Grey Goo oozes onto the RTS scene this Fall

Petroglyph and Grey Box have one of the coolest looking new RTS’ I’ve seen in a while on course for an Autumn launch on the PC.

You might laugh at the name and think some grey goop a silly premise for a game, but Grey Goo is an actual world-ending scenario, and a very cool and unique one at that. Basically, grey goo is a flood of never-ending, self-replicating nano-machines (woo, that’s a lotta hyphens).

The threat comes in, in that there’s really no way to stop the little bots once they start consuming everything in their path for fuel and resources. Meaning that they pretty quickly can ‘eat’ an entire world. So kind of like Galactus of Marvel Comics fame, just a whole lot smaller.  As I said above, this is a real theory too, and is actually based on research from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), so maybe that’s what makes Grey Goo, as a game, stand out so much to me.

According to Petroglyph, development has been a real labor of love as they’re aiming for Grey Goo to be something really different in the genre. The developer is working on infusing the title with all the classic RTS gameplay that you’d expect, but without any of the negatives of the genre and none of the “tedium and frustration”. Sounds like a plan to me.

“Grey Goo has been a real labor of love for us for some time now, and we’re incredibly excited to finally start talking about it,” said Ted Morris, Executive Producer at Petroglyph. “We have a rich, lengthy background as RTS developers, dating all the way back to our time on the original Command & Conquer™ at Westwood Studios. We want to bring back some of what made those ‘traditional’ RTS games great while addressing all the lessons we’ve learned along the way. Grey Goo is an experience informed by the collective history of the RTS genre, infused with innovative ideas and a forward-thinking spirit that accomplish something original by incorporating new amalgams for the genre.”

Grey Goo will have a total of three factions to make war with, the Beta, Humans, and the title Goo. Each army (or puddle as the case may be with the Goo) will have different play styles and ‘epic’ units that are promised to be absolutely massive in scale. I’m thinking something like Titans in the Warhammer 40k universe, and if they’re anything like that, I’m sold on Grey Goo right now. The game will also have an adaptive AI that should make every play session markedly different, so you’ll need those epic units if you want to beat this program.

Look for Grey Goo to absorb the PC this Fall from Petroglyph.