Episode 277: Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)

[Rob Zacny]

Planetary Annihilation is finally here, and Rob is joined by Fraser Brown (PCGamesN) and Brendan Caldwell (Rock Paper Shotgun) to discuss their differing views on the game. 

 

Rob's Review

Fraser's Review

Brendan's Review

 

Listen here.

 

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As mentioned in the show, longtime friend and original panelist Tom Chick has been diagnosed with aggressive throat cancer. Please send Tom all the best and consider visiting the following page and showing him your support: Fundgate: Tom Chick Beats Cancer

[mikemariano]

I haven't listened yet, but I will now have that Journey song in my head the entire time.

[Michael]

  On 9/25/2014 at 1:43 PM, mikemariano said:

I haven't listened yet, but I will now have that Journey song in my head the entire time.

 

My plan worked!

[ilitarist]

  On 9/25/2014 at 3:18 PM, Michael said:

My plan worked!

 

Are you a wizard?

 

...Sorry. See, the problem with good editing is that sometimes it's more interesting than the show subject.

 

Frankly, I don't see how you can talk about other RTS so soon after the marvelous Rise of Nations show. Also you shouldn't talk about point & click adventures set on trains for at least a year.

[hexgrid]

I never played much Supreme Commander (I own it, but back when it was current it invariably caused my graphics card to start faulting after half an hour or so of play...), but I was pretty heavily into Total Annihilation and even had some fun with TA:Kingdoms, though it had its problems.  I backed PA mostly in the hopes that it would be a modern interpretation of the TA lineage.

 

Like this podcast, I'm not quite sure what to think about PA.  I definitely agree that it seems like it's not done baking yet, and I do wish there was a better way to get an overview of what's going on.  What's there I want to like, but I'm not sure if it's nostalgia for TA carrying me past a weak game.

 

I do think (as was mentioned) that the paucity of tactically interesting terrain is a problem; where (as Rob said, I believe) TA was a game that celebrated turtling, I find PA celebrates rushing.  As more of a turtle myself ("he made a sea of heavy cannon and called it peace"), I'm less enamored of PA.

 

Hopefully they'll keep building on it, though.  It has the potential to be really good.

[sclpls]

Seeing the state of the game now, I've basically written the game off. It seems like no one working on this had any vision for how a game taking place across multiple planets should differ from a traditional RTS, and so you have what feels to me like a very generic TA/SupCom style gameplay wedded to a gimmick. There isn't any moment to moment experience playing this game that feels better than its predecessors in my opinion.

[jeremywc]

I really agree with the point about Planetary Annihilation feeling difficult to manage. The UI just doesn't feel as polished as it's spiritual predecessors. I've always felt that one of the most underrated things about Chris Taylor's games is that they never feel obtuse to play, even when there's a ton of chaos on the screen. Hopefully the game will sell well enough that the PA team can spend some time to go back and refine the interface a bit more.

[hexgrid]

One of the things I really liked about the TA lineage is that it was (IIRC) the first to break away from limits on the number of units you can have selected at a time.  Warcraft limited you to having 9 things selected at a time, and StarCraft bumped that up to 12 (unless they were "big" units...), while TA had hotkeys for "select all combat units", "select all units of this type", and so forth.

 

I think the problem with PA is almost entirely a result of its big concept.  If you were playing PA on a flat, constrained map with tactically interesting terrain, it would play (arguably) as well as the earlier games in its lineage.  Likewise, I think if you took TA or SupCom and set them in PA levels, you'd be floundering the same way.  The tools you have aren't tuned to the environment you're operating in.

[hexgrid]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-resources-an-apocalyptic-rts-game

 

Uber's new Kickstarter.  Chthulu vs. The Singularity, the RTS.  They say they're using the PA engine to do it, but hopefully something on the ground with (supposedly) destructable cities will solve both the bland terrain problem and the "how do I manage this map?" problem.

[riadsala]

Even if the planets are a little tricky to handle, I think Uber deserve more credit for trying to do something a little new and different. 

 

Shame the game wasn't better , but I have no hard feelings about the money I spent on the kickstarter. 

[hexgrid]

  On 10/12/2014 at 1:31 PM, riadsala said:

Even if the planets are a little tricky to handle, I think Uber deserve more credit for trying to do something a little new and different. 

 

Shame the game wasn't better , but I have no hard feelings about the money I spent on the kickstarter. 

 

I don't regret backing it either, but at the same time I think we can look at parts of it (like the decision to go interplanetary within a match) as interesting (promising, cool-sounding) research projects that produced unfortunate results.  There are some things that someone has to try to discover the problems, and PA covered several bases for us on that front.