Slashdot Mirror
Stardock Developing MMORTS Game
John Callaham writes "Computer Games Magazine has learned that Stardock, developer of Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine, is now working on an unnamed massively multiplayer real time strategy title that will be free to play." From the article: "...the development team is trying to solve the problems that have kept other similar games from being as popular as other MMO titles. When asked to describe the gameplay Wardell said, 'I like to call it The Sims meets Total Annihilation.'"
Stardock, developer of Galactic Civilizations and The Political Machine, is now working on an unnamed massively multiplayer real time strategy title that will be free to play.
Free? Wait a minute, I'm confused here. Why would they make this game free? Not that I'm complaining or anything, I just haven't ever heard of a for-profit company working to develop a game more complex than Frogger and giving it out for free. What's the catch here?
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
I preferred the starcraft, the TA units just seemed pretty uninspired, also both sides were pretty much the same. Also i like being a squishy alien.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Wrong. TA was not more complex - it was simpler. That was why it was good. No spells to limit how much you can control at a time. No weapon energy to distract you from handling large groups. No worrying about whether units are moving or attacking (they do both). No need to "attack to position" - they do that automatically. No relocating your base to handlde depleting resources. Harvesting resources was just building a building. No artificial unit caps.
The improved commands were just consolidating things - unlimited queues for units, starting orders, construction buildigns, construction workers. Simple things like the "guard" command made the gameplay so much easier to manage.
Many games increase complexity by adding more spells, more complex units, things like formations, bizarre terrain, etc. TA did the opposite - everything in the game is simple, and the emerging gameplay is so much more mindblowing than StarCraft.
Just spread your army like the plague, and try not to panic when shit happens.
Again, careful simplicity brings emerging complexity - compare Lisp to C++, Go to Chess,etc. Where in "complex" systems like C++, you learn a long list of specific rules, strategies, combinations, etc. simple but well-designed systems allow you do do just as much in a more elegant fashion.
TA is such a simple system. Yes, the list of units is nauseatingly long compared to StarCraft - but each unit is simple and pure in function, and generally knows how to do its job whether or not you babysit it.