Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

Looks like it’s a bit of a sad day (and several days after the fact). Relic’s first community manager, Allie “Buggo” Henze is no longer at Relic. Allie was Relic’s first “version” of a community manager. I think I can speak for all the fans when I say that we appreciate everything Allie did for the community and for us fans.

To the members of the Relic community, we have to tell you that Buggo is currently pursuing other opportunities. This has led to some speculation that Relic will no longer be supporting our loyal fans - nothing could be further from the truth. Soon we will be introducing you to new members of Relic who will carry forth the commitment we have to our fans. We are expanding our community support greatly over the coming months; better support for our modders, frequent updates about what’s going on in the studio, expanding our numbers, contests, content, and more.

And for those wondering, we are still hosting our upcoming community open house - you don’t want to miss it because you’ll be treated to some sneak previews of our work.

Thank you for your continued support!

Relic Entertainment

Official post here.

Buggo does still have an account on the forums, and hopefully will be able to pop in and say hi (I’d not expect her to be able to comment on Relic and all the cool stuff she worked on). The forum staff helped Relic out by modifying her account to be named “Relic” and then created a new account for Buggo. Any posts on the “Relic” account before April 24th were made by Allie, and anything after were from another Relic rep. I expect to hear more soon from Relic about their intentions, but it’s been made very clear to me that they’re not going to go without a community manager type position again. Also, as far as I know, the Relic Open House is still on, and judging on the biggest fan contest starts today at noon pacific.

Allie, you set the bar pretty high for any future community folks at Relic. I hope whoever gets the position next can meet the community’s expectations. Good luck in the future and we’ll see you around!

There’s a thread running on the forums about people’s recollections of the Relic Open House. If you haven’t already, pop in and have a read. If you visited Relic for the open house, and haven’t posted your impressions yet, go for it!

Relic didn’t announce any new games, expansions or anything like that, but we did get to find out they have several teams working on various projects. Watch here for an article (once approved - NDA issues), about my recollections for the weekend.

One of our forum members by the name of Lor3-16 is organizing a Dark Crusade mentor program. The idea is that experienced people take newbies under their wing for a while to teach them the ins and outs of online play.

You can read more about the program in this thread or send a message to Lor if you’re interested in signing up as a mentor.

It’s almost that time of year again!.

Let’s see if we can beat last year’s total.

You may have noticed a little item appear in the right-hand sidebar titled “Notable Forum Threads”. These are forum threads selected by our staff for being particularly interesting, important, funny, or anything else that catches our attention. Enjoy ‘em!

If you’re interested in getting these in your feed reader, the RSS feed is available here.

It does seem to disappear occasionally, presumably due to an error fetching the RSS feed. Don’t panic if you don’t see it.

Howdy!

It’s been… a while. I would say I was busy, but then again that seems like such an obvious excuse. So instead of making crap up, I’ll just say that I haven’t updated the forum roundup because I’m a lazy bastard. Ha.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into the fun once again. A bunch of cool threads await.

This week on the RelicNews forums….

You may have heard of Sword of the Stars and Sins of a Solar Empire, two 4x games that are currently under development. I would link you, but my dog ate my google, so you’ll have to search for yourselves.
Anyhow, Sword of the Stars (SotS) is made by Kerberus, a new outfit with a bunch of oldschool Relic developers. Sins of a Solar Empire (SoSE) is not made by Kerberus, but it has a name that sounds similar. Both games are somewhat similar in concept, so Squid had this awesome idea - why not combine the two?
The result is SofTits - Sins of Things in the Stars. SofTits is much more than a funny acronym however; it is a call to pens, keyboards, tablets and paint brushes. The combined creative powers of The Studio launched on a holy crusade to create concept art and background stories for what will one day be the best game in the universe. You can check out awesome “screenshots” and cool stories in the official thread. Everyone is invited to help out of course, if you have an idea for a race, technology or historical background, go and post now.
Reading through this part I realize that you may not be that enthusiastic about clicking, so let me just mention three words: “tentacles” and “schoolgirls”¹.
Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you familiar with the our advertising hating attack moderators or the new auto-thread locker, might enjoy this bit of confusion. A prominent member from the Relic Forums and HW/HW:C community from times long past started a General Discussion post about his site related to a new game, “Sins of a Solar Empire“. Apparently some old HW:C (Barking-Dog) devs work at Iron Clad Games, makers of this new product. Anyway, the autolocker’d been locking recent threads about the game, and when Momoguru posted about his fansite (because other “Sins” threads had been autolocked), he was struck down by the GD moderators (I’m not a GD moderator and I got angry email for it? How’d THAT work?). One of the old threads has been re-opened, so go see what all this fuss is about.

Check out Momoguru’s site here.

(Wouldn’t it be great if THQ let Relic go back to Space RTS games? I wonder if Relic even wants to? Ohhh maybe some Battlefleet Gothic + Dawn of War similar to the new Empires at War Star Wars game that’s coming?)

We’ve just launched the Relic Boards Yearbook, 2005 Edition! Check it out, and if you’re a Relic board member, post a profile!

WildCard, author of the famous SLS intro movie, has created a moving tribute to Murph. The video (10MB mpeg) can be seen here and you can discuss it on this forum thread.

ceejayoz is auctioning some DoW goodies and sending the proceeds to Child’s Play in memory of Murph.

I imagine there’ll be more things like this done in the next few days; he was a wonderful guy who really made an impact on us all, and we’re going to miss him like hell.