A new kid on the block

As fun as Sins of a Solar Empire was, it's greatest crime was the broken promise of a 4X revival. It's been three years now, and despite getting fairly decent incremental improvements, Sins impact faded extremely quickly. Now Sword of the Stars II trying to take back its mantle as the ultimate space 4X game, and finally we're seeing some promising new blood enter the fray. Legends of Pegasus is the debut title from new studio Novacore Studios (published by Kalypso Media), and is basically an amalgamation of all your favourite 4X titles wrapped in a (we hope) distinctive and engaging package.
 

Damage effects arn't anything special at the moment, but maybe they will improve as we go along

Using a Farscape-esque plot, Legends of Pegasus sees you in control of a surviving band of humans trying to survive in an unexplored part of space. Earth was attacked by an alien race, and you were sucked through a wormhole before you could escape. The fate of your home I s unknown, but what you do know is that this new neighbourhood isn't exactly friendly either. The story-driven single player (take that, Sins) will apparently involve all three of the playable races, and the 'main character' will stick with you through-out. An involved story is not often a crucial part of a strategy game, especially 4X games, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

Novacore are taking a page from Kereboros' book in the sense that they want to make the three different races – the humans, the industrial Zor, and an unnamed organic-tech race - very unique from each other, even down to the way their ships are designed. In addition to the three races, there will be 12 playable factions, although what that actually entails and whether it affects gameplay hasn't been revealed yet. In addition to the three playable races, we're told there will be many more NPC races that populate the game world and help make it feel alive

Reading through the press material fills us both with excitement and trepidation – you always have to take PR schpeel with a pinch of salt, but when we read things like “Several hundred technologies with dynamic and combinable research trees” and “adaptive complexity and tactical depth” we can't help but wish that, for once, the PR is true. A playable build for this game can't come soon enough, I tell you.
 

You messed with the wrong mammels

So far, all we've physically seen in action is the combat engine, and a localised version of the campaign map. We can confirm, for instance, that the engine is absolutely stunning. Think of how SOTS2 is looking and it's a similar of graphical fidelity. We've seen a real-time combat action, which seemed pretty basic but it was the first 'part' of the story campaign – can't comment on how much tactical depth will be present there. Non-combat segments of the game take place on a turn-based scale, but it's all in the same world. Two fleets would move towards each other turn by turn, until combat is initiated and then suddenly everything is switched to real-time. This include planets as well which can have structures built in orbit which will suddenly become a part of the battle environment.



Speaking of planets – they will be intractable on a bigger scale than SOTS2, and even Sins. You can place buildings and facilities on the ground as well as orbital structures as we mentioned above. Planets can also be terraformed and changed in real time as your planets become more and more developed. We were shown a tech demo that showed off how the changes would look over time, and it looked pretty impressive. It's little touches like that which can make or break a game sometimes.

Everything else that sound interesting about this game is only stuff we've been told – the technology tree, for example, wasn't demonstrated at all. Ships can also be customized to a high degree (again, similar to SOTS), and each race has different methods of customization. Despite claiming the game has a focus on multiplayer, there was nothing to actually support that claim there at the show this year.

We were told there will be online and local multiplayer games available, with a variety of game modes other than the standard skirmish. Domination, an 'Emperor' mode where you have an avatar that you have to defend... we're told the multiplayer portion of the game it going to be very flexible, with multiple options for you to choose between. Still you'd expect elements like this within any multiplayer mode of a strategy game, so whether anything 'special' is going to be present remains to be seen.
 

Very impressive visuals, we have to say

And that's all there is pretty much. There may have been one or two details missed out, but as it's still early days there's plenty of time to get that information to you. We're glad more space 4X games are starting to emerge, and we honestly can't wait to see more of this game. Maybe this will even inspire the Ironclad games (who are published by Kalypso in Europe) to actually get a move on. Legends of Pegasus is due out on PC sometime during Q2 2012.

Most Anticipated Feature: We do love customising our ships, so we wouldn't mind playing around with that side of things.