Any Chris Taylor reaction on Planetary Annihilation ?

When does having one player per army mean that you can't have multiple battles on multiple battlefields?

As per CT's example, you can have 2 players playing a game of 3D chess and battling it out on multiple chessboards.

Most people with extensive experience can be quite the cynics when observing others with lofty goals and dreams.

Do I think Uber can pull off the near impossible? Absolutely.

Do I think Uber is faced with an almost insurmountable challenge? Absolutely.

I wouldn't be so blindly confident in Uber with their experience as a company on the whole, although a lot of the issues surrounding past setbacks have involved -serious- hassle with financing and Microsoft; which is where PA will really show if they can stand on their own entirely just by the support of fans. 2 Million really isn't a lot these days for creating a videogame, but the saving grace is probably the fact that Uber is a very small company. It would probably seem an impossibly tiny amount for Chris because GPG was substantially bigger than Uber.

I agree with what you wrote. I'll also add that CT is NOT the only one who has had to adjust his mindset and conform to business pressure.

As casual gamers make up the largest gamer demographic, many companies have changed the focus of their games to cater to the casual gamer.

Take BF3. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as it's predecessor, BF2, much to the disgust of many BF2 players. Many have complained that DICE took this route with BF3 to cater to the COD crowd. Perhaps DICE did.

The same can also be said for Planetside 2, which also is not as sophisticated to its predecessor, Planetside. Again, many have complained that SOE took this route with PS2 to cater to the COD crowd. Maybe SOE did.

Like it or not, if your a for-profit company that makes games and your goal is to make a lot of money, then you will make a game that targets and appeals to casual gamers. Even more so if you're a publicly traded company and have shareholders to appease on a quarterly basis.

Whether Uber falls into this category or not remains to be seen.

I think Uber will be OK financially so long as they continue to convince gamers to pay $90 USD to play the PA alpha.

I'll be amazed if they have this done to an serious degree by December... The time frame is just so small my brain cannot wrap around the idea of how they will pack everything in such a small time frame. Even more so as they don't have any ridged structure in place of what they want done that alone has me worried.

Guess if it's not done by December then they can just extend the beta, if they don't have the money for it and need to release before people view it as being complete then it's going to be the $90 steam alpha all over again.


If it does all go to plan though, this game will be awesome and will change how people/companies throw money at game development in the future.

Eh, I'm very optimistic about this.

Yes they still have a ton of work in front of them and supporting mac and linux may be more work than they hoped for but the current direction they're going is the direction I want the game to go.

The planets feel great and the graphic style fits the game. The revamped economy plays good with no obvious drawbacks at the moment. Units (the current tiny set we have) fit the theme of the game.

I'm very happy with the current state of the game and I look forward to its further improvements.

This project seems to be going along fine. This game is where I expected it to be at this time

It doesn't. Some people are just concerned that without being able to focus on several battles at once game play will suffer. I don't think it will be an issue. But even if it is, having more than one player per army should solve it nicely.

This project seems to be going along fine. This game is where I expected it to be at this time

sorry about double post, forum gets glitchy sometimes

If CT hadn't gotten his company in that economic and PR snaffu with Wildman last year, he might have been able to buy the rights for TA from Atari and have a Kickstarter for Total Annihilation 2. That would have been significant enough to have been Kickstarted in Planetary Annihilation's wake.

Based on your post, I just did some reading on CT and Wildman. It seems CT is not the astute businessperson I'd imagined him to be.

While I still think he's an excellent game designer and visionary of sorts, it's clear that his business acumen is not up to par with his game developer skills.

thanks for that

This is true of a lot of people. They are great in one or two areas and not so great or just average in other areas. Truly multi-talented people are very rare.

Chris said some more negative things that got edited quickly on reddit. Something about us not having a chance in hell of making this game. Personally I don't feel a need to respond in a way other than actually making the game. I played a really fun game of Planetary Annihilation this morning.

I think Chris is smart enough to know that starting a war of negativity just isn't a useful. Is he positive on the game though? Not from what I hear

Considering all the games people love from CT were made by many of the ppl making this game anyway... who cares what CT says!

Poor guy got bought up by Wargaming and now he's likely working on some "free2play" title that is way beneath his creativity. With that said, I think he definitely failed to adapt to the changing market and he needed someone else to be the boss for once.

To be negative about this project just makes him seem a bit disillusioned with the industry and probably mostly jealous at your success on Kickstarter.

I will always think fondly of Chris but he should have just focused on designing games and let someone else handle the business and production.

I completely agree with your sentiment. Not everyone in tech can become a Steve Jobs (as much as they'd like to think they can).

I think CT has a case of "sour grapes". He has no one to blame but himself.

I think Uber has an uphill climb to make but I think they're capable of doing it so long as they avoid any pitfalls or serious missteps.

Be sure to buy Chris a copy when it is done, then challenge him to a game and let him feel the annihilation.