Wargaming acquired TA IP.

Agreed.

They should name it Partial Annihilation. PA, in other words.

Xbox Commander :mrgreen:

I actually care more about the Battlezone franchise on that list, to be honest. Battlezone II was (and still is) incredible. I REALLY want to see something like that up to modern spec.

A lot of negativity towards Chris Taylor here.

The only thing I can really say is that I don't know enough about what Chris Taylor has planned for TA2 or Chris Taylor himself to make a judgment on whether it will be good or not. However, one important thing to me is that there isn't much you can do with TA in terms of innovation except going the path of other RTS's and/or PA.
I mean, I doubt many people would just want to play a carbon-copy of TA with spruced-up graphics, a new storyline, and a different paint job on the units. You can't go towards other RTSs like CnC or StarCraft 2, because that's what they did with SupCom 2 and people hated it. You can't go the path of multiple battlefields, because that's what PA is doing.

What can they do with what they have?

Btw Chris Taylor is the original creator of total annihilation for which PA gets its inspiration from...without Chris creating the spark that was ta we might never have seen pa. He is only human and made a few mistakes. Any ways CT should have stuck with kings and castles he prob could have won us over with that...

I wonder if Atari sold ta to ct before uber announced pa, if everyone still would be compelled against it with the fear of ta2 = sc3.

My bet, just saying, is probably so.

However, i am still glad Uber hopped on this project in time, securing their claim to the first to take a shot at a modern ta. Name or not.

Considering it was auctioned only recently, I don't see how that's possible. I'm not sure what you mean in the rest of your post.

Mike

Yeah I agree there is not much more to do to innovate ta2. Seems pa is going the right direction with the future of rts gaming but we still don't know if it'll workout on multiple planets and game play. People in alpha know how the game play is stacking up. Like I said before ct should have stuck with knc since it would not be directly competing with pa. There is yet to be a fantasy rts game with strat zoom and massive scale of supcom.

According to CT the problem with trying to pick up KnC again instead of Wildman was that KnC would have Costed 6million and was too expensive.

of course my counter argument is you change the game to be cheaper. That's exactly the kind of thing Uber did to make PA within the realm of Crowd funding, Single Faction, Procedural planets, no single player(GalWar was a stretchgoal) and the simpler Art Style all played a part of making PA cheaper to create.

Obviously KnC would have been the EXACT same game we had seen previously, but being honest and up front about everything goes a long way in garnering support. Not to mention based on the Vlogs they did pre-AoEO it seems like the game had already progressed a fair way, it would have really helped make a great pitch and backers would be much more comfortable with GPG working on an RTS as opposed to an ARPG-DOTA game thing.

I think CT just has a hard time keeping projects from growing out of control without some oversight and being capable of saying "this is too big we need to cut back". Demigod reportedly suffered feature creep to the point where they ran out of money, he was unwilling to prune KnC to make a more viable project......

In a way, as a consumer, I'm not really sure CT is fit to be running the show anymore, he still has some great ideas and all that, but I'm not sure his fit to be in charge without some oversight.

Mike

I remember reading an interview of Chris Taylor years ago, and he said something very interesting at that time that struck me. He said that when you're doing an RTS game, you cannot make compromises. You have to choose between a very simple gameplay Warcraft, Starcraft, Commander & Conquer...), and a highly demanding one. Otherwise, anything in-between will disppoint both casual players and RTS lovers. Quite a few years later, he did SupCom2. Exactly what he said must not be done.

That sounds like a grossly overblown statement, especially in the face of making video games to be ALL about compromises because you can't just re-create reality. Supcom/FA had plenty of compromises as well, SupCom2 didn't fail specifically because it made compromises, every game does that.

Mike

I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about realism. Or someone invented laser/energy-based weapons & quantum transportation and I don't know about it.

FA did not made any compromise to please the casual gamer, that's for sure.

The point still stands, The machines we use to play games don't have limitless power and capabilities, nor do the people that make the games, for example if you make an open world game the overall quality of the environment is lower than a purely linear game might provide. SupCom had a lot of units possible on screen, but as a consequence the units themselves were individually of lower detail.

There isn't a single game out there that doesn't make compromises of some form which is the point I'm making.

Again, I'm pretty sure it was not the point of his statement.

Unit or terrain graphic fidelity are irrelevant to gameplay.

Supcom 2 was full of compromises : flow economy but pay up front, less reclaim-based, tech points, less unit diversity...

ie. PA can make some compromises to be playable on several planets, rendering small scales (single planet battle) quite dull, or it can make not compromise at all, the player skill and attention spawn being the limit (I would certainly prefer that).

For now, they removed 2 stats from the units (energy and build cost).
Is that a simplification ?
On paper yes.
Is that bad (in the sense of "more casual") ?
Not really.
Is that good (does it make the game better)?
I'm not convinced. The two stats are still there, but derived from mass cost. It's now effectively two hidden stats (it's never good), it's not really easier than before to estimate build time or mass cost/second (so it's not easier or better), but they've removed two great balancing tools.

In my mind, the essence of what CT said is :
If you want a simple game, you have to go deep in it. Simple rules, simple concepts. (not simplification of complex mechanics, truly simple ones).
If you want to simplify a mechanic, it has to really be better in the end, not just a simplification for the sake of it (and sorry Uber, that's what the new eco is for me currently).

But maybe there is a component to that decision that is currently missing from the game, so I might be wrong in the future.

SupCom 2 had a more diverse unit set then SupCom FA, if only through its upgrade system.

oh did it?

And the upgrade system was a really, really bad mechanic.

You plan an action (ie. bombers) because you've scout that your opponent is weak in AA, you go for it, and suddenly your enemy tanks get AA.

It's stupid, and it ruin what supcom is about : planification & map control.
And virtually every unit has every role, rendering army mix useless.

Yet omni role units didn't change 'planification' and map control.

And nor did AA on tanks ever replace normal AA units, if you think they did then you didn't play much of it.

If you look at the units in Sup2 with everything unlocked and upgraded by default, then yeah; you might be able to say that Sup2 was more diverse than FA.

However, tanks in Sup2 all had a mobility ability; teleport for Aeon, JJ for Cybran, and the AB for the UEF. Diversity in Sup2 certainly wasn't what some people think it was.