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Sometimes, it’s great being me. Right now, for example. Because I’m getting the chance to tell you guys, the Game-Debate readers, before anyone else in the world, that a certain classic Games Workshop title, that is very dear to my heart, is coming to the PC and will be available as early access before the end of this year.
We’re in for a treat, because as well as you hearing it on GD first, this game is looking to be one of the coolest adaptations of a Games Workshop licence yet.
So why am I so giddy with glee? Well, Dark Future is a Games Workshop game from my childhood. Set in a dystopian near-future, where life is cheap and the highways have become the battlegrounds of the corporations, a desert-full of souped-up interceptors with cyborg drivers and hack-proof firmware do battle with raiders and corporate stooges in armoured trucks with rocket launchers mounted on the hoods. Exciting stuff!
Sold in the eighties and nineties as a customizable board game with Mad Max-esque death-wagons screaming around post-apocalyptic highways dropping mines and firing machine guns at each other, it stood alone in the world of board games at the time. Now, Dark Future: Blood Red States promises to bring with it an awesome new approach to vehicle combat, all the while supported by the rich lore that traditionally comes with any Games Workshop product.
Click on these expandable images to see the full details
Auroch Digital are the development studio bringing this to life on PC and they tell us they aim to get this into Steam and Early Access before 2015 comes to a close. We have seen the current state of development and it looks on course.
Part team management, part top-down 3D board game thingy, Dark Future puts you at the helm of a small ‘Sanctioned Ops’ agency, taking jobs from governments and corporations as well as private contracts, most of which involve whizzing around the environmentally ravaged States of America, shooting at other vehicles crammed with screaming bandits. There’ll be a variety of contracts such as escort missions and delivery jobs, and the funds allow you to buy and upgrade vehicles and drivers. Your armoury of vehicles and weapons will become a death dealing pick ‘n’ mix including oil slicks, spikes, turret-mounted firearms and rockets, not forgetting bionic enhancements for the drivers.
We’re told it’s “a turn-based strategy game, played out in simultaneous real-time action”, with chases and combat taking place across the wastes or through the broken city streets of 2023 Midwestern USA. While the action is mostly handled from the top-down view, the camera is movable to allow for some amazing angles on your slow-mo stunts and kills.
You can play the corporations against one another, just as surely as they're playing you. Deliberately throwing your jobs to make the big bucks from their competitors, but if they get wind of your double-dealing, their "legal teams" will teach you a new meaning of "hostile takeover". Think Mad Max meets Interstate ‘76 with a healthy side-order of Shadowrun. But don’t think this is cyberpunk as you know it; we’re told it’s “more weird than wired”.
To add to the driving, shooting and mayhem there will be a dark, well written narrative that focuses the player through the corporate driven politics of the future. James Swallow, the man behind a swathe of successful fiction including Deus Ex, will be writing the nail-biting story arc.
Click on these expandable images to see the full details
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
Dark Future, the cult Games Workshop board game of clashing highway warriors, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that was once America, is getting a reboot from Auroch Digital.
Bristol based indie developers, Auroch are known for their acclaimed version of another Games Workshop classic, Chainsaw Warrior, as well as for GameTheNews, an initiative that blurred the lines between reality and gaming, and included titles such as NarcoGuerra.
Auroch’s Dark Future: Blood Red States is supported by the Wellcome Trust, and will be a turn-based strategy game, played out in simultaneous real-time action. The gameplay is a furious mix of hammering chain-guns, tactical high-speed manoeuvres and the ripping of metal as vehicles smash into one another. All the action is conducted against a dark background of the decline of humanity; too wild to be true and too close for comfort.
Dark Future was originally released as a board game in 1988, and later expanded into a series of books. The world it inhabits is a very different reality; cyberpunk more weird than wired.
