Best Dev to make Majesty 3/Majesty Clone?

[mafilux]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY

I love Dwarf Fortress, and I was watching this thinking, "I bet the Dwarf Fortress bros could make a damn good Majesty clone." If you've played DF before, it's intricately complex (to the point of insanity, really). While Majesty doesn't need to be nearly as complex as DF, I feel like these are the types of guys that would be able to give Heroes the kinds of personalities and AI we all love. (Dwarf Fortress is free to download and play, just for anyone who might want to try it).

What are some other devs you guys think would be good?

[i_nive]

Not a suggestion, just a thought that endeavors like this are best fit by well-established Devs (like DF's you pointed out). Meaning a "young" team will likely fail the marketing part and will not be taken seriously ...

[mafilux]

Originally posted by i_nive:

Not a suggestion, just a thought that endeavors like this are best fit by well-established Devs (like DF's you pointed out). Meaning a "young" team will likely fail the marketing part and will not be taken seriously ...

Yeah I agree. I feel like it would need to be someone familiar with the old tech Majesty used to run on. Newer teams have a different view of what's fun and what's not - every game is about marketing to the masses, not the few, lately.

[happyscrub]

I hate builder games like that. makes things so complicated, 99% of your game time is figuring out how to micomanage irrelevant @#$@. That's why they rarely do well.

[Matkatamiba]

The app is pretty honest to the original design. I don't play mobile games much, but it was a decent game.

[Sifer2]

I don't know about the Dev to make it I care more what their vision of the game should be. The one's that made Majesty 2 clearly wanted it to play more like a difficult RTS puzzler game. It was all about replaying levels until you built the right class setup to win when it spawned massive hordes of monsters at you on some random day.

For me that wasn't very fun. I like the fantasy kingdom "SIM" aspect more. Making heroes then watching what crazy adventures they got themselves into. The original dev team looked like they were going into more of a city builder direction with Majesty 2's old in dev screenshots. I think it would have been better. One good example would be that new game "Manor Lords" that has started advertising on Steam. I could imagine a fantasy version of that where instead of hiring small mercenary, and miltia's you hire heroes.

[horse sized nut]

Not sure. The AI in this game is very much a simulation. There are not many other devs who have pursued a game much like it. I am close to being done with uni, and would like to work on some kind of spiritual successor once my skills grow in game development in the next few years.

I'm not sure anyone but the original designers would be that great a fit to be honest to address the topic.

[Reality]

I kind of wonder if Majesty is more of a happy accident sometimes - the sense of theme IS wonderful of course, but the hero AI and decision trees while unique in the game's I have played, is held together by a system that isn't actually that facny - it's simply a descending order list of decision trees rolled against d100 (with + modifiders based on prime stats like Loyalty INT, ,etc on a per hero type basis) -

Making a clone is a tall order of course, but I think you could knock out a "design doc" for a simulation game and put up all the decision trees for your new hero/monster types - Even on paper the ones in Majesty act more "independent" in game than their actual tree's suggest (human gambler fallacy I suppose to always assume 90% always beats 80% etc)

Deciding what kind of "frame" game to put the simulation you would get out of that design doc can be difficult, but - Majesty still has some trappings of an Age of Empire 1 era RTS in both good and bad ways (the get coordinate pathfinding system) and as we know, has a difficulty cliff thing when going from level to level instead of a "smooth progression - I kind of think that the best thing to do is to assume (like the original dev' apparently did) that the simulation IS the most interesting thing and to just go forward with the rest of the game without worrying about polishing it's rough edges.