Regarding some details we'll be releasing today

Honestly Uber's a really nice company and so I doubt the money grab theory is plausible. This company supported a game for much longer after it stopped giving them revenue... WHILE BANKRUPT! That right there is some true dedication.

To them 1.0 doesn't mean "complete" it means that's it's completed their main vision.. A game with huge armies, crossing over dozen of planets, with asteroids being hurled at planets and causing catastrophe to ensue. To me the games premise is complete... Now all we need are the additional features. Server should be the first of the list to go live.

DOZENS?!
WHOA I GOTTA TRY THAT OUT!!
*computer implodes*

Hey if you're a n00b first thing you do is make a 30 planet system amiright?

Anyway okay... dozens is an incorrect term, but I meant... A couple?

(You can actually have dozens of size 200s and still have less surface area than a size 1200)

Is it a good thing or not to release it (really) "soon" ?

It's hard to answer without having our hand on this pre-release version.
No doubt they're will be a flamming thread on this after the next release.

For the moment, just say good luck for Uber at PAX.
I hope the game will be well received.

And anyway, the final answer of this question will be given by press critics.

I wish I could go to PAX

Nope, it will be given by real critics.

http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_criticism/

Idk, the highest rated game of the last two year, GTA5, released buggier than this.

Basically, what that tells me, is mainstream will badly rate something that it doesn't hype up, and that mainstream will rate well a complete pile of dog poo if it is already mainstream hyped.

A ton of people play a game buggier than PA, love it because walking around doing random stuff brah, and rate it better than PA, while calling PA unplayable. I swear, I am not apart of this species sometimes...

And it is literally, LITERALLY, because of keeping a positive position with the mass public. Critics will play a buggy *** game, and rate it well, because if they rate it poorly, the 2m people playing it will never read another review they make again, and their review website will disappear. They give the "rating" people want to read, just like press give the news people want to see, and movies sell storylines people want to watch #jerryspringer

I think it's important to realize that the mainstream video game press is notoriously bad at picking out good games from bad games. It's possible they are in the pocket of moneyed interests (certainly some media outlets are), or it could be that it is in their collective interests to review for publicity for new games, and then move on. Reviewing a popular game poorly hurts their reputation a lot, while reviewing a bad game highly does not.

In any case, gaming "journalism" is seldom worth reading, with a few exceptions.

Strategy games are good because they are interesting enough to keep players playing for years. That's really the only metric that anyone should care about. People kept playing the great RTS titles, for example Brood War and Total Annihilation, for over a decade after they were released.

Popular opinion and the gaming press are too fleeting and too insubstantial to really consider as a measurement of quality. And their track record is terrible. Especially for strategy games. They tend to love spectacle, which is extremely fleeting in its appeal. Which works fine for the gaming press which covers a different game every week, and for popular opinion which flits from game to game.

SupCom seemed to struggle with the balance between spectacle and strategic depth. Focusing on its experimentals (spectacle), especially in SupCom 2, was actually bad for the game since it was at its best at lower tech levels with larger numbers of smaller units. One huge unit is just not as interesting to fight with as an army, especially against an enemy huge unit.

But for people who want a real, serious, high-quality, interesting strategy game, the strategic interest of the game itself is the only arbiter of quality.


Planetary Annihilation faces the same struggle that SupCom did. The spectacle features (planet smashing) seem to be of greatest press interest. But they are also its least strategically interesting features. More development of the basic mechanics of fighting with common, conventional units to make battles more interesting would be fantastic. The engine is clearly there, but the unit design and the numbers need some attention. It's just a question of priorities. Do you focus on the spectacle, making the big in-game events like planet smashing a centerpiece of gameplay? Or do you focus on common battles, making them complex and interesting, and make planet smashing rare but with huge impact?

My personal theory is that the reason why TA specifically played as well as it did (in its day) was that the 3D units were its spectacle, headline feature. So those units were designed to play as well as possible, with a large number of units that were interestingly different, and with different models. Even the Peewee had articulated arms and weapons, with individual projectiles, and that was the spectacle feature of TA.

My hope is that even though interesting, different, articulated, units, with physics simulation in 3D, and so on, is no longer a big spectacle, the same amount of attention to making common battles with regular units interesting will happen in PA. Just with greater numbers and larger maps, including spherical maps and with multiple maps (planets) in a single match. The orbital layer and the ability to destroy maps with planet smashing becomes a huge move when those battlefields are already the theater of a lot of interesting battles.

From a strategic gameplay standpoint, the value of spherical maps cannot be overstated. It's just a huge change from everything that came before, with immense potential.

Brad thanks for the update! Everyone we have been in the thick of it. I believe most of us have tunnel vision. If we step back this game is utterly astounding in what it has accomplished. I know we have things that we still long to see come to light. But lets take a moment and give thanks.

Thanks Uber!

btw @BradNicholson. Can you tell us about how you go about mining a Gas Giant? Is there a new unit or structure that you must build?

SoOoOoOoOoOoO MuUuUuUuUcH Mother-Flippin' HyYyYyYyYyYyPe

Wait this is IT

Wat.

U Wot M8?

I'm sorry, I'm sorry... Last one for a while, I promise!...

Maybe...

Ya know, I keep looking at these wonderful red alerts I keep getting on the forums, hoping and praying that one of them will be Brad or Garat with some actual news, but instead, I excitedly open it up to see.....

This.

dafuq.

Honestly

U Wot M8?

I couldn't resist.

W-what are you implying, that I'm not as cool as Brad or Garat?

Well fine! I don't even care!

*cries internally </3*

So close...

I had to google to figure that one out. How dare you guys make me.

Okay guys we need to calm down or this'll all be removed as spam...