Things continue to progress. Much of Stardock's resources are currently finishing up Galactic Civilizations II. But within the next few weeks, most of the development team from GalCiv II will be migrating over to work on Society full-time which should get things moving.
Interest in the game remains very high and our goal is to have something interesting to show by E3 (May). So what is Society really about?
Society is a game that is about building up a virtual society. Your society continues to exist even when you're not on-line to play it. While it does have warfare, warfare is just one of many aspects of the game. Players have virtual ruling families that can be married off to the ruling families of other players to build alliances. They have unique resources that they can trade back and forth in order to build unique equipment.
What we think makes Society special is that we've come up with solutions to many problems one would tend to run into in a strategy game that exists in a persistent world. For example, buildng up some beautiful city over days and weeks wouldn't be very fun if it could be destroyed while you're sleeping. What we've done is create some new game mechanics.
Most MMOs take existing single player or multiplayer game mechanics and try to extend them to a persistent environment. Society, by contrast, was designed to be persistent from scratch. It's not taking some existing game design and putting it on-line. Its design only works in a persistent world.
Stay tuned.
