Gameplay is just one half of a great RTS. The other half is fiction. TA/Supcom has always been great at technical achievements and gameplay but weak in the fiction department. The backstory is all over the place and not that interesting. The factions are basically indistinguishable not just in terms of gameplay but also in terms of personality and art design. It's just different kinds of robots that each look and sound as, sorry to say, uninspired as the other. Starcraft is the most successful RTS ever because it fires on all cylinders. The gameplay is some of the best but the fiction is definitely the best - faction personalities, unit personalities, art design, writing, voice acting, campaign plot. For comparison, look at Achron. It has a good central gameplay mechanic but that's it. The writing, the graphics, the campaign, the unit design, everything else is really bad. They would probably have sold 5 times more if they took the time to polish this part of their game. Hopefully PA will have better fiction than TA and Supcom. The pitch video makes me very optimistic about this. That thing took some serious writing chops. It has a certain, shall we say... Saturday morning cartoon sensibility. Just the way he says "Brutally efficient self-replicating mechanisms of war". It's perfect. Grim, yet patently ridiculous. Like 40K with a more blatant comic undertone. If the whole game is informed by that style - awesome. Hopefully Uber will keep the setting as simple as outlined in the pitch, and not waste their time on pages and pages of fanfic-grade backstory. A good barebones story always beats a bad 'epic' story, just think of Doom 2 compared to Doom 3. So in place of TA's and Supcom's frustrating blandness we have Eeevil robots with the personalities of Saturday morning cartoon villains. If my hopeful assumption is correct, this is a huge leap forward. Obviously PA is MP-focused so we shouldn't worry too much about the campaign. What I'm most insistent about is this: Each unit should not just have a gameplay niche but also a fictional niche. This is what Starcraft did so well. Each unit is utterly unique and memorable. Starcraft would have been worse if the Terrans had five different kinds of tanks. Blizzard understood this and focused on making their tank as 'tanky' as possible, whereas the Goliath corners the market on mech units. The inspired personalities for units add a surprising amount to the game. Now ideally each robot type would have their own unique voice acted lines, like the Transformers. This would cost a lot however so hopefully Uber can at least make them as good as the Zerg or Protoss robot unit sounds which manage to convey a lot of personality without words. Maybe the most important/powerful units could have voice acting but not the cannon fodder. TA and Supcom were slammed for their bland unit sounds and PA can do better. Now to make each unit unique and memorable, you need them all to fill a conceptual niche, to incorporate a certain cluster of iconic pop-culture inspirations. In Starcraft they could capture all the 'iconics' of a human sci-fi army, an insectoid alien swarm and a noble elder race. This is one reason one faction is better than several for this game, because it's all robots, so there's a hard limit on how many tropes you can embody. Just like Starcraft captured the essence of a mech pilot, a fighter pilot, a tank commander etc., so PA can capture the essence of various kinds of fictional robots and put it in their units. If there's a cool thing you've seen a robot do on film, you should be able to do that in the game. If there's part of a certain robot's personality you liked you should be able to see that in the game. The key is variety, making each unit feel unique. So if there's a big unit whose niche is to kill lots of weak units, don't give him generic lasers, give him dual miniguns or plasma flamethrowers, or why the hell not, circular saws, energy blades or wrecking balls. (Any reason the game can't have melee units BTW?) At least try to avoid the same lasers and missiles and uninspired beeps and whirrs for everything. The game will be so much better! The names should also be inspired and awesome, no more 'T3 Strategic Artillery' please! If I were the designers, I would make a detailed analysis of all kinds of robots in popular fiction, extract their coolest/most suitable elements and arrange them in different places in the game to make the game as rich and varied as it should be. Just like how the designers of Fallout 3 spent weeks devouring every kind of 50s media. So off the top of my head, here's some stories about robots and what their elements could be used for. -Transformers: Transforming bots; A robot bigger than a planet; Optimus' energy sword; lots of interesting robot personalities - perhaps the Commander could have Megatron or Starscream-like VA? The lore is a great basis for a gripping singleplayer narrative. In general, an excellent resource! -Metal Gear Solid: Giant robot with strategic nuke launcher. Nuff said. -Gundam: No reason the game can't capture some of that esthetic. Perhaps a high-tech unit should look like a Gundam. -BattleBots: At least one unit should be inspired by one of these! It could have a buzzsaw, or a giant pneumatic hammer. -HHGTG: Marvin-like personality would raise the game to TF2 levels of silliness. Not that that would be a bad thing, but maybe it's not what the designers are going for exactly? -50s B-movies: Lots of great concepts there! Here's more, have fun! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fi ... d_androids /rant
please spend everything on the gameplay and NOT the fiction. video game fiction is really lame 99% of the time.
