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Posts Tagged ‘Drifter’

GDC 2013: A Tour of 'Drifter' With Celsius Game Studios

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013

Since we first saw it in person at GDC 2012, Drifter has been under heavy development by Celsius Game Studios. The sandbox space trading game is approaching the final months of its development and studio founder Colin Walsh stopped by to show us some of its sights.

If you're not familiar with Drifter, it takes place in a massive open-world sandbox. You captain a small trading ship and work your way up the space food chain with new equipment and new ships. How you do that is up to you: mining and crafting, trading goods between systems, hunting pirates for bounties or engaging in piracy yourself.

We had a chance to take a look at a few of Drifter's current systems: the space station, the fast travel system and a fair bit of combat. The pirates were shy about coming out to play, but we managed to start a pretty impressive firefight nonetheless.

It sounds as though there are still quite a few systems to come: crafting, communications, RPG elements and a whole line of story missions to guide players through the galaxy, among others. The interface is also due for a major overhaul soon. Colin tells us he's hoping to have the game ready to go this summer, and we'll be keeping an eye on it to bring you more as it approaches release.

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Posted in GDC 2013, News, Upcoming Games | 10 Comments »

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Large-scale Space Combat and Trading Game 'Drifter' Gets a New Trailer

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

It's been a little over a year since Celsius Game Studios formally announced Drifter, an epic-scale space trading and combat game and a follow-up release to their fantastic 2010 space shooter Red Nova [$0.99], and our anticipation has been bubbling ever since. It's not just us, though, as Drifter has found itself amongst the Ten Most Anticipated Upcoming Games list which is based entirely off of how many of our readers have added the game to their Watch List in the TouchArcade app [Free]. In short, we all want this game!

We last saw Drifter in action at GDC back in March, and it was looking great then. Today, Celsius has finally released some more teaser footage of Drifter, this time showing a confrontation with some space pirates in the middle of an asteroid field. Check it out.

As has been mentioned previously, the soundtrack for Drifter is by the great Danny Baranowsky who is responsible for more classic game soundtracks than I can shake a stick at, and the new tunes in the above video definitely add tremendously to the overall atmosphere in the game. It's all seemingly coming together rather well still, and every time I catch a new glimpse of Drifter my anticipation to play the darn thing grows even greater.

As to when we'll all actually be able to get our hands on Drifter, Celsius Game Studios says there is a slim chance it could hit before the end of the year as originally planned, but an early 2013 release is looking more likely. It definitely won't ship before it's fully ready to go though, which I appreciate, so for now I'll just kick back and try to be patient as Drifter's release draws closer.

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Posted in News, Upcoming Games | 14 Comments »

GDC 2012: Upcoming Space Trader 'Drifter' from Celsius

Monday, March 5th, 2012

Today at GDC 2102 we sat down with Colin Walsh of Celsius Game Studios and took a look at his upcoming galactic space trading game Drifter.

Drifter is a large-scale space action strategy title in the proud tradition of the legendary Elite. The game will feature a galaxy 100,000 lightyears across, comprised of 10,000 stars with systems both procedurally generated as well as custom-tailored for a specific play experience. The systems in question are populated with MPCs, pirates, miners, and even a band of black-hole worshiping religious fanatics that call themselves "The Song of the Infinite Abyss."

In Drifter, you start out in a small craft that you use to get from system to system, trading weapons, ores, and goods of all sorts in order to amass fortune that can be used to trick-out and trade-up your ship, in order to amass even more fortune. Your adventures take place in and among the Unaligned Planets, a Wild West sort of galactic zone, made up of colonies resisting the order of the Commomwealth of Free Stars and the oppression of the Solar Dynasty.

Gameplay involves commercial transactions in various orbiting settlements, as well as heated battles in the void of space, where winner takes all. Accompanying the action is a powerful audio track crated by Danny Baranowsky, known for his audio work in Canabalt and Super Meat Boy, among others.

Colin tells us that he is aiming for a summer release with Drifter, but that the title will definitely land before years end. Expansion packs that add to the game universe will follow the initial release.

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Posted in GDC 2012, Upcoming Games | 15 Comments »


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