Magna Mundi getting cancelled ?!

[Heathcliff]

Major drama happened today at Paradox forum when a Paradox employee hinted that their upcoming game Magna Mundi might get cancelled as the game now have been delayed several times. Magna Mundi is developed by a third party developer that has licensed the EU3 engine.
If the game will be cancelled it's a sad day for us strategy gamers as more strategy games are always welcome.

Quick facts about Magna Mundi:
Magna Mundi began as a mod for Europa Universalis 3 in 2007, with contributions from many programers. In 2009 developement started for Magna Mundi to become a standalone game. Magna Mundi is very similar to EU3, but it also features 30 subsystems covering different areas, with the aim to make the game more historically plausible and provide a more interresting game during peacetime.
The Magna Mundi forums on Paradox forums have over 100´000 posts.

Two gameplay videos of Magna Mundi featuring the new game, that is not yet released:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_quF_ZdWdM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUIAkrUwe4c&feature=relmfu

 

[Maniacal]

Yeah we heard.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11546922&postcount=4441

 

[Luckymoose]

MM looked like garbage anyway.

 

[Yeekim]

I don't care how it looked After my experience with MMtM, I'll buy any game this team makes, as long as it doesn't CTD more often than twice an hour.

I don't believe PI would summarily cancel this, hoping for a beta release.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Meh, don't really care. Never cared for MM anyway.


The only thing that makes me sad about this news is that now I can't steal MM's code when it is released for my EU3 mod.

 

[Heathcliff]

Word has reached Berlin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeEyeLB_PLc&feature=youtu.be

ROFL

 

[Antilogic]

It was only a matter of time before the Fuhrer commented on it.

 

[GoodGame]

I'm more interested in Salem, A Game of Dwarves, CK2, more Magicka, and Victoria 2, anyways.

Was it going to make some kind of Total War battle system?

 

[Joecoolyo]

Was it going to make some kind of Total War battle system?

No, direct opposite. Instead of the simple numbers approach EU3 used, or the play-it-out-yourself Total War system, MMtG went with text and story based. Battles were written out day by day, with 3 distinct phases occuring. So for each battle you got to read an interesting story as to how it went.

As for the news, I'm not very surprised. Doing testing for the game, I found it to be extremely buggy, near unplayable.

Here's hoping it comes out eventually though, once bug free it looks to be pretty amazing in its scope.

 

[Maniacal]

That actually sounds extremely interesting for the battles.

 

[Joecoolyo]

That actually sounds extremely interesting for the battles.

It was, added a lot to the idea of creating your own "story" in the game. Each day you got to read what happened, and how it happened. The early days would be filled with reports of skirmishes between scouts of each army, and as the decisive battle drew closer, the story would turn into the attacking commander trying to push the defending into a decisive battle. Sometimes he would be able to, sometimes he wouldn't.

The decisive battle itself was also exhaustingly detailed, to the point in which you had a good 10 minute read if you want to find out everything that happened.

 

[Antilogic]

There's such a thing as too much detail. While reworking the battle system so that armies skirmished while they "found" each other out for a few weeks and then have a decisive engagement over a day (or a couple days) would work from a realism aspect, loads of excess text doesn't do much but increase the difficulty for the programmers.

 

[Evie]

I'm about as surprised as I,d be by a girl turning me down.

The truth is, Ubik's whole design philosophy on the mod (and by extension, the design philosophy of people he attracted to him to work on it, and thus the whole team he built for this) was based on the idea of giving the game the means of simulating as many aspects of history as possible.

Problem is, while that works great on a mod where your users are not paying for your content, and are quite willing to put up with bugs and even help you solve them; and where you have no responsibility to anyone regarding deadlines (and where the game engine limits you, it doesn't work nearly as well for a paid game, where customers expect a working product, your publisher expect deadlines met (and your programmers can just change the engine to add more stuff to it, instead of being limited by it in what they can add).

 

[Heathcliff]

It's official now: Magna Mundi got cancelled.

It's a sad day for us strategy fans.

But our inspiration - the Magna Mundi dream - to one day create a perfect new strategy game with plausible outcomes lives on.

Paradox new strategy seems to mainstream their games like Vick 2 and CK 2.
Unfortunatly I think it will alienate the coreplayer base who like Hearts of Iron 2 and Magna Mundi.

 

[Evie]

That dream is probably part of MM's problem. Game design is about making reasonable compromises: between gameplay and plausibility, between time constraints and additional features.

Mod-making, which is what MM started out as, doesn't have to deal with those same constraints. It doesn't have to appeal to anywhere near the same number as MM; it doesn't have to deal with a fixed development process.

 

[TheLastOne36]

I just hope future businessmen don't use Magni Mundi as an example against supporting mod --> game conversions.

 

[Arakhor]

Unfortunatly I think it will alienate the coreplayer base who like Hearts of Iron 2 and Magna Mundi.

The core player base? Really? I'm automatically predisposed to disbelieve you immediately.

 

[Princeps]

Yes, sad. It looked very promising.

 

[Heathcliff]

The core player base? Really? I'm automatically predisposed to disbelieve you immediately.

I belive the newer Paradox games lacks replay value because the games become to similar to each other.
I think the games EU3 and HoI2 have more replay value than Vicky 2 and CK2.

Even if the last two games are commercial successes, I think alot of players were disappointed in them. But the Paradox fans on the Paradox forums are loyal, so they don't write it because it hurts the company.

Personally I got tired of Vicky 2 and CK 2 after a couple of games. But I still play EU3 and HoI2 even when I have owned them for 5 years.

 

[Princeps]

CK 2 was very disappointing. It addicted me for two days, then it sucked.

Which definitely makes this cancellation more annoying.