work on these legendary products”.

Sequels to Close Combat and Fantasy General, both coming this year, are also a testament of Slitherine’s ongoing mission in this space.

“The foundations of what we play today are still traced back to that golden age of gaming. We cannot ignore that, like we cannot ignore that technology has moved on with player’s expectations in other areas such as social integration, multiplayer, narration, ease-of-access and more. It will be a challenge, but we are happy to accept it and try our best to make a game that does justice to the brand”.

MoM: Broken, but great.

I swear, if they release a dev blog where they talk about fixing the "Balance issues" in MoM, I am going to scream!

I hope this doesn't affect the open source Master of Magic remake they are doing in Java.

Tamren wrote:

I hope this doesn't affect the open source Master of Magic remake they are doing in Java.

oh? Can you tell me something more about this? A link perhaps? I am a VERY big fan of Master of Magic, and still play it.

I really think that the idea of highscore lists, which Stardock are pretty much the only one I see do this. It makes for great replayability as well, striving to get a better highscore!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/momime/

http://mom.pjj.cc/forum/index.php

Highscores can be fun, like in SpaceChem where you can see your friend's attempts at the same puzzle. Hopefully it isn't global though, otherwise it will quickly become meaningless with speedrunners and hackers filling the scoreboard and not a reflection of actual gameplay.

I mean, I'm here for this, I just don't know that a straight reboot will get you much territory that Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might and Magic, Dominions 5, Endless Legend, Total War: Warhammer, and Warlords haven't already covered.

The bit where Master of Magic still stands out is its sheer combinatorial brokenness, which is the bit that made it awesome and probably wouldn't be that great for balanced multiplayer.

(If I was making a fantasy strategy game I'd be going in a different direction, Crusader Kings by way of Lords of Midnight, maybe.)

Still, I'm not going to complain if we get another solid fantasy strategy game.

Endless Legend is the only one I've played and enjoyed recently, and it's not anything like MoM. MoM combines champions, armies, and Civ-type wargaming with Spell "technologies" and spell effects both tactical and strategic.

Your Mage could have a powerful Avatar, or she could be primarily a healer and unit and city buffer (Life Magic), or she could be a literal world destroyer, or all your units could be absolutely vanilla and you win through trading research or blasting your enemies.

MoM is the franchise where the Dark Lords want Halfings because their incredibly food production and fexundity allows you to sacrifice your citizens with abandon to fuel Shadow Demon armies. It's the franchise where pure White Wizards choose Dark Elves because Dark Elf innate mana production allows them to spam Streams of Life in every city fueling an ever-snowballing ball of world-changing life mana primarily sourced from Dark Elf magic.

Without the broken combos giving it character, it's just a generic fantasy board game.

While there has been a lot of duds, there has also been a few very good Master of Orion remakes. One of the latest ones, Genesis, has the gameplay down, added a few extra things, and made some UI changes, and of course a slight graphical upgrade.

Thats what I hope for here as well.

You all are basically describing the Warlock games. I played a bunch of MoM back in the day. Warlock comes pretty darn close.

Is the second Warlock worth playing? And strangely, Age of Wonders 3 didn't do it for me, at all - I LOVE MoM, but AoW is the most boring game ever (for me, of course).

I liked 2 more than 1 personally.

I am interested to see what they do with this. Slitherine is publishing Fantasy General II as well. The more turn-based strategy games the better, I say.

Gremlin wrote:

I mean, I'm here for this, I just don't know that a straight reboot will get you much territory that Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might and Magic, Dominions 5, Endless Legend, Total War: Warhammer, and Warlords haven't already covered.

I was wondering about this too. Getting the MoM vibe right could be tricky, but like tboon mentioned, I'd be happy enough if they are able to create a solid turn-based strategy game, even if it misses the MoM mark a bit.

Yeah half the fun is the horribly broken magic system, it wouldn't be the same game without it. The point of the game isn't to balance wizards or schools of magic by relative "power". The one and only objective of the game is to get to the spell of mastery and cast a spell so powerful it gives you sole control of ALL magic. It's all about how you get there using the tools you start the game with.

Some of my favourite runs are "warlord" style where I don't start with any magic books at all, and instead start the game with a pile of perks. Instead of funneling all my effort into magic I put it into cities and use the income to recruit armies of elite (but mundane) troops that can clear out towers, monster dens and mana nodes through sheer force of arms. I still get the basic alchemy spells that all wizards get so any mana I accumulate goes into making items for my heroes. Warlord wizards are lot of fun in the lategame because you seem to have a better chance of looting spell books from ruins and other wizards if you start with none. This gives you a random mix of spells that can combine in spectacular combinations like wind walking shadow demons.

The other fun thing to do is starting with no perks at all and the full 10 books in any given colour.

LarryC wrote:

Without the broken combos giving it character, it's just a generic fantasy board game.

I still remember my Chaos-Channelled flying War Trolls, wrecking everything in sight. They'd better not balance the fun out of it.