civilization-mmo posts

A few weeks ago, Sid Meier announced plans to bring a version of his Civilization strategy game series to Facebook. But has the game's publisher 2K Games decided to shut down preliminary plans to adapt the Civilization franchise to a full-fledged MMO? It's looking like that's very possible. The blog site n3rfed.com has some evidence that such a project was in the works but was recently canceled.

The site points to LinkedIn online profiles from two members of the now apparently defunct (and previously not officially announced) 2K Austin development studio. The dev team was on the small side (just ten members according to one of the team members) and was shut down in October after working on a prototype MMO "of an existing franchise" for a little over a year.

While that franchise is never actually named, one of the former 2K Austin team members states in his LinkedIn profile that the the team "developed the overall design of the city layouts throughout the various ages of history". That certainly sounds like a Civ-type game to us. Big Download has emailed 2K Games to see if they care to comment on this story.

[Via Blue's News]

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Our sister web site Game Daily has just posted up the latest in their series of Q&As with major game industry figures with questions submitted by readers. This time the interviewee is Sid Meier, the head of 2K Games's Firaxis studio and of course the creator of the long running Civilization series of turn based strategy games (which just got a new edition announced for the PC). One of the reader questions asked about the possibility of a MMO style Civ game and Meier admits it's " . . . definitely an interesting idea and could take the game in exciting new directions."

That's not all he is apparently thinking about, however. Meier adds, "Beyond that I have some new ideas that are quite different from games I've made in the past – and that's all I'm able to tell you right now." Meier talks about a number of subjects in the chat, including whether there will be a new Pirates! game (none are planned at the moment) or whether Firaxis will go back to the classic sci-fi strategy game Alpha Centauri (Meier would like to do it but the game's rights are currently owned by Electronic Arts).