I just wanted to say that I was extremely excited about this game as soon as I saw it on kickstarter and the nice cinematic videos and interviews did a lot for me. However, I didn't decide to put money into the kickstarter program because I had just done so for a couple other titles. I thought I would wait until this released. Now that Planetary Annihilation is in the lime light again due to Steam I feel like I should just express that the current gameplay being so similar to Supreme Commander really goes against that unique/clean/simple feel the cinematic had. Of course you can never compare a game to it's cinematics. Anyhow, coming from somebody who has the Supreme Commander series and enjoyed them very much (the first more than the second), I feel that the functionality should serve you well but the game itself already feels tired because of the huge similarities. I don't plan on picking the game up now simply because it's so similar. A lot of games have the luxury of being able to clone features/functionality/style but I don't think this is one. From the commander to the buildings to the unit classes it's definitely much too similar to supreme commander. I didn't post this to bash the game or the company but I just imagine if the cinematic were to be made first, then a handful of staff were hired to turn that vision into a game I think it could be something better. Who am I to tell you how to make a game.. I'm just somebody who has always wanted to be involved in game development but has never pursued it.
Your opinion is odd to me. PA is not much like SupCom especially at the moment. But also generally it more like TA, if you forget about the fact that you are playing on planets. I.e. SupCom had 4 techlevels and no flying engineers. PA and TA both have 2 techlevels and flying engineers. It really doesnt feel like a copy of SupCom to me. Where do you see SupCom in PA?
Well, supreme commander was pretty similar to TA, and PA is aiming squarely at a 21st century TA, so I don't know what you were expecting.
I also don't get the comments that the game doesn't look like the Visualization, but maybe that because no one gives any context for the comment. Obviously there are some aspects like the Global Illumination that can't be done in a real-time environment and the Alpha isn't in a state yet with any post-processing stuff, but otherwise nothing is really different, half the structure assets are still even. Mike
I was excited about Planetary Annihilation with only the information/videos that were on the kickstarter page at the time. I didn't and still don't really know much more of the back-story of this game besides the goal of becoming something like Total Annihilation. My comparisons that just eat at me start with the commander, just like in SupCom. It's literally the same thing. Just to give you a frame of reference of what can irritate me check this video out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf8aBFTVNEU Everyone knows this but in your early movie going life you may not realize why it's familiar. For me it was that scream I heard in star wars. Now, when watching movies (some very good ones too) I'll get completely pulled out of the story because of this stupid scream. Generally it's not just the scream but you can usually notice little things here and there that seem to be from some kind of sound kit that the audio company reuses repeatedly on many movies. I've played a lot of SupCom and if you don't see this game as almost just a reskin of SupCom then I don't think you're looking very hard. So far what I've seen in this game, 90% of it could be done with a Supreme Commander mod. I've done a little modding of Supreme Commander myself. So to name a few comparisons; the units - cookie cutter comparison. Yes, there are a few different kinds of units but if their weren't any then it would be exactly the same, we can't have that. The economy UI, literally the exact same resource types and information layout as SupCom. The buildings, essentially all duplicates including the aquatic. I guess I really don't have to name anymore because this is the core of the game. I was fairly excited for the game but after what I have seen I just can't be excited for it. I'll likely pick it up some years down the road when it's on sale for $5 on steam. The core of my feelings were literally seeing the awesome cinematic (which felt like a fresh new idea, at least to me since I haven't come from TA) and then feeling the letdown when I realized how familiar the game already was to me. If I seem to be really negative I don't mean to be. I mean if you're just looking for more of the same this game can really scratch that itch with some new twists. There are definitely some titles I would like to have more of, Company of Heroes 2 is going to be one of those. Hardly any innovation but the player base needs the rejuvenation of a new title. I would love to see a new Warzone 2100. Even if it only were upgraded engine/graphics. I just didn't go into this title expecting to see Supreme Commander with a twist.
Actually FA was much more limited than TA. Sure FA added shields and commander upgrades and divided the units into 4 tech levels but TA had: 1. Hovercraft as a fully fleshed out unit class. 2. Underwater mass points. 3. Sea planes (great for ambushes) that were sort of t1.5 in addition to the usual t1 and t2 aircraft. 4. Water based radar, power generation, mass fabrication, and other base infrastructure. 5. Air, ship, hovercraft, and sub based construction units. So while FA is a great game TA actually did an awful lot more. TA was just held back by the limitations of the software and hardware technology of its time. You can't have a map that is totally water in FA, in TA you can. In FA you can't have one guy with only water and the other guy with only land and have a good fight, in TA you can. Additionally in TA the water/land topology of a map meant a lot more and opened up a lot more strategic and tactical options than it did in FA. However PA adds the following things that TA just couldn't do: 1. True spherical maps. 2. Orbital units and combat. 3. Planetary invasions. 4. Moon and asteroid bases. 5. Combat on gas giants that have no solid ground. 6. Extinction level events as a standard method of escalation. 7. Interstellar warfare across whole star systems in a single match. PA is essentially going to be TA unleashed and expanded to use the incredible power of modern PC hardware. While comparisons to FA are expected and even valid to some extent PA is not a descendant of FA. Rather PA and FA are both descended from TA. More like distant cousins than anything else with FA being TA with equal scale but with more focus on a smaller scope and PA being TA turned up all the way to 11. So rather than asking yourself if you like SupCom or FA you really should be asking yourself if you liked TA. You can always pick up TA on gog.com if you want to try it out.
