This game looks good but I’m a little put off by how different it sounds in the reviews. No single player campaign?! Was one thing I was looking forward to acutally since the one in Gal Civ II wasn’t really that great IMO.
One of the things that really has bugged me in modern RTS design is the fact that this implicit expectation of “a campeign game” has somehow grown to take over the mind of every person exposed and make it into some accumulation of ideas which are, at best, confused and at worst actively self-defeating.
Really, consider the bulk of RTS (and especially 4X) game campeigns. They tend to follow an extremely unimaginitive pattern:
- You get introduced to the very basic interface. Camera movement, ship movement.
- You get introduced to middling interface. Building things. Resources.
- You get introduced to the reporting interface. Pop limits. Markets.
- You get to play with a few of the lower-end units in a tightly constrained fight. Front-line stuff, no real power.
- You get a handfull more units and not necessarily the ability to manufacture more and get tossed into a slightly bigger fight along two interactional axes: adding planes to the ground forces or fightercraft to space.
… and so on for tens more fumbling, intermittent steps, and at no time along this pre-determined path are you given any kind of real autonomy to determine which way things will turn out. Your decisions are largely meaningless. The first half to three-quarters of a campeign game, as it’s known today, is made up of what’s really just an obscenely bloated and poorly-written series of slowly-paced tutorials.
Interestingly, one of the few games that broke this mold, albeit gently, were the original Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm. In that case, there was some early introduction things and then you were slap in the middle of a mess with a persistent fleet that really impacted the latter stages of the story with early choices.
Ultimately, though, in developing and distributing a game like Sins, you have to decide if you want to spend 6mo - a year writing the outline for, support text for, and scripting events for what is effectively the Devs telling you the player a story, or putting that time into polishing the mechanisms and gameplay so that you can make your own stories. It’s that simple.
Once the Galaxy Forge tastes a bit more polish and I find some documentation on Ironclad’s event scripting/triggering system, I want to sit down and write up some basic tutorials which might be a little smoother than the ones currently available. But that potential is really only available because they spent the time others might have spent writing up the equivalent of a RT4X graphic novel into the gameplay. If I have interest, I can write my own novel. And if a few months down the road Ironclad wanted to charge me $5 for a series of linked campeign maps with embedded lore along the way, then I’m their target demographic.
This way, everybody wins with a better game.
