Soren Johnson and Mohawk Games


This week on the podcast, I sat down with co-founder of Mohawk Games Soren Johnson to discuss his time in the Game Industry and his latest project Offworld Trading Company.

Mohawk Games

We began with talking about Soren’s previous work on Civilization, at Stardock Games and more which led into a talk on how Soren’s design philosophy when it came to the strategy genre has changed from each of his previous studios and games. This led to a varied discussion on strategy game design including the balancing act of transparency vs. creating a pure simulation title like Crusader Kings 2. I also asked his thoughts on how the strategy genre has changed over the last decade since working on Civ 4.

Our final topic was focusing on Offworld Trading Company itself — The design of it, gameplay and I talked about some of the concerns I mentioned in my spotlight. I also asked Soren about his thoughts on Early Access as Offworld is his first experience with the new model.

One thing about the recording, Soren was doing the cast while being away from his computer and I picked up a lot of background noise that I wasn’t able to completely edit out.


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  • Andrii Vintsevych

    Is there any way to view the list of all podcast episodes? When I go here https://game-wisdom.com/category/podcast and lick load more posts many times. Mohawk episode is the earlier episode I can get to, but I don’t think that it’s the first episode of the podcast.

  • Andrii Vintsevych

    Is there any way to view the list of all podcast episodes? When I go here https://game-wisdom.com/category/podcast and lick load more posts many times. Mohawk episode is the earlier episode I can get to, but I don’t think that it’s the first episode of the podcast.