I'm not sure that it's that big a change of direction. We knew that Wage Wars was going to be a multiplayer online game and my impressions were that it was going to be a smallish one.

Saying they could hypothetically license out Fangus is also nothing new. Even when they were making games full time, Lorne discussed licensing out Oddworld as a possible venture.

Well I got the impression OWI was focussing on being a company that was going to provide content, gameplay ideas and stories and then license them out to other companies.

Now it seems they are going to build a little game that's going to expand, I hope you are right and this is going to be Wage Wars (even if the title might not be appropriate any more :p)

I think you're getting confused between licensing and outsourcing. Outsourcing would mean that OWI would design the game but another company would produce the animations and programming and etc. Licensing would mean giving the other company permission to develop a game based on the property, but letting them work out the fine details.

Well, it could potentially be an MMO in the style of Spore or maybe not even multiplayer at all, but a large, free-form kind of game with different types of gameplay "expansions" released. Like, there's a free base version and you could purchase different modes of gameplay to add on to it, like make it a FPS. But if you don't like FPS, you don't purchase that expansion (or, if its not expanded by expansions, but level packs). Instead, you could by the RTS pack.

I don't really think that's what they intend to do at all, I'm just speculating.

Great work with the scans, ArtemisPanthar. It makes a very interesting read.

Michael Bross talks about it on his blog:
http://www.bross.com/blog/index.html

I think the way they separated the story from the gameplay by putting the story in the movies and the gameplay in the games is like separating the pasta from the sauce. I just hope they realize what they are doing and come back to combining the story with the gameplay.

On the other hand, games that try to squeeze in story while you’re trying to concentrate on completing the task at hand piss me off. There’s the initial distraction, followed by not knowing what to do next because you were paying attention to killing enemies or timing jumps rather than the Voice With An Internet Connection.

Also, videogame story often comes in the form of talking, which isn’t a) the funnest thing to control, or b) at its most cinematic when viewing the back of the character’s head.

They finally posted the full article (with pics) on their website: http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archi...gus-klot-.aspx

Thanks for the find.

Whoa, awesome! Thanks a lot!
I'm gonna update TOGG with that ASAP