Achron — an RTS With Time Travel

An anonymous reader writes "As much as I'm looking forward to StarCraft 2, there's a new RTS gaming tech that has me even more enthused. The Escapist Magazine has posted interviews and footage of the upcoming 'meta-time strategy game' Achron, which was announced at GDC earlier this year. It's a multiplayer RTS where you can send things through time. The official site has some gameplay footage as well, and it looks like their tech is useful outside of gaming."

Comments

good to see it as a mechanic

[Trepidity]

In novels, there are roughly two main ways time-travel might be used (with a lot of gray area and variations): as a simple plot device that changes the setting, or as a hard-sci-fi thought experiment about how the world might work, or what effects there might be, if time travel were possible, and particular laws governed it. There've been videogames using the first strategy, of course. And some have elements that start going towards the second, but still embedded in the game's plot rather than the actual game mechanics. Interesting to see time-travel and its effects as an actual playable element.

Very Original

[Prien715]

This is the most original thing I've seen to come out of the RTS genre in a long time.

And to think, there's no reason Blizzard couldn't have done something just as innovative and different for SC2...they just don't want to take risk.

Re:Time travel RTS is hard to imagine

[MankyD]

It is a little hard to picture, but think of it like this:

You're opponent goes in the past and kills your troops. In the present, suddenly, your troops start disappearing. You look down at the bottom of the screen and see your opponent screwing around in the past (it shows you where they currently are in time.) So you send some of your troops back to stop his attack. It is rather complex, but they make it work remarkably well.

You can even send a troop back in time to team up with itself.