The Long-Debated "Soul"

A year or so ago there was a lot of discussion on these forums about the game (particularly the units) lacking "soul." It's hard to quantify what this means, but I believe after a while the game did begin to develop "soul."
Units like the Ant, Dox, Boom and more are (to me at least) memorable and distinctive. The planets have a certain character to them, as does the soundtrack.
What are your thoughts? Does the game have "soul?"

I think the soul of PA is the planet, space, and orbit.
Without these elements, PA is just another tranditional RTS game.

In my opinion, the planetary weapons are far more impressive than small units.
The best signature for PA are Halley and catalyst.
They are very easy for people to know what is this game.

At least for me, the soul is the whole art style in itself. It is like playing with the toys you always wanted to have as a child.

The soul for me is how it feels so familiar to Total Annihilation especially the Eco, units, and of course the nukes

I think the soul of PA comes from the community mainly. The people claiming the game lacks soul didn't look beyond the surface of the tutorial.

As for the actual game, I thought the art direction was a good move. I know many may not agree, but keeping things child-like makes the game less serious. In a game filled with Halleys and catalysts , there is an element of absurdity that has to be balanced in a humorous way. Had PA gone in a more serious tone, I feel there would be more threads complaining about the lack of "realism for the sake of realism" which is a hole of needless nitpicking.

So to summarize, I feel the "soul" of PA was the absurd. Some people love it. Others despise it.

Since this is a "in my opinion" thing. It's the fact that it's simple enough to get the point across but detailed enough that when you zoom in on a unit you can see the effort put in. Like zooming out to see the whole solar system then zooming in to see a single dox (out of thousands) on one of five planets. That is incredible, and that is where you feel it's soul....
or

that fact you can identify strength or size of a unit/army indicates soul because without it no emotions can flow.

I definitely agree with this.
For me PA's overall atmosphere (created from the planet aspect, huge scale, art style, music etc) is what gives PA more 'soul' that most other games I have played.
Something that I think sums this up quite well are the epic cinematic videos various people have created such as these

Anything can gain 'soul' if you spend enough time with it so that it builds an attachment and meaning.




'Soul' may not be quantifiable precisely, but you can definitely estimate it to a meaningful level of accuracy. PA had/has lacklustre visual effects, limited sound effects, bad pathing, bad ui and feel, bad unit roster choice and interaction. And more importantly, one of the main distinguishing elements of PA (orbital and multi planet) is clunky, shallow, and nowhere near the expectation that was set. Though not that i mind because i don't personally play PA for that kind of gameplay.

There's also an unmistakably clear and significant difference in aesthetic quality and feel between the kickstarter trailer and the finished product. For legit gameplay or technical reasons perhaps, but it's there nonetheless and you can't deny that.

The reason i play pa and why it has meaning to me is because of the community that still plays it, not so much because of any wonderfully designed gameplay.

I think the units look too much like toys and for me aren't as engaging as the TA units. In TA every unit mattered, and you cared for each fighter, each bomber etc. In SupCom2 you could have good battles with small groups of units. PA is more strategic and individual units don't matter as much. It's also very scalable and so quick paced and so you can't get attached to a single unit or single army.

I still don't understand the "units look like toys" perception. It's art. I guess that's subjective though.

I guess it's because they're all clean and colorful.

I Don't know what you played but in supcom 2 there wasn't a single moment I cared for a unit that wasn't experimental. Ta style games don't have meaningfull units in any way. A game that made you care about your units as gold is dow2 or maybe etherium. The last playing against an Ai was my most difficult match ecer in any rts. That was extremely good ai.

See I don't think the trailer looks better than PA now. If it's more aesthetically pleasing it is mainly down to how close the camera is to the battlefield and the 'cinematic' angles it's shot at. These are two things that you don't do in game so it doesn't get the feel. If you look at cinematic stuff people have done within the current game, the actual unit models and animations are more detailed than the trailer, not less.

I think a lot of this 'the trailer was so much better' stems from the reality of paying a game.

One point I do acknowledge, units don't live long enough to get attached to. That really could happen in TA as the pacing was much slower and many units had high health. I remember quite a few 'micro' players who would forgo the macro game in favour of expert use of a few units, and they could often win that way. If anything to me that is what PA misses, as no individual unit (even a titan) can change the battle on its own (except super weapons ofc). That said, PA was always pitched as a large scale game so can't really condem uber for that.

Also, haven't you noticed, every new rts gets slated for 'laclustre units'... I really think rts fans are impossible to please these days.

At this point quite a few of PA's units are very memorable mainly because they have history to them (well so long as you're an active community member). Biggest example would be the Ant.

There's also the "Liberty Dox"

The

The emperor bless the ant!!

Defi

Definitely. Every game that i've played of the genre has had that problem. If you look at grey goo, even if you don't care about the units themselves they have such an elaborate feeling to them that the worl feels alive. I don't think mucj people will remember any of those apart from the mother goo but Pa players will definitely remeber the dox or the ant. Hell even the bumble bee or the vanguard have a pretry distinc feel to them. The facyor that makes you care about a unit
is:
1- the asthetic part of it
2- the power that it has
3- the community
4 community
5 community
.
.
.

I was gonna write a rather long post but elodea has pretty much summed it up.

- Units die too fast to feel epic and to feel attached to them
- Units are too generic in design and style (that improved with Titans, but those vanilla units are very bland)
- Sound effects are very subpar (the music is great though)
- And another host of bad design decisions, be it artwise (*cough* swirls) or gameplaywise (orbital...)

You can argue all you want but those points drove many players away from the game. In my book PA is 'the game that could have been' if it wasn't for a series of bad decisions and ignoring the community.

I see almost all from kickstarter trailer in real mutliplayer games.So its fine. Kickstarter trailer is better for me just because it has no lags((

Fair enough, all i will say is i don't share that opinion.

I love how everyone talks about PA as if it were this massive failure. It's every bit as successful as it's predecessors. No it isn't particularity *more* successful, but TA wasn't this gigantic hit that took the gaming world by storm and neither was SupCom.

It's done as well as it was going to imo- a big issue is that one persons 'bad design decision' is another persons 'must have' feature. I'm not saying PA is perfect by any stretch, but I do think it hits the niche THE DEVELOPERS WERE AIMING TO HIT. We also have strong evidence that PA sold close to (possible slightly in excess of?) a million copies so obviously some people like it as it is.

TL,DR; designing an RTS is inherently a compromise- and PA falls into a category of 'less mainstream' than some other titles in the first place so anyone claiming it somehow failed is really being unrealistic. To make a game that would have a stacraft level of multi player success would imo have to be a very different game that I'm not sure would mesh with what PA was intended as from the start. PA was shooting for the 'large scale' aspect of TA. TA also had up close, mico oriented 'personal' game play many miss and I'm certain that could be made into a totally different TA derived RTS. I don't necessarily think that would fit into PA in a workable fashion and including it would not guarantee success.