Rush, Boom, Turtle: I Like to Watch, Eve
Dos and don'ts for the makers of fine RTS eye candy
4/14/2009 10:05 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 4
One of the most important elements of a real-time strategy game is the graphics. In fact, I'd argue that the only genre in which graphics are more important is shooters. People playing real-time strategy games expect either massive armies or intricate presentations of soldiers at war. Except for the goofballs still playing
StarCraft, who get neither. But for the rest of us, it takes either the spectacle of
Empire: Total War or the detail of
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. Or the lovely halfway point between them of
Demigod. We can act like we're not superficial because it takes, you know, like, thinking and stuff to play real-time strategy games. But we need our eye candy. We're graphics whores who pretend we're gameplay princesses.
So for any of you game developers out there still making real-time strategy games, here is my list of do's and don'ts that maybe you can post in your break room, next to all that mandatory stuff about workplace safety and sexual harassment.
Do: Let me slow the game down. And I'm not just saying this because I'm old and slow, which I'll address in another column. For the love of the 40 guys you hired to do your artwork, put in a speed control so we can take some time to appreciate their work. High marks go to the RTSes Stardock has recently published. What a treat it is to get some battle going in
Sins of a Solar Empire or
Demigod, and to then slow down the graphics so I can move the camera around and admire everything that's happening. It's like a Zack Snyder action sequence, but not as homoerotic. On a related note, lots of camera options are good. For all the stuff Petroglyph managed to screw up making
Star Wars: Empire at War and
Universe at War: Earth Assault, it had the right idea with its cinematic camera option, which hops the view around automatically.
Don't: Pull a Relic by giving me wonderful graphics and then forcing me to play too quickly to enjoy them. Why doesn't
Dawn of War II have an adjustable speed? Here are such wonderful graphics and animation and artwork, all doing intricate things with and to each other, but I'd never notice because I'm busy clicking the grenade icon or setting up my bolter's firing arc. Even when I get to a certain level of comfort with the action and interface, it all goes by so quickly. What is this, an action game? Actually, don't answer that. But I know Relic is capable of making games with adjustable speeds. In the original
Dawn of War, that was one of the options when hosting a multiplayer game. But Relic forgot about that with
Company of Heroes, which runs at only a single, officially sanctioned speed that's about one notch too fast to actually get my tanks facing the right direction. When it came to
Dawn of War II, an adjustable speed was so far from Relic's mind that when I asked Jonny Ebbert, the lead designer, if they had any plans to include the option, he thought I was asking if there was any way to speed up the replay.
