Rush, Boom, Turtle: Sins of a Sins Developer

Blair Fraser confesses that Sins of a Solar Empire could have been a very different game.
3/10/2009 7:51 PM | 1 Comments | Page 5 of 8

Chick: Fair enough. That's pretty intriguing. I'm glad to hear you guys are thinking in that direction.

Fraser: We always have. I know a lot people say we just cheaped out, but it's so meaningful and important to me that I didn't want to do it in a half-assed manner. I no longer play RTS games that have a certain style of campaign. I don't buy them, or I just don't play that portion. I'm basically sick of it. And we didn't want to do that with Sins. We'd rather figure out how to present it in a new way that's meaningful to us.

Chick: Fair enough. Going back to feedback from the beta tests -- this might be a difficult question because you might not be able to answer it diplomatically -- but what are some of the sillier complaints you get from fans? For instance, I'm just going to throw out a couple that I've heard. I hear people complain that the turrets don't move on the capital ships. Or that non-fighters don't fly around during combat.

Fraser: Yeah.

Chick: I've seen both of those and I think they're completely immaterial to what you guys are doing. Do you get a lot of complaints that you think are silly and miss the point like that?

Fraser: Totally. You named a great example and a bad example, and I'll explain why. In terms of turrets, a lot of people coming from Nexus or Homeworld expect that level of detail. But given what we were trying to simulate, and the system specs we were trying to hit, turrets doing that just didn't make any sense, especially at the scale we're doing it. It was absolutely silly. Waste of our resources, waste of the CPU's resources. So we didn't do that. Now, the other one -- ships not flying around with fighters -- we actually did that at the start. The problem is, given the number of ships you can potentially have, it was absolute chaos. It made for very poor gameplay. As realistic as it may have been, or as "Battlestar Galactica" as it may have been, it just didn't work. However, we did know it was something we could provide as a modding option. In Entrenchment, we actually unlock that capability. There are several mods right now that incorporate that as a gameplay feature. If you go to the modding forums on the Sins site, you can see a couple of examples. Who knows? They may be able to tweak the physics to make entertaining gameplay.

Chick: What are some of the complaints you hear that you actually agree with?

Fraser: Well, I mentioned the example of the phase lane thing. No campaign: I absolutely agree with that. We'd love to put our story out there. The 2-gig barrier. A lot of people want to make these huge galaxies with tons of ships. I really want to get past that, but we need people with 64-bit machines before we can do that.

Chick: Is that a limitation on the size of the galaxy or the number of units?

Fraser: Both. It's a limit for 32-bit operating systems. Some people say we should be able to do more, but it's really out of our hands until we get more people on 64-bit. They basically want us to release a second version of Sins in 64-bit form. But as much as I'd love to do it, it's not worth it at this point. Other complaints? Online play sometimes takes too long. That's a difficult one. Sometimes I love these long, epic matches, but I recognize that some people just have an hour to play. We try to deal with a lot of that in Entrenchment by providing the Quick Start, increasing the importance of homeworlds, making it easier to clear out planets. But it's probably not where the average person wants it. If you look at games like Dawn of War II, they've really cut down that per mission time. Chick: To be fair, you guys offer a lot of options for faster games. You can speed up research and production and travel, with the equivalent of sliders. Can you tell if many people use those?