Supreme Commander 2 Announced… KindaThis entry was originally published at Ken Noland
Read this press release first.
When I was a teenager I used to volunteer time over at a local internet/gaming place called NetWars located in Bremerton, Washington. They had these ‘pods’ that they setup with fully enclosed environments and the area in the back was completely dark. It was lit only by the glare of the monitors and by the floor lining similar to the lining you find in airplanes when the lights are out. It set the mood for the area.
On any given night, you’d find me in one of these pods developing custom levels for Duke Nukem, Quake, and other games specifically for NetWars as a promotion to their business. In exchange, I was granted unrestricted access to play as many games as I wanted for as long as I wanted. This turned out to be a very bad thing for me once I discovered Total Annihilation.
Total Annihilation was an eye opener for me. It had very simple game mechanics, but got very complex once you started to manage your economy and out-produce and out-strategize your opponent. When I watched a Krogoth march into an enemy’s base and watched as everything exploded around it, I fell in love with the game. It was amazingly fun to play.
Time went on and occasionally I’d start up a new game. I also went out and downloaded mods and played with the amazing new creations of the fans of the original game. I even got involved in the Spring Project, a project that was going to turn Total Annihilation into a true 3D strategy game. That project got cut short barely after it had got off the ground as soon as Supreme Commander was announced.
I watched the videos on the various gaming websites. I would read the interviews and the fan speculation about the game. I couldn’t wait! I went out and got a brand new computer just so I could play the game at high resolution and I pre-ordered my copy months in advance. The copy came in the mail the day before it was officially released in the stores. I put the disc in, installed the game, and then played the campaign.
At first, I thought the game was visually stunning and a masterpiece. I would use my second monitor to monitor my main base while my primary monitor would zoom in and out over the battlescape to get a macro and micro management down to a science, but then I noticed something coming from my speakers… there was static!
I overlooked the technical flaws for a while, until I noticed on the forums that everyone out there was having one problem or another. Some problems were related to sound, most were related to speed, and yet even more were due to stupid user error. As I started playing more and more, I started seeing weaknesses and problems with the tech used to engineer the game. As the patches came out, there was very little improvement and the sound problems continued(please read my earlier post).
Just as I was about to give up, they announced the next installment for Supreme Commander, and it was to be known as Forged Alliance. I had hopes that they would fix the sound system, and I even flew all the way out to Seattle(at the time I was living in Boston) to talk to GPG to see if there was anything more I could do aside from creating a tool that I had released that converted the sound system format to something that they could use, which I had done for free. From the start of the interview they told me that they brought me in for a different game, not Supreme Commander. Gee, I sure wish they told me that before I left Boston, would’ve saved us both the hassle. I felt as though I was just dragged three thousand miles for nothing!
I bought Forged Alliance, like a good little fanboy. I played it, and then the unit imbalances, the lack of a map editor or unit editor(yet supposedly the most moddable game ever), the incredibly horrific patching experience, and the total disregard for system performance made me turn my back on the series. The only saving grace was another Supreme Commander fan who decided to write some amazing stories based in the Supreme Commander universe(check out Dotswarlock’s stories on the SC Forums).
It’s been a few months since I started a game with Supreme Commander, but last week I went back to the forums to check in on the fan fiction section to get the latest in the Dotswarlock story. While I was there I noticed that people were getting all hyped about the press release stating that Square Enix was planning on working together with Gas Powered Games to develop Supreme Commander 2…
The boyhood fan of Total Annihilation wants them to succeed, but the game programmer in me says that this will be another disappointment. GPG has already lost several key engineers that made Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation so much fun. People like Robert Berry, Jonathan Mavor(to which there is a massive weapon bearing his name in the Supreme Commander franchise) went on to found their own startup, Uber Entertainment. My personal favorite, and a common commentator and supporter for the mod community, Chris Blackwell is now with GameHouse. Plus, if you look at the resumes of half the upper management, you’ll find that over half of them have never released a game prior to working for Gas Powered Games.
The loss of those core engineers coupled with the poor management and early release of Supreme Commander and the dwindling fanbase of the Supreme Commander franchise by both modders and hardcore gamers alike will make Supreme Commander 2 a difficult task to pull off!
Still, I am hopeful!
Because I am a dedicated fanboy, I will most likely go out and buy the game when, or if it ever comes out. However, I am going to do so with a slight amount of discretion and caution. I hope they’ve learned their lessons from Supreme Commander, and the many other games that they have released that have received average, or fair ratings, and they are willing to dedicate a large amount of resources to making this the best RTS of all time.
I’ll continue later with a technical breakdown of some of the things that could have been handled better, as well as improvements I would like to see, but for now, I have my own games to build!
-Ken Noland
