Good evening, you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

With me tonight is regular panelist Bruce Garrick.

Yeah, hello Gavres.

I'm also pleased to welcome tonight's guests, Quarter to Three's Tom Chick, and EA2D, Soren Johnson, lead designer of Dragon Age Legends.

Tom, Soren, welcome back to the show.

I just want to say, before we start, that whatever Bruce Garrick is going to say, I disagree.

I'm not surprised.

All right.

Excellent.

Here we go.

All right, so tonight we're going to be talking about some conversations that got started at GDC last week.

And in particular, we'll be discussing some of what came out of Tom and Soren's

GDC panel, Strategy Games, The Next Move. So I was not at the panel, but I did read some

interesting summaries, you know, after the fact. And one of the things I guess I'd like to start

with is, Tom, you actually claim that strategy games are in the midst of a golden age.

I, yeah, I'm incredibly giddy about the state of the genre.

Not games where you have a counter representing an SS Panzer division.

The ship has sailed on that stuff.

I'm talking about like strategy games in general. If you,

if you open up the definition, I think we're in a platinum age. And my lead in for that was,

you know, by the way, the panel wasn't just me and Soren. We also had John Schaefer, the lead

designer, Civ 5, Dustin Browder, the lead designer, Starcraft 2, and Ian Fisher, a long-term ensemble fellow who's doing Age of Empires Online. I thought. You had Ian Fleming, I thought. Oh, right. That's why, yeah. He's dead, Bruce, isn't he? I don't know that stuff. Okay, that's a very, that's a very august panel that you had there.

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