The Long-Debated "Soul"

That's wrong and you know it.

People had complaints not because "this game is not my style", but because "this game is bland, buggy, and not up to the expectation that i was led to believe".

It's all bland.

Go play Total Annihilation for an hour and tell me that PA has soul.

Listen to a Sentinel pound away at an approaching army. Listen to that noise of power.

Watch a peewee move its arms up to aim, as if it were a gunslinger.

Watch a Can or a Gimp waddle along

Listen to the selection sounds of a core commander.

Use a D-Gun on a sumo.

Listen to a barrage of Berthas pound their target.

Watch a Hammer open its barrels to begin pummeling a target.

Watch as a Doomsday Machine unfolds to unload death on a legion.

TA had a hundred times the soul that PA has.

All I can say is I think that is nostalgia speaking. You played that game earlier thus you remember it more fondly.

I could give examples for literally every unit in pa for their unique sfx and fx. I don't see your point.

Hello once again guys.

When I start up PA for a little man on robot action, whats the first thing I do before I even go onto the game?

I load up PAMM. Not for the unit balance mods, or the total conversion mods, or even the mods that add new and exciting game modes.

I load up PAMM for the UI mods, the crafted maps with cool cliffs, abandoned fortresses, volcanic scenery and the kind. I load up PAMM for the texture mods that give me hi-def commander skins. I load up PAMM for the effect mods, ones that make explosions and shells into juicy effects that can even make it a little hard to look at the screen. I load up PAMM because I want chem trails (lol).

That's the heart and soul I was looking for and the one I got from the community.

Cool effects for the units and battles, darker nights so the lights burn even brighter, a selection of many kinds of unit weapon effects to choose from 2 of the mod makers who worked on creating a spectacle and a flashy sight.

I wouldn't mind of every unit was a dox, or a ant in the balance. So long as it looked cool.

Now don't get me wrong this game has many amazing effects, even if we did have to have orbital battleships, they look really cool. Orbital lasers and lightning guns. Massive pounding static artillery, hovering tanks and destroyers.

Sure I get the counter argument to this: "Flashy effects make the game harder to read for competitive play." And you are 100% right. Darker nights means that you can't see terrain, and many of the explosions mean that you can't read a battle without the UI telling you what units are in the blazing maelstrom of fire.

But, in my opinion, the game could have been so much more, and not just mechanically. Visually, vocally, even the lore was but a breadcrumb compared to what we had to go on from TA and supcom.

That's a let down sure, but I have been dodging a simple question from he start.

Does the game have soul?


It 'just' crosses the mark for me.

Stuart loves TA more than himself so you know... Just like everyone don't expect real reasoning behind such a biased vie of things. For example I know i'm extremely biased to PA and anything related to w40k.

I played supcom
I played TA
and i can savely say that i hold PA more dear than those two despite having its own flaws

yes it could have sounded better
yes it could have looked better
yes it could had have better lore
but i like it because of its grandness and viscerality and brutality of its battles
it is what i want out of clashing metalavalanches
i dig the artstyle and i dig the capabilities no other rts before offered


what is soul though? please define that ...
the identity of the game?
cool units?
memorable music and sound?

if yes than yea PA has a soul
it HAS memorable music
it HAS memorable sounds
(botchatter, halleys, annihilaser, unitcannon)
it HAS cool units
(boombots, manhattans, infernos
nanobots, sparks .... atlas!!)

also tell me that crashing moons into one another or blasting the supposed haven of your enemy wasn't awesome the first time you did it

Edit: I'm not going to change any minds at this point.

My position is PA definitely has something that keeps me coming back. The sup com series as good as it was never did. It's subjective and personal, I'm definitely not alone in liking the game.

Just because you disagree with me doesn't mean that you need to say crap like that. I respect TA as a game with more soul than PA. Is it perfect? No, but to ignore the aspects of it where it outperforms PA is a disservice to both games.

Because PA's a great start and with some work on balance it can approach the level of soul of TA. It's a real pity that we can't change the sound, but even so we can still do so much. Dom's done work to fix the blandness of FX. Galactic Annihilation did what it could to add flavor to the vanilla units and now Legion's introducing a whole new faction filled with great new units, complete with personality and soul(I will of course see to it that these two are melded together after legion's release.) PA is far from a lost cause.

don´t make the mistake to think same level of soul = same level of gameplay ..

Soul is not lacking in dependence to gameplay. Units that play to the extremes have personality. Take the GA Zipper, a bot that fires in short spurts before reloading. This characteristic reload time gives the unit a personality of usage.

That's a fair point relating to the mods.

I see many critics of PA point to mods as a case of 'uber should have done this', which I think is a disservice to both uber and the modders.

Uber deserve credit for building solid mod support into the game. It's as core to the franchise as the units imo.

The modders also deserve serious credit for the huge effort they put in.

You see this is something I remember from the TA days. There were so many issues with TA as an online game. The community worked its way through them and created something special.

That developed over a long time though. In comparison PA is pretty young still.

With respect to the sounds, we have established it is possible to mod them. The issue is well need to build a full new fmod project in order to do it. It's a big undertaking. Still, if the TA, spring and sup com modders have shown us anything, it's don't rule anything out

I'd certainly agree that sound modding would go a long way to making the game that much more special.

To be honest, it wasn't awesome the first time I did it....










It was awesome every time!

Yeah it's like a, all you tactics now are worthless because of my lazzzor
Dard vader would have liked such a powerfull death star xd

I think the fact that the topic "about a soul" took 2 pages before it derailed into PA vs TA is quite surprising...

That's a very positive way to look at it we need more of that, +1

To be honest, I don't care about the "soul" of PA. The only thing I care about is what I got out of it. And TBH, what I got out of it was the best RTS experience I've ever had. I've never found another RTS that matches the speed, scale and simplicity of PA even remotely, so until I do, PA will have all the "soul " I need in an RTS game.