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.

Stardock, the makers of such fine games as Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire, and who are well-respected ’round these parts for their vehement opposition to Digital Restrictions Management, have announced their next game, Elemental: War of Magic. In case the name didn’t give it away, this is a departure from Stardock’s usual science fiction fare into the realm of fantasy. Now I’m not especially fond of said change of venue, seeing as how I tend to think that swords-and-sorcerers fantasy is over-represented in videogaming while space opera science fiction is under-represented, but I’m remaining hopeful.

First of all, the game being from Stardock immediately gives it a leg up in my book, as I’ve enjoyed every other title they’ve produced for PC in recent years. Compare this with a larger publisher like Electronic Arts, whose titles are often hit-or-miss. And the graphical style looks pretty nifty. Rather than aiming for hyper-realism, Stardock is going for a cel-shaded look. It’s now been long enough since the initial cel-shading boom that I think cel-shading can be considered cool again.

But of course, what really matters is how the game plays, and we simply don’t have much information available on that front yet. According to GameSpot (if you’re willing to trust them after the Jeff Gerstmann incident; I’m still iffy) , the game will play like a mixture of Civilization and the Total War series. Stardock envisions battles being just as large as those in, say, Medieval II: Total War. It’ll have the ability to pause the action at any time and queue up commands, which is what makes it a bit more strategic than classical-style RTSes (and more of a chore to play online to boot). I suppose the main difference over Medieval II is that the out-of-combat screens are more like Civilization, which will allow creation and settlement of new cities (Medieval II was effectively played on a static map of Europe in which the cities simply traded sides).

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the game is the announced “persistent multiplayer” mode. I suspect it’ll compare to Cities XL in this respect, but there isn’t yet enough information to be sure just yet. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this game as time goes by and new information is released. Unfortunately, it isn’t scheduled to be released until February, 2010, so don’t get too excited over it. Also, I suspect the game is far from completed, because while we’ve seen lots of screenshots from the simple-to-program overworld map, we have nothing yet from the promised battle screens. That could take awhile to do right; heck, the Total War series is on its fifth game now and it still has significant problems with it. Simulating combat between thousands of units in military formations correctly is hard.

It’s been awhile since I last played a city-building game (since SimCity 4 came out in 2003, to be exact), and boy do I really need my fix. I’ve been addicted to the series since I filled up an entire box with floppy disks of SimCity 2000 saves on our family’s 386 many years ago. There’s nothing else that quite matches the thrill of being an urban planner — and no, I’m not being facetious.

So imagine my amazement when a friend pointed me to Cities XL, a city-building game in the SimCity tradition that I have absolutely no excuse for finding out about earlier. Cities XL is coming out in 2009 and will be a lot like the next release of SimCity, with an MMORPG twist — every other city on the planet in the game world is built by another player. That sound you just heard was the sound of me necessitating new pants.

In addition to the MMORPG element, and all the possibilities of trade/cooperation with other players that brings, Cities XL is also going to improve on the old grid-based landscape of all the old SimCity games. Roads can now be laid out in any direction, not just along the grid or at a 45 degree diagonal. Roads can even be curved. But it’s the highway construction that really has me excited. The video (you’ll have to navigate to it) shows the player fluidly constructing a major highway intersection, with multiple levels of ramps and curved overpasses. This is your opportunity to kick the clover-leaf intersection to the curb and make something so much cooler.

I’m definitely looking forward to Cities XL, and anyone who calls themselves a fan of the city-building genre should be as well. Will Maxis finally be surpassed in their own genre? Here’s hoping. If you don’t hear from me for several months in a row sometime in 2009, it’ll be because I’m constructing the most bustling metropolis on the face of the virtual planet.