In response to the numerous requests hitting our mailbox we’ve decided to try and answer some of your  Sovereign Questions. For some reason, there seems to be a lot of confusion, sheesh – don’t tell me you actually haven’t played Everquest or Ultima Online yet?

First off, you should know that Sovereign is not a sequel to Everquest. However, it is being designed by the same developers (Verant Interactive). The game is in its very early stages at present, and Verant had not planned to release any information on it until after GenCon next month.

Fortunately, this did not stop the intrepid U-G staff from digging around, cajoling, bribing and generally being a bunch of  “sneaky” bastards.

I guess we’ll need to take you from the beginning, and we apologize for confusing Everquest fans and the non-online RPG types who’ve kindly written in and told us to “Sort it out”

Sorting, 1… 2… Sorting

Ahem. Where to start? Well the main problem I have, is that every time I even think about Sovereign, my pulse starts to pound, my palms start to sweat and a slow malevolent, downright EVIL grin slowly smirks its way up my face…

You see Sovereign is every Strategy Gamer’s wet dream. (This is a family publication. You should have said “Every Gamer’s night time orgasm” – Ed) 

It’s one thing to play Strategy against a computer. With the exception of perhaps some of the badass chess games, you always eventually work out how the computer behaves, and plan accordingly. Heck – that’s why we’re not still all playing the original Civilization. It applies equally to the real time games. No matter how hard they try, designers still have yet to come up with an Artificial Intelligence system that even comes close to the thrill, danger and challenge of defeating fellow humans.

Playing Strategy games against fellow humans manages to be a great way to spend an evening, the pleasure you can get out of a really good game of Total Annihilation, Starcraft or Age of Empires is really quite unique, but after a while, the same tactics and similar scenarios do get old eventually. There are other downsides to Strategy games as well. Turns Based games, which traditionally, are more balanced and “fair” take forever to organize, let alone play, a game. And, maybe, it’s just me, but don’t you find it annoying to be beating seven shades of crap out of human opponent in a real time strategy game (Say Starcraft) only for him to log out without so much as a “Well Played”. And finally, don’t you get frustrated by the fact that no matter how many battles you win, no one knows exactly how much of a badass you actually are?

Well fellow strategy nuts, our chums at Verant Interactive (Them of the Crack Cocainish Everquest) have put together a rather wonderful plan to remedy this strategy shortfall. They call it “Sovereign”. Next Page