Louis Castle Interview

[Gobalopper]

There is an interview with co-founder of Westwood Louis Castle at GameSpot UK today. It mainly covers Renegade but there was a few questions mentioning Emperor that are worth pointing out, they are below:

GS: Since the current crop of both off- and online RPGs is dominated by fantasy-based games is there any hope of a Lands Of Lore revival - maybe as a massively multiplayer RPG or even an isometric Diablo-style game?

LC: You know we've talked about those things many, many times and it's certainly possible. But the thing is, at Westwood, we only have a certain number of creative leaders, a limited number of people that can drive product teams. I think that's probably true in the industry as a whole. In a hit driven world we prefer to do fewer products and try to make them really big hits. So, right now we've got plenty on our hands with the Command & Conquer universe of games and Earth and Beyond, much less looking beyond that. The Kyrandias, the Blade Runners, the Lands of Lores - these are things we're not looking to continue working on at this time. Once we're looking for another opportunity we'll obviously look at our back catalogue. That's why we did Dune Emperor. The fans wanted another Dune, so we made it.

GS: Speaking of which, was it as successful as you hoped?

LC: No it didn't sell as well as we had hoped.

GS: Does that mean we're unlikely to see another?

LC: That coupled with a few other things makes it unlikely that we'll do another Dune game.

GS: What about the Dune 3D graphics engine?

LC: The Dune 3D engine was built to do Dune and it wasn't a very robust and flexible engine. The 3D engine we use for Renegade, the basic underlying 3D engine is called W3. Not a very creative name, Westwood 3D! We're using that for Earth and Beyond, we used it for Renegade and we used it for Pirates (PS2). And the next C&C RTS is based on the core of that. So the quick answer is no, we're not using the Dune engine, but we are using a 3D engine.

I think that will put to rest the people who still think Westwood is working on Emperor or another Dune game. It's unfortunate but there isn't anything we can do but look forward to the release of Generations most likely late this year.