January 18, 2010

My Dream Game: The RTS

Even if there are a million great games there's one that has a very special place in my heart: Supreme Commander. It's not the game I've played the most and there might even be games which are better and more fun but supcom was the game that introduced me to competitive gaming and it made it me feel like no game had done before. I took gaming seriously for once; sure I had played online with cs but I was never serious. I did nothing to improve myself, I didn't really care - as long as I didn't have 1-10 or a silly just-beginning-stat.

Before supcom I always cheated my way through an RTS game (I still remember that pepperoni pizza gives food and quarry gives stone in age of empires) or just gave up when things got rough. Now I'm happy to give it my best just to beat guitar hero on expert and someday I'm sure I'll do it! Getting beat down by a lame rush? Before I would just whine and shout "lamer" and throw out the game but instead I saved the replay, copied his moves and presto! Now I got to be the one who got shouted at!! And I can tell you - it felt a lot better...

All this effort I put into the game really got me involved on a very different level than in any game before. I'd never even thought that SimCity, the great 4th edition, was imbalanced. But when I think about it: the huge apartment-building with a couple of thousand inhabitants it always, always without fail clogged down all the transports even when I dedicated everything around it just for transport. Later I found out it was bugged and there's a fix, somewhere, to download which will fix this and some other bugs. Now I started to find things I didn't like in supcom, things that was... wrong. No matter what you did, and no matter what the really good guys did - you couldn't beat a certain strategy. It ended with everyone playing the same faction, spamming the same units in game after game... Not really fun. I participated in discussions and believe it or not I think that I was right more often than not. I was improving!

But hey! Why did they do this? What if they had done this instead? If I had made a game it would have done this and thus been a lot better...

And here I am. I have this dream of making the best RTS game ever... Staying true to my play style from supcom: copy the good things from others, improve them and make them my own, my plan is to mix in the great things from all the RTS games I've played throughout the years. Obviously the most prominent would be supcom but also StarCraft, kknd, TA and CnC among others...