O.R.B. Preview

For at least as long as people have been making games, nerds everywhere have dreamed of exploring the cosmos in cool-looking futuristic spaceships. They've been able to do so in countless computer games, including Relic's innovative and very impressive 1998 game Homeworld, a real-time strategy game that let you control a fleet of starships in a fully 3D universe and was later followed by a stand-alone product called Homeworld: Cataclysm. Since then, no game has been able to reproduce Homeworld's brand of fully 3D space exploration and combat. That is, at least until now--or, to be more precise, about five years ago.

O.R.B. may look like Homeworld, but it'll be much different.

Strategy First's O.R.B. (which stands for "off-world resource base") bears a striking resemblance to Homeworld, yet it's been in development since before production on Relic's 1998 strategy game even began. Since then, Strategy First has wisely kept tabs on every aspect of Homeworld that received praise from critics. O.R.B. will be powered by a 3D engine that will let you do everything you could do in Homeworld, including moving and attacking ships in all three dimensions, zooming out to take a far-off view of your fleet, and zooming in extremely close on each highly detailed individual ship. Homeworld's presentation--its combination of haunting music and its convincing representation of starships in space--truly helped convey the sense that its players were alone in the vast reaches of some far-off galaxy. O.R.B. is taking a slightly more conventional approach, but it's no less ambitious than Homeworld. In fact, it's actually more so, and it should be, considering that two Homeworld games have come and gone since the development of O.R.B. began.

While Homeworld put players in command of a fleet of ships that was trying to find its way home, O.R.B. will let players choose to play as one of two different factions at odds with each other in a ruined asteroid belt known as the Aldus system. Aldus was originally home to an ancient and mysterious alien race that has become extinct--little is known about this mysterious breed of aliens, and little remains, except a few traces of incredibly advanced technology that can sometimes be found in the asteroid belt. Now that the aliens are gone, the only known inhabitants of the Aldus system are the Malus, a communal society of warlike beings who tend to favor slow, powerful ships, and the Alyssians, an enlightened group of scientists and thinkers, whose spacecraft tend to lack sheer power, but tend to be faster. The two races encountered each other while attempting to mine the same resources from asteroids--and as a result of a series of miscommunications and their own inherent cultural differences, the two ended up at war. Now each faction strives to cheat the other out of vital resources, steal the other's technology, and defeat the other in out-and-out combat.

The game will turn real-time strategy upside-down.

But letting you play as different factions won't be the only thing that Strategy First's upcoming game will do differently. O.R.B. will attempt to take traditional real-time strategy mechanics, update them, and adapt them to 3D space. For instance, take the game's resource-management model: Though you'll need to mine resources in order to fuel your research and build an armada big enough to crush your foes, you'll do so by exploring and mining the faces of asteroids. But you'll have to act fast, as the asteroid belt is constantly rotating in space, and if you wait too long, the rock you're mining will end up in enemy territory. Then again, you'll also have the option of building an outpost on an asteroid, which you can use as a new base of operations, and you'll also find that flying through an asteroid field can be a handy to way to slip past enemy sensors.