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Square Enix Announces Supreme Commander 2
arcticstoat writes "Supreme Commander 2 has now been officially announced, but with a surprise publishing partner on board — Square Enix. Gas Powered Games' original RTS game and its expansion pack, Forged Alliance, were published by THQ, who is no stranger to the RTS genre, but Square Enix has previously specialized in Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Explaining the move, Square Enix said in a statement that it 'has previously worked exclusively with Japanese development companies, so the decision to form strategic partnerships with developers located outside of Japan serves as a new cornerstone of its strategy to create games targeted primarily at consumers in Europe and North America. Additionally, Square Enix Group's foray into the real-time strategy genre is a significant expansion of its product lineup.'"
The Front Mission series is incredible. Not to mention that I'm more interested in the developer than the publisher when it comes to experience and game design.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Let the great grandchild of Total Annihilation be as great as the original!
Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.
It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.
Square Enix? an RTS game? HA! Hahaha! I can see it now, all the units with have spiky hair, and all the engineer units will be named Cid.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I also did a fairly successful AI patch for SC.
Get it here:
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=23929
The AI script was all in lua so it proved quite easy to mod.
they will finally patch Forged Alliance!
I loved Total Annihilation (and Absolute!) and Supreme Command. Forged Alliance added some direly need rebalancing to Supreme Commander, however the game was never 'finished'. It had some serious unit bugs that were, indeed, possible to live with, but should be patched (and many have been patched by the community). However, FA slows down. And slows down. And slows down.
I have a really fast computer, but still, just launch a game with two LAN players and no AI. Do _nothing_. Just let it run 'nothing' for an hour or two. The game will have slowed to a crawl. You cannot play long games or 'epic battles' in FA because of this - with real play it happens, in my computers, after about 30-45 minutes on the ingame clock... a second will not take up to 10 real seconds.
Sad, really. I'm sure I'll buy SC2, but as a proud owner of TA, SC and FA (In total I legally own 10 games, and play less) I do hope FA gets fixed, it had a lot of potential, but pretty much died for lack of support.
Supreme commander 1 was horribly designed, this fact must be faced. It used a tonne of memory and the art direction was barely passable for roughly %50 of units for all races.
They also ruined the story of the game in the expansion by cutting off any interesting threats one could generate off the first game. The seraphim just became another evil-alien faction, when in the beginning they were these enlightened beings. It was really sad that the seraphim were all cookie-cutter. They killed the russian girl in the 2nd expansion in just the stupidest way. The supcom team proved they had the skills to make a game but not one outstanding unfortunately, they made a lot of basic blunders that had been learned 10 years prior. I still can point out basic errors when I go back to starcraft and see how they basically mimic'd the interludes between and sometimes in missions with animated faces.
The art direction for supcom in game was horrible and uninspired, I have to say. They had some neat units but they were outnumbered very largely by mundane and uninspired ones. They bit off way more then they could chew, and the strategic zoom really made the art irrelevant since the distance and scale of the units was way off so you could hardly ever realy enjoy the units that were halfway decent becuase you were almost always zoomed out for strategic reasons.
I no longer care how good it is. Unless they include decent unit and map making tools as part of the game, I'm not going to buy it. I'm sick of hearing "they'll be released later" and then getting crap or nothing.
You hear me, GPG? Unit and map tools. Good ones. No more excuses.
I agree, supcom had a lot of potential that was blown by bad design decisions. It's too bad they lost any kind of creativity when they mirrored the factions, the xpack was entirely underwhelming, Supcom did not need another race, what it needed was the replacement and/or tweaking and upgrading of the art and units that already existed.
The artist they hired to do supcom were simply all over the map, some of the stuff they produced was great, while the bulk of it was "meh" and uninspired.
It wasn't a bad game overall, but it had bugs, balance issues, and became quite repetitive as compared to other RTS titles. And instead of working to correct the issues fans had with the title, it went ahead and rush an expansion pack out the door (which sold far worse than the original title) and moved on to the equally abysmal "Space Siege."
