PC Game Fun Time

Supreme Commander 2, the sequel to … well … Supreme Commander, has been announced, though no release date is yet set. And it’s going to be published by Square Enix, which makes it the company’s first foray outside of the Japanese game development market, and also a large departure from the usual big-haired angsty hero RPG fare.

For those of you who may not be aware, Supreme Commander was the spiritual successor (designed by the same guy, Chris Taylor) to the late-90s real-time strategy masterpiece Total Annihilation. Supreme Commander ultimately wasn’t quite as legendary as its predecessor, but it was quite good, and Grokmoo and I spent many months playing it. We even ran a dedicated community blog. Here’s hoping that the sequel surpasses it. My main problem with Supreme Commander was that the endgame wasn’t particularly good, with potentially hours worth of build-up to a resolution that typically lasted a minute at most. The exponential ramp-up of economic structures, which allowed one to construct huge armies entirely independently of any strategic need to control resources on the map, led to massive, massive turtling, which felt more like SimCity with a disaster thrown in at the end than the strategic give-and-take, feint-and-assault one typically expects from an RTS.

I think Chris Taylor is aware of the criticisms of Supreme Commander and should be able to use the lessons learned from it to great effect with the sequel. Supreme Commander was revolutionary, but uneven around the edges. All Supreme Commander 2 has to do to be a masterpiece is to be evolutionary. And Chris: Please don’t make the same mistake of having such ridiculously high system requirements as Supreme Commander. As a college student at the time, I was definitely in your target market, but the only way I was able to play the game was to build a computer good enough to run it — and the only reason I could afford that was because of my scholarship. Look at the success of World of Warcraft, which succeeds partially because it prioritizes running on moderate hardware over absolute cutting-edge visuals, and ask yourself if that really was such a bad idea.