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.

Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.

This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.

To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.

As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.

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Seeing as how both of my housemates have to get up two hours before I do to make it to work (their jobs suck, huh?), I typically go to bed long after they do. So since they’re not around to play games with at this hour, I need to find something else to occupy my time with. Hence this Late night discussion post, which I hope to turn into a regular feature. This is for everyone else who’s staying up late (or has the audacity to live in a different time zone).

The first Spore expansion is coming out in less than a month. Details are sparse, but it’s looking like it’ll cost $20 and consist of new parts for the creature/object editor and … that’s it. If you aren’t thoroughly underwhelmed by this, you must be in the target market.

Does this piss anyone else off? I remember way back when I used to play The Sims (don’t give me that look). The expansions for that game seemed to serve no purpose other than to enrich Will Wright. I wouldn’t even call them proper expansion packs, merely content packs. I couldn’t justify spending my hard-earned money on them, and so I didn’t. So I’m very disappointed that Spore seems headed down exactly the same money treadmill that The Sims perfected, but seeing as how Electronic Arts is running the show, would you have expected it to go down any other way?

I suppose it might be time to write off Spore. I wasn’t impressed with the initial release, but I held out hope that it would get on the right track with the inevitable expansions. “They didn’t have enough time to flesh out all of the stages of the game,” I reasoned. “They should be fixing it soon.” In hindsight, the naiveté inherent in these statements is hysterical. Are there any serious PC gamers left who haven’t given up on Spore yet? I’d love to hear from you. Please convince me that Spore can still be saved, because I’m thinking that all signs point to fat chance.