Oh well, at least it'll have some awesome looking cutscenes!
I used to be a huge fan of Total Annihilation and I was really looking forward to Supreme Commander. I was pretty disappointed with it though. Allow me to preface this complaint by admitting outright that I am bad at RTS games. The scope of the missions was, for me, very frustrating. On one mission in particular, I could complete the first theatre pretty easily, the second theatre without too many snags, and then got completely trounced every time I got into the third theatre. Presumably I was doing something incorrectly early on, but I had to play 30-45 minutes of the first two theatres over and over again just to get to the third theatre (always to find that I was still inadequately prepared.) Eventually, I just gave up.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I too was disappointed. The missions for all three races took place on the same six maps, which was pretty dull. Also you spent most of your time zoomed out in order to see what was going on, so the game reverted to watching dots move around.
Overall I'd say 'nice idea, terrible execution'. I'd also suspect that the real reason for bringing in this new company is because whether they admit it or not, supcom was an awful game.
I waited eagerly for it, having also been a huge fan of TA back in the long ago, and I was gutted when I realised how flawed the game really was.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It's reasonably unlikely - moving up to 4GB of RAM on Windows means getting a 64 bit operating system. They are available, but 64 bit installs are very much in the minority.
I still don't trust 64 bit versions of Windows to be compatible with everything, and 64 bit versions of Linux can be a PITA sometimes. I may well be unfairly biased.
The majority of shipped computers with installed operating systems are still using 32 bit versions of Windows, so I think it unlikely that anything outside of rarified markets like CAD/CAM and server iron will start insisting on 64 bit capabilities any time soon.
I've been using Vista 64 for 18 months or so, both at home and at work and I think you should trust 64 bit Windows. It's very good, and as long as you can get drivers for your hardware (initially a problem, but not so much any more). As far as software compatibility goes, it's pretty good. The only difficulty I've had is with some video codecs and overclocking software which needs to install low level drivers. Graphics drivers were iffy for a while, but they're fine now.
Anecdotally, I've observed that people who have installed Vista 64 are much happier with it than those with 32, but that may have more to do with clean user installs against crapware infected OEM installs.
I hope that Windows 7 will be 64bit only, or at least 64 bit by default
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
So I'll be watching developments here with interest.
? Your post makes it look like your replying to something but you're not. I haven't seen any mention of the system requirements anywhere, in fact I don't think they've even confirmed it's coming out on PC. From TFA:
Little has been revealed about the game itself yet, although weâ(TM)re promised more details about the gameplay, features, supported platforms and the release date in due course.
Obviously it'd be mental if it didn't come out on PC, but still. Your post looks like a poor troll.
Nick
During my latest round of desktop upgrades I reinstalled with XP64. It runs like a dream.
The only real 'teething' issue it had was Creative's utter driver incompetence (X-Fi Titanium sound card). They have 64-bit XP drivers...they just don't want you to get them, apparently. And their customer service reps are either deliberately mislead as to what's available on their website or are utterly incompetent.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of games that have 64-bit installs available (Crysis and I believe Bioshock among others). I'm just waiting for Steam to properly install 64-bit versions (UT3 still runs as a 32-bit program).
I'm eying an upgraded from 4 to 8 GB of RAM, mostly because I can.
Long story short, 32-bit good, 64-bit better. I can't see a reason to not move to it on your next install.
I'm not sure where the memory req's were mentioned either, but I am certain SC2 will at least prefer 4GB. SC was one of the first games to hit the 2GB memory limit on 32bit systems. Apparently SC would crash on very large maps when it hit the limit, even on 64 bit systes (bc the game is 32bit and still limited to 2GB mem).
Here is an article citing Chris Taylor that even 4GB is not enough for all the factions they wanted to add to SC2: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=185765
And here is a link citing the original problem: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1161686
From the experience running Ubuntu's AMD64 version, there isn't really anything to be a PITA; the only thing with any issues whatsoever is that you must use npviewer to get Flash running in a 64-bit browser, and it's very unreliable.