what games are you looking forward to the most?

[Zenicetus]

This is the game I'm most anticipating as well. Supposedly there will be an official announcement in a couple months (I seem to recall November being mentioned, but don't quote me on that). I'm not holding my breath, however, as it wouldn't be the first time Stardock has delayed announcing it. No idea when the beta starts, although I'm guessing it'll probably be concurrent with the game's official unveiling.

Here's what I can remember about Stardock's "Not-MOM" from recent dev posts at their forum (someone correct me if any of this is wrong):

* Turn based strategy with a fantasy theme. Unofficial successor to MOM.

* Multiplayer designed in from the start.

* New ground-up game engine with tactical battles as well as the strategy layer, and the engine will be the basis for GalCiv3 a few years down the road. I never missed tactical battles in GalCiv that much, but that will make a lot of people happy.

* Scaling for multiple processors, or not, so it can look great on high-end machines but degrade nicely to work on lower-end machines. They need to hit the lower-end hardware market for a niche product like a turn-based strategy game, but it sounds like they're shooting for some flash graphics if you have the hardware for it.

* Hints of an RPG element. I'm guessing that probably refers to a scripted campaign alongside the sandbox game, but maybe they're going for the "hero" thing there too. No details at all on this yet.

* Open (with pre-order) beta sometime in early '09, with the release date being "when the players think it's ready." That would be the same deal they did with GalCiv2/TA. If they make that window for the beta, then the game must be pretty far along already. That marketing model only works well if the initial beta is already solid enough to have fun with (like the first TA expansion beta last year).

I'm sure it will be a fun game, but I hope they hire some good writers for the background world and faction designs. They're doing a fantasy world and rules system from scratch, which always has great potential (not to mention no royalties!)... but it's not easy to come up with something original and compelling. I enjoyed the Kohan series as a strategy game, but ugh.... the writing, and the world design seemed pretty slapdash (IMO). One of the things that made Warcraft successful, as a non-D&D title, was the quality and humor of the writing and design of the world.