Top 5 Things GPG Must NOT Screw Up in Supreme Commander 2!

I’m rarely critical of Supcom/FA and Chris Taylor’s work. So I figured it’s time to put my ugly cynical hat on…

Here are the items I believe are essential; seriously I mean absolutely critical, that Gas Powered Games do not screw-up upon release of the highly anticipated Supreme Commander 2, around March 2010…

1) Multiplayer

Don’t even get me started on GPGnet. It blows. Hard. The other day my nephew was trying to get Forged Alliance running online. It took him hours of updates and frozen windows before finally giving up. Finding latest patches was a nightmare when it didn’t auto-update as it was supposed to. The GPGnet software was just buggy throughout.

And Demigod… well what a nightmare start that had. The latest Stardock report states than only 23% played Demigod online; I suspect much of that figure were players who simply gave up trying. Massive connection issues early on nearly ruined Demigod. It’s still selling well today, but the online community remains weak.

2) Pathfinding & AI

The original Supcom (pre-FA) had some worrying pathing issues. Large numbers of units simply melted the processor and caused horrendous slowdown. Supcom1 was designed for epic battles, yet they’ll never really see the full light of day, as even with the latest CPUs Supcom simply cannot efficiently manage that number of units, all crashing into eachother, projectiles whirling, exploding; battling across gruelling 3d terrain, gathering formation etc.

Good things. Nay, great things are promised for Supcom2. Let’s hope it lives up to expectation and people can actually play this amazing game how it was supposed to be played!

3) Balancing; Bugs & Patches

Balancing such a colossal behemoth as Supreme Commander is no mean feat. It’s all 3d terrain and physics: pure simulation. It’s not even a matter of very very clever ‘number crunching’ like in Starcraft. It’s just not possible with the hyper-complex emergent gameplay we see in Supcom. It kind of shoots itself in the foot that way.

However, GPG can listen to their community and fanbase, keep active, stay transparent and in regular communication, they can prepare in advance for possible investment in extra or unscheduled QA, alpha/beta testing, patches, add-ons, bonus downloads, glitches, bugs, imbas, geenral post-release issues etc. They must provide fixes promptly and professionally if they are to maintain their brand integrity and keep people playing.

4) Marketing!

I know I know, no-one likes ‘in your face’ brash marketing. People like to be sold on word-of-mouth quality and brand recognition, not to have their innocent ears and eyeballs forcefully injected with loud, shiny brain-crack. But…

Supcom had awful pre-launch marketing. At the big gaming events where GPG were able to exhibit prior to release, very little was heard about it. I remember it was a point of great debate and bewilderment in the community. It seemed to kind of stumble casually out of the starting blocks like a golden horse unprepared for the exhausting real world of high-pedigree racing between fierce competitors.

It’s essential to get people actually playing this damn game in order to establish that online presence right away! If people log-in after buying the game only to find a handful of active games… well that’s going to put them off. Numbers ARE crucial in this regard (sorry hardcore Zen gaming purists).

Square Enix are probably going to come into their own here and push it to the max. GPG need to stay on the