I recently was given a chance to interview Wargaming’s Jacob Beucler. Jacob is the Global Publishing Producer in charge of Master of Orion. He’s responsible for the go to market planning, development collaboration, player satisfaction and all things public facing. Jacob holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Game Art and Design and has worked on such games as Deus Ex: Invisible War, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Blitz: The League, Mortal Kombat, and LEGO Universe. Jacob has worked on both Development and Publishing sides of the business for the past 15 years.
At the moment Jacob is working on Master Of Orion which is a brand new 4x strategy game from Wargaming. They are trying to bring back this IP which was popular in the 1990’s by releasing a brand new game for the franchise.
Bryan: So with Wargaming, what was it that made you want to make one of these 4x games?
Jacob: Hmm, great question! So Wargaming’s history goes back all the way to 16 or 17 years ago when they were making turn based stragey games like Massive Assault. While this (Master Of Orion) may seem out of our wheel house, it is actually the roots of Wargaming and that’s an accurate statement just based on Victor’s love and confession for why Master Of Orion mattered to him. When it (Master Of Orion) came up for auction, we had to have it and we weren’t just going to sit on it. We were going to make something with it, so that’s kind of where we went.
Bryan: So the game at the moment is in early access, for those who may not know what it is, can you detail this a bit?
Jacob: Early access is an opportunity for early adopters to opt in and provide some feedback, so for us we developed a really cool collector’s edition. It has Master Of Orion, 1, 2, 3, the soundtrack and the art book and those are all really cool things and they’re valuable. I think that the ability to play it now is also a cool thing so it’s like this hybrid between a free to play beta and a paid Kickstarter, but it’s run through a really great platform known as Steam and good old games.
Bryan: So how long does a game take to come out after being in the early access?
Jacob: It’s a cool question. You know you’re going to have a really bad time if you walk into early access with a date and because of that it’s a difficult question to answer. You get one shot to bring back a legendary IP and so you know, I think a lot of us would have hoped we could have absolutely nailed it and crushed it by now, but we didn’t, we’re not there yet and we’re going to take a bit more time to get there.
Bryan: I was wondering, out of the 10 races that you can choose to play as which are the most popular?
Jacob: It’s the humans, followed by the Terrans
Bryan: Oh, I’ve only actually ever just played as just those two.
Jacob: Those are the only two you’ve played?
Bryan: Yeah.
Jacob: Yeah hahahaaha.. it’s familiarity.
Bryan: Which are you favourite?
Jacob: My favourite are the Darloks, they are the griever race, they will mass everything up. They are really hard to play and they’re very hard to win with, so it’s super challenging. But they’re really good at spying on people so I have fun with that.
Bryan: That’s very interesting.
Thanks for your Time Jacob
Jacob: Yeah you to!