I think the two replies so far have confused storyline with personality. Storyline = Bioshock, personality = TF2. I am hugely in favour of EVERY unit having a distinct personality, created using a bit of backstory, unique looks and sounds, and a unique role on the battlefield. I hope a lot of time is put into this aspect of the game. If possible, it would be great to get the alpha testers that donated a lot (yes including me (; ) into writing the backstory for units as they are produced by the studio - perhaps also suggesting modifications to the models/animations/sounds to fit in with how they see the unit.
On the subject of unit sounds, TA and Supcom have both been very good at this. Nothing quite like sound of a Monkeylord exploding. So hopefully the devs will stick to that general template: no actual voices for units, but mechanical noises that somehow manage to create a sense of personality. Perhaps some of the dubstep that didn't make it into the music score could be used as sound effects? Robots unfolding or transforming should definitely go *wub wub wub*.
SupCom was hit-and-miss with sounds. Some of them were great: others were rather cartoony and comical.
No offense that that is just not a good idea. Having sat through the majority of Supcom Modding, the majority of Fan ideas just aren't very good. And that's not trying to be mean, it's just not everyone even understands all the aspects you have to consider when making or adding new units. As far as setting and gameplay, I hope Uber focuses on Gameplay, it truly is the MOST important aspect of a game. Mike
Seconded. Many cooks don't guarantee a better soup. Personally, I liked the Total Annihilation story more than Supreme Commander because while it was simpler and shallower, it worked.
I don't mean the fans trying to help with gameplay, I mean purely backstory. For example, Uber comes up with a new unit for the game which fills a great role. They could then include the unit in alpha, and allow fans to suggest the background and name for the robot. Perhaps it's a small light-weight bot which has a light machine gun (or more spacey equivalent). The fans could write a bunch of descriptions and potential names for the bot, and then Uber could pick the one that they thought fitted best - they could even make small modifications themselves to the aesthetics of the bot to get it to fit their favorite description. Say, making it slightly skinnier or adjusting the scale, NOT changing the actual gameplay in any way. The amount of people who have donated enough to participate in the alpha is.. reasonably small (ish), and the amount of people out of those who have enough time and writing skills is probably also small. So it hopefully wouldn't become a flood of garbage ideas.
First, I wouldn't call 1600+ people 4 days in to be a small number, second, you might be surprised at the kind of things to pop out of the woodwork the second you ask fir this kind of stuff, even when you don't ask for it. I trust Uber to not cave into peer pressure, but all that weeding through will take time, and thus money. Also consider that it kinda steps on the toes of the people backing at the 5000$ pledge level too.... Mike
Ah okay, it is quite a lot. That being said other indie games I've been involved in have had more alpha purchases than this, but have pretty quiet forums. (E.g. Cobalt, 22k people in alpha currently, but the forums only have a handful of posts per day). Uber could at least test this sort of thing and see how relevant the outcome is. Of course it won't really need thinking of until at least the kickstarter is over and an alpha-only forum is set up (if it needs to be hidden), so talking about it now isn't really important.
A simple story is all we need at this point. That said, I would be all for a fanfiction/story section of the forum. With the plethora of robotic creations out there, it would not be difficult to come up with some interesting fluff. I'd personally like to write something along the lines of the Accretia race from RF Online...I thought their origin story was pretty cool, and had some fun places it could be taken. That said, the story should be reserved to the intro video and cutscenes, so until making a campaign becomes a priority, what we've already got is more than enough for me.