Well then I have to ask what you were expecting from the same People behind TA and SupCom creating another Spiritual Successor to TA... Mike
You seem to be looking for something totally new it seems. There are certainly a lot of things that look alike when you compare SupCom and PA, but they are pretty general things. Yes you have futuristic tanks. Yes you have a commander, Yes you have Metal (hey SupCom called it Mass) and Energy. Yes they come from pgens and mex. I think you can continue this list a lot, but they those are all core concepts that TA, SupCom and PA all share. They are the foundation that the game is build on, I personally have no idea how you could change them without leaving the RTS sub-genre of TA. I think the jump from TA to SupCom is far smaller than the jump from TA to PA. PA will play on multiple planets, it will feature asteroids, probably more units at once, the egg-concept and probably lot's of other things I am forgetting about right now. The similarities are really only at the core concept and that's hard to change. My perception of the KS-Video was totally different: I saw the construction aircraft with those green nano sprays and basically thought: Oh yes please TA in 3D with planets and asteroids.
Yeah, it's not for everyone. That's all right though. Many of the finer changes from SupCom have to do with making gameplay more engaging and deemphasizing the economy, but if you're not interested in 'more of the same' then it's not for you.
There is a lot to be said about these issues. First off PA is very much being built as a platform. This means that I expect other people to innovate on top of our game to create new experiences. ???? is to PA as Dota is to WC3 for example. I think this is important to point out because we aren't just building a game, we are building a platform. Secondly the relationship between TA/SupCom/FA is a complicated one. It's not the relationship that an outsider has playing the games, it's the experiences that we had making those games mixed with the rest of our experience making games. As elucidated above there was a lot of cool things TA did that SupCom didn't do, for various reasons. Many of those things I thought were a net loss for the game (especially the compression of engineers down to a single axis). Overall PA is much more inspired by TA than it was by SupCom because I'm trying to guide the game back onto a path that I personally think is better. Whether or not we're successful is a different story. Bottom line, if you are looking for something completely different then I would wait and see what happens with our community. My bet is that we are going to see some serious gameplay innovation happen on top of this game. Remember, this is a marathon not a sprint
Seeing as there were full on space combat total conversions for TA that basically turned it into the space based part of Starwars: Empire at War (Which pre dated both Empire at War and Homeworld.) I think we will see some pretty interesting stuff come out of the PA modding community. Personally I want to see a full on total conversion to TA with updated graphics and the orbital stuff added in but that's just me.
Yeah that's pretty huge. IMO what made Blizzard RTS so successful was that they were built as platforms. Maybe not as flexible in their engine but certainly flexible in possibilities (thanks to their GUI "trigger" scripting and p2p distribution) and certainly approachable to amateurs. I think the last part is especially important, WarCraft III and Brood War produced so much custom content because they were approachable platforms. Timmy and Jimmy can't make proto-DOTA if they give up before trying. I'm almost hesitant to ask if Uber has any (present or future) plans to create something analogous to the Blizzard campaign editors. Understandably they're difficult and costly to produce but there is definitely a market for this type of thing. While StarCraft II's more advanced GalaxyEditor has more potential the lack of approachability didn't do well among amateurs and really hurt custom map communities. I can imagine a lot of players immigrating (or at least checking out) PA just for a decent campaign editor. Even something as low-tech as the StarCraft 1 editor would probably go a long way. SCMDraft II, is considered the most user friendly and powerful StarCraft 1 editor, it can be found here. Tutorial/Description of SCMDraft II, basically a description and guide on how everything should work on an analogous program Edit: Sort of tangential but I remember how big a deal it was when somebody made Zone Control on SupCom, campaign editors make that sort of thing trivial.
No offense buddy but you're judging an unfinished product, WAY unfinished project. Supreme commander takes from Total Annihilation what you currently see in both 1 and 2. With the exception of upgrades and skill trees. If you watched the videos with no volume I could see why you didn't understand that this was supposed to follow closely as a successor to TA and to the genre of RTS for those who think its shrinking. TA itself was a game that had endless strategies, endless amounts of units and so much modding capability.
I rewatched the video just to basically re-see the whole thing imagining the SupCom core and I mean if that's what you're looking for it's totally there. For some reason I was watching it and thinking hmm... self replicating robots seem awesome! I had some idea in my head about one core robot type that forms up all your army (adding/removing parts). Looking at it now it seems like the focus is on sending the commander all over the place to accomplish everything but when I was looking at it the first time without comparing it to anything it looked like you were sending some kind of "spawn bot" that replicated to form everything else.
This was my first editing/modding tool myself and the simplicity of the tool had a lot going for it with regards to teaching an early teenager how to be creative within it's ability.
I don't know how much we have talked about modding, but the plan is to expose a JavaScript API for issuing commands to the sim (spawn unit, grant resources, etc..) and defining triggers ('only one commander remains', 'player X has built Y Z', 'a player has moved a unit into a trigger region'). There will be a scenario manager that will allow arbitrary JavaScript code to run. The manager can make API calls or respond to triggers. The fundamental game types will be defined with this manager. While I don't know if we will release an editor specifically for campaigns, we will ensure that it will be possible to make such a tool.
Thanks, that is good news. I wish I could do a better job conveying the value of such a tool but I suspect Uber would actually love to make something like a campaign editor and resources are the limiting factor. I just remembered this guy made an open source editor on a custom map community I used to frequent: http://www.staredit.net/topic/15514/0/ I'm not sure if that would be useful for making something analogous on PA. Maybe I should bring it up on the mod forums.
