Status of Emperor

[Gobalopper]

Well since it is highly unlikely for Westwood to come out and say "we are abandoning Emperor" I guess I will. This is pretty obvious from the lack of updates from WW people as of late. Devinoch is now moving onto Renegade stuff so he doesn't have the time to spend on Emperor anymore. Chris still stops by every now and then on the messageboards but I'm guessing he will be moving onto other projects as well. Even though IG played a big role in the game we rarely see them, I don't know why but it would have been nice to hear every now and then from the people who put a lot of work into the game.

A lot of you are probably thinking that because Westwood isn't going to support Emperor anymore the game will die. Well this will happen if no one is around to keep the community alive.

To me it is just like Dune 2000 all over again, except this time we have a game that is among the best RTS games out there.

Unlike the other fansites who seem to have stopped updating we will be keeping dune2k.com updated with maps and whatever else. I am open to suggestions on how we can keep things going, I really don't want to see what happened to Dune 2000 happen to Emperor.

As for why this happened there are a lot of things that went wrong. If Emperor was to be released today I think it would have gone over much better. For me it was a lot of small things that soured peoples opinion. Problems with firewalls at release and the online interface, which still needs to be redesigned, are two that come to mind.

I can't really blame Westwood for no longer supporting the game, if it isn't selling they can't support it forever, but I can blame them for not putting enough effort into Emperor before and after it was released.

So what can be done to keep Emperor popular? Unfortunetly not much without support from Westwood. It is highly unlikely we will see another patch or an expansion pack of any sort. At this point what you see is what you get with Emperor. It is up to the fans now, make maps, get involved in creating modifications and editing, or get some friends involved in the game.

This probably isn't what a lot of you wanted to hear, but someone had to say it. Feel free to post your thoughts in our forum.