Over the weekend, I bought TA off of GOG(old disk was annihilated long ago) and fired it up for the first time in perhaps ten years, and I was impressed once again. Detailed 3D-looking terrain, 3D units, realistic ballistics, realistic artillery, realistic line of sight, wreckage and tree reclimation, non-restricting unit selection, intuitive streaming economy, awesome sound track, weekly free DLCs. I wondered why I ever gave up on it? I first saw Total Annihilation when I was eleven, shopping with my mom at Futureshop. The game was being demoed on oneof the top end computers, I was looking at some other kid playing it, and went: "Oh hey, robots shooting lasers... are those 3D? and fog of war eh, Sh!tz, did that bump in the ground just block his line of sight?" So we got the game some point in that year, and when I enthusiastically fired it up, it wasn't as cool as I hoped. Every feature that we love now was there, but 1998 was the time of 230Mhz CPU, 32MB memory, and 28Kbps dialup modem. Every time you fire up TA and start a mission before you even notice the loading screen, did you remember that once upon a time, you heard the computer click and grind for five minutes and you prayed for the next mission to load without the game crashing? When it did load, it usually gave perhaps half an hour of playtime before the framerate dropped. I remember in my first play through, I had to exclusively use T2 units and artillery, because everytime I amassed enough T1 units to break the enemy's defenses, the computer froze before the units can get there. I had to play on easy, so the AI don't build, and I also gained a foundness for naval missions then, because the few ships on the map meant very rare slowdowns. And while free DLCs sounded like a staple for today's good game, I never went to get many of them or the patches, because I had 2.3 kbps downloading from Cavedog's website, and the dialup got interrupted often. Not try to diss TA, just that I played it over the weekend and reminesed about it. and I wondered why I didn't play it too much then. I think it was mostly just the technical limitations. There was one map, the 7 Islands, that I had never managed to load until I got an 128mb RAM Pentium III on the year 2000. I always wondered what kind of machine the developers must have had to test the game on, persumably it ran even slower when they developed it on 1996 equipment.
This has been a problem with pretty much all games Jon Mavor has worked on almost all of the games Jon has worked on. A lot of the people working at Uber were also part of GPG and Cavedog, the same people that just had to push the limits of technology back in 1998. It worries me a little to be honest. I would rather have a game that looks like *** but plays like a divine harp (ex. Tribes 2, Dorf Fortress) than a game that looks like every last bit was polished with liquid gold but plays like *** (ex. Battlefield games, Halo games, SupCom). The only graphics models that age well are simple ones, I.E. TF2's ridiculous use of phong shading and gloss, Psychonauts' deliberately cartoony and scrambled models, which reflected the high-detail concept art considering the game's age.
I was in my first year of Uni in Manchester. had a new good PC back then and the internet connection was excellent from the campus (can get over 500kbps) I was addicted to multiplayer online, 4v4 no air was my fav. I barely passed Uni because of it, hehe. then after 3 years I went for masters degree and decided to move to an accommodation without internet connection to force my self out of it. no other RTS game filled in the gap for me since then. (even SC1 and 2). PA is like a dream come true.
Huh... I didn't have any problem with TA, even in 1998. I was using a higher unit cap as soon as I found out about it. SupCom, that's a different story, but TA was golden for me right away.
I was one of the first guys who got it and I was very lucky because I got it for half the price just one day after release. A customer had turned it back in because it would not run on his system. For me TA was THE ONE RTS-game I could beat a friend in. We normally played Starcraft on our monthly LAN-Partys and this one guy kept beating the crap out of us, even if we played 3 against him. But not in TA with this less micro orientated gameplay. I crushed our RTS guru ^^ Great times that were. I still have the soundtrack on all my devices and listen to it while playing games.
Dunno why but I get offended when people talk about TA in the past tense all the time. It's still a great rts game.
I think you don't understand why you yourself loved TA, fo me it really is the fact that it's not cutting edge but actually spilling over the edge of what we can do today, breaking the apriori, pushing the boundaries. This is what I love about these types of games. Go ahead, Jon Mavor! Make a game that makes our computers kneel! That's how long-lasting games are born, Chris Taylor must have forseen this, games that become a-propos way after they come out and only start to get old decades later.
@goduranus: Totally agree with all what you've said. My PC struggled after a few hours of playing and I was hoping the game doesn't crash. But beyond that TA was the best game I've ever played.
What? I didn't care about the graphics, I liked TA because it was fun to play no matter how good you were at the game.
????????????????? you're more and more off. since when are graphics what bogs a computer down? Real time simulation and a great number of units is.
simulation can bog down a computer for sure, but nowadays graphics are the main culprits. Look at Crysis, BF4, ARMA3, etc.. Sure those are all FPSs, but they're also real 3d simulations in many ways, with many players, vehicles, bullets, effects, etc. And its usually the graphics card that is the weakest link for games like that. For once PA is a game that give my i7 a run for its money and actually uses a good chunk of my 16gbs of ram. I'm all for more simulation!
heh but that's how it is. I have always considered real time rtses to be superior to fpses simply because of how much more "real" it is... simply because of the simulation aspect. An fps has 1 unit at a time. 32 units on a server but none of them are in real time. you know that... most of the time you're shooting at and getting shot by ghosts.
I bought TA thinking it was another game I had recently played at a friends house. I went from "d'oh!" to "w00t!". In the golden age of dial up modems I actually managed to play ONE game on Boneyards before they shut it down. I got pwned by a guardian/punisher rush after a few minutes. I also downloaded the DLC units at school and put them on floppy disks to bring home.
