Empire Revealed

June 24, 2006 12:16 PM

FiringSquad has a story up about the formation of Chair Entertainment, a new developer manned by former members of the Advent Rising development team. Their first project is Empire, an Unreal Engine 3 powered shooter. Orson Scott Card, who wrote the Advent Rising story, is on hand to help with the story for this project, and will also release a related novel.

Maarten Goldstein

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Sturm08

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June 24, 2006 12:59 PM

Wow, the same guys from Advent, using the updated version of the Unreal engine, making a game in the same genre, with the same writer for their story.

This will suck.
- icase81
  
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  June 24, 2006 1:41 PM
  
  Advent rising wasn't a BAD concept, or game... it was a rushed implementation that doomed it. It was rushed out the door by the publisher if i recall correctly.
  - Sturm08
    
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    June 24, 2006 2:29 PM
    
    Maybe, maybe not. Not everything can be blamed on the publisher -- it just isn't that simple. There was nothing really innovative or great about the design. It was a standard shooter with a few nifty concepts and everything about it sucked.
    - [deleted] 226079565
      
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      June 24, 2006 2:58 PM
      
      [deleted]
  - node
    
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    June 24, 2006 2:51 PM
    
    Exactly. It was also arguably too ambitious too, though not terrible.
  - Chris Remo
    
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    June 24, 2006 4:27 PM
    
    There wasn't anything fundamentally bad about really, it's true that a lot of its faults were due to a lack of polish. However, it also came off as very derivative to me. I don't know if it would be possible to rip off the visual design of Halo and more strongly without simply being Halo. Those aliens in particular were nearly identical. Other than that, the story and characters and world felt very generic and uninspired, which is a shame considering some of it came from Card. The controls had some potential, but in my opinion they tried to do too much and it ended up being very unintuitive for me.
    
    Still, we'll see what they have in mind next.
    - cell9song
      
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      June 24, 2006 5:36 PM
      
      There's no doubt they were gunning to be the next Halo and they followed that story a little too closely. It all goes back to my opinion that Orson Scott Card is an overrated hack. They tried creating an Epic feel but didn't have the experience to pull it off. If it were given to a more seasoned studio it really could've been something interesting despite it's unoriginality. Having said that the combat was much more interesting, particularly after he got his powers, than Halo. I hope they keep some of the better ideas from AR for this game.
      
      BTW, it wasn't the publisher that dropped the ball on this game, it was the developers.
- dmiller
  
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  June 24, 2006 10:37 PM
  
  Actually, it could be argued that what hurt Advent Rising the most was the lack of engineering put onto the game far too late.
  
  I seem to remember that Advent Rising's development team started off as an art house with very little engineers to do alot of the things that they'll get with the Unreal engine. They will still need engineers though, so lets hope they get that support sooner than later.
  - Sturm08
    
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    June 24, 2006 11:27 PM
    
    A lot of this sounds like a rookie mistake. No engineers, crazy schedule, too ambitious, whatever. Maybe even Orson will do a better job writing a game story this time around.