You did it! Congratulations! DL'ing as we speak.

Unexpected.

Honestly Drox was rather fun, though a lot more fun when i modded it with a huge XP boost and could really try out the different features of the game. And would probably be moreso with friends to play with.

Drox 2? I'll have to see. A quick glance at the screenshots suggests they are still using the same engine (or very similar). So we'll see.

Drox 2 is MUCH faster and more complex.

So no Mac support anymore? Anyway, good to see, that there is still Linux support :)

"If you seek sandbox, seek no more" say DO recruiters.
And an operative I become.

So it is the same engine. Which means the game is more an expansion, or a different approach on how it handles it.

I know if you look under the hood at the files to edit them there's tons of references to their other game Din's curse. And yes it isn't much different from a dungeon crawler, the difference being if there's walls or not, otherwise there's levels, quests, items, damage resurrection experience, a few cosmetic changes and it's basically the same system with a different coat of paint. Similarities stood out heavily before, though it was unique enough you more or less chalked it up to the difference of playing D20 Fantasy vs D20 modern or D20 StarWars or similar.

I'm sure if he shared the source for the engine people would patch it to be compatible with mac, although not sure about IOS since Apple seems determined to keep pushing updates to break everything.

I was thinking the same thing. I want to be more charitable to Soldak, since I loved Drox Operative, Kivi's Underworld and Din's Curse. But after later games like Zombasite and Din's Legacy, it's getting harder and harder to deny that they're essentially just reworking and reheating the same game engine and the same gameplay loop over and over again. I mean, as you point out, once you look behind the interesting recontextualization of Drox Operative, the gameplay loop is actually almost identical to what Soldak had released before.

You could of course make the same argument for Spiderweb and their games, but at least Vogel has made the effort to modernize and update the engine behind his games. And he's varied the gameplay with series like Avadon and Queen's Wish (for better or for worse).

You know, there's a demo for this game, guys. If you tried the faster gameplay, you would not be having this conversation about how similarly things play:

http://www.soldak.com/Company/Demos.html

It's much faster and more action-y.

The toolchain is ancient and going from 32-bit to 64-bit isn't necessarily simple. I think a complete rewrite would be more feasible at this point.

Drox Operative was sufficiently fast and action-y for me. These games all have options to make things go faster or slower anyway; that's not really the issue. Again, I do like them, but at this point I'd like to see Soldak do something significantly different. That's always a risk, so I'm not actually expecting it to happen.

The upshot to this is that it keeps the game very friendly to older hardware, and it means running the game through WINE or CrossOver is simple.

Granted, as I said earlier, I'm trying my best to be charitable to Soldak, given how small they are and how dedicated they are to their community. While open-sourcing the game for people to potentially port to 64-bit OS X/Apple Silicon may work, I'd just as soon see an interim solution like offering the game packaged for modern Macs in a WINE wrapper.

Nice, I picked it up today. It's faster than I remember the first game being, and the gameplay feels tighter, but I'm still learning and re-learning things. I like Soldak, their games are so different from anything else, and to me that's worth a lot. It's like they're in a category of their own.