An
interview on Rock, Paper, Shotgun talks with Shams Jorjani of Paradox Interactive, who reveals plans for a game titled Cartel, a squad-based RTS game that may be released as soon as 12-18 months from now. RPS suggests this will be more of a true sequel to Syndicate than the Syndicate revival
recently confirmed by EA, which is not much of a stretch since the new Syndicate is a first-person shooter, while like the original Syndicate, Cartel will offer squad-based real-time strategy as well as "a global research and diplomacy map." They discuss the game and its setting in a "futuristic world," and Shams is pretty open about how this was inspired by the change in direction for the Syndicate game in the works at fellow Swedish developer Starbreeze:
Anyway, we are now in a place where there are many classical PC games that now have people doing remakes and new takes on them. One of these is Syndicate, which is being developed at Starbreeze. It was the worst kept secret in the Swedish games industry! But now it’s out there, and we were very interested in the reaction to it. Meanwhile we were kicking around a lot of ideas for what kinds of cool games we’d like to see made because nobody else is making them anymore. During this time there was someone over at 2K who said you could not make turn-based games anymore, that the new X-Com had to be a shooter because you can’t do turn-based games anymore. Now, we have tremendous respect for the Starbreeze guys, they make great games, but the announcement sparked a discussion about “what is in a name”. What makes a Syndicate game? The world? The gameplay? The platform? The name? What is it? Cartel was born out of this discussion.
