orcaloverbri9, on Jan 11 2006, 07:11 PM, said:

I would not have been surprised if it was given something in the 40-50% range.
View Post

that would be the whole point, game magazines may not be notd for their even-handed reviews, but what they crank out is what ALOT of the Gaming world goes by, and this game just doesn't strike the fancy of the cracked-out, 5-second attention span belonging to the average Counter Strike player. we need to target a more tolerant audience, we need to go after RPG fans who are used to slow-devoloping storylines. I love this game because it is like a Tom Clancy, John Grisham Douglas Adams (God rest his soul) choose-your-own-path novel broken up into a six-storyline space sim. It has elemets of action, suspense, and humor in a positively perfect blend (not to mention the sheer kickassedness of the game itself even without any storylines) and you have complete and utter control over ALL of it.

(/ramble)

Edwin_again - I agree with you completely. However, I do think there is a market for EV in the PC world - for those of you not familiar with Shrapnel Games - www.shrapnelgames.com - they offer a lot of similar games - specifically Space Empires, Weird Worlds, and Dominions. All are made by a small development team, all include open resources/scripting abilities similar to EV, and all have (relatively) low-end graphics but rich game play.

They are all also very popular - with space empires being arguably the #1 4x space strategy game for the PC right now. The Weird Worlds engine looks a lot like EV lite (no rich plots, but same Elite-style movement - I tried the demo, was disappointed at the lack of depth and fired up EVN again).

A couple of thoughts:

1. a more modern graphics system would go far on marketing - Space Empires V and WW both have switched to OpenGL graphics and look nice. An older game - the War Engine - is almost dead, despite a similar toolkit approach and earlier popularity.

2. speed of development - if the lag time between the start of an idea and the release of the mod is too long, it gets tough to finish. Re-use of ship graphics (or a very large fanbase library of graphics free for the download - Space Empires has literally 1000s of ship files made by modders). Also, a random galaxy generator (syst and spob resources stay the same, just the links and XYs of the syst location change in each game) would go far to increase replay value and promote mod creation (we could continue to use the same universe, just different links every time change geography).