It's an alternative, bleak, hollowed out America, in 2023. The major cities are either corporate controlled high-tech gated communities (Patrolled Zones, or PZs) for those who can pay, or lawless shanty towns for those who can't (NoGos). Between these is 'The Big Empty', the polluted, wasted Red States of America where vicious gangs hunt and fight. The atrophied state has all but given up trying to impose law and order here and instead relies on a new breed of bounty hunter come highway warrior to keep the roads open, the Sanctioned Operative.
Into this fractured new world the player must make their fortune. The player runs a Sanctioned Ops agency; taking on missions for bounty outside the PZs. As well as the tactical action on the road, the player must also manage both the vehicles and drivers – from upgrades to the front-mounted HMGs to booking a driver into the clinic for a new set of bionic eyes.
More information about our descent into darkness can be found at DarkFuture.info and @DarkFutureNews. Stay in the loop with Dark Future: Blood Red States by following Auroch Digital on Facebook and Twitter.
The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all
We love our superheroes because they refuse to give up on us. We can analyze them out of existence, kill them, ban them, mock them, and still they return, patiently reminding us of who we are and what we wish we could be.
"the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king,
Pete Melvin wrote: Sounds needlessly complicated and frankly a little dull for a game based around cars.
I dunno, could be good. It works great in games like the Combat Mission series or XCOM series. It's a good way to interpret turn-based wargames on a computer.
Battlefleet Gothic ships and markers at my store, GrimDarkBits:
I dman well be better be able to play an Italian Nun and a member of the US Cavalry who fight Cthulhu workshiping Mormons in the ruins of London Bridge.
And Elvis better not be DLC, I want him in the game for free from day 1.
The three Jack Yeovil novels were awesome, the game itself completely forgetable.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Watched the trailer, ick.
All the backgrounds look like the modern US, nice paved roads, street signs, civilians on the road.
No wastelands, no ruins, just generic modern roads.
And the cars... well they've learned nothing from the 80s. These future wasteland cars still look like Porches with guns glued on, never mind that they'd never get up to full speed in the post-apocalyptic wastes, and with that low clearance they'd destroy their suspension as soon as they hit a crater.
I've driven in pre-apocalyptic wastelands and none of those cars would last more than 10 minutes.
Now I don't need realism for my cars with guns game, but I do need some sort of crediblitly.
And they ain't got it.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/05/22 02:41:45
Kid_Kyoto wrote: The three Jack Yeovil novels were awesome, the game itself completely forgetable.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Watched the trailer, ick.
All the backgrounds look like the modern US, nice paved roads, street signs, civilians on the road.
No wastelands, no ruins, just generic modern roads.
And the cars... well they've learned nothing from the 80s. These future wasteland cars still look like Porches with guns glued on, never mind that they'd never get up to full speed in the post-apocalyptic wastes, and with that low clearance they'd destroy their suspension as soon as they hit a crater.
I've driven in pre-apocalyptic wastelands and none of those cars would last more than 10 minutes.
Now I don't need realism for my cars with guns game, but I do need some sort of crediblitly.
And they ain't got it.
Well sure - if you focus on the bad stuff. What about all the good?
*tumbleweed*
Soo, uhh Mordheim still really looks like that might be a fun game.
This game was more, Death Race:2000, then it was Mad Max/ Road Warrior...
Good game, though. MB had a good run with these sort of games back in the day. Hope its a good PC game, I'll get it when it's cheap.
Problem I'm seeing here, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is that GW is trying to ride the gravy train with PC games at the expense of itself. Question to be asking is why GW is not rereleasing the games for tabletop, because.. you know they are such a miniature centric company.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2015/05/22 14:36:01
At Games Workshop, we believe that how you behave does matter. We believe this so strongly that we have written it down in the Games Workshop Book. There is a section in the book where we talk about the values we expect all staff to demonstrate in their working lives. These values are Lawyers, Guns and Money.
a turn-based strategy game, played out in simultaneous real-time action
Wut?
I have the feeling it's not unlike Darkwind - You "program" your car with a series of commands (acceleration, turn radius, brake, whatever), hit "play", then all cars execute their orders simultaneously for 3-4 seconds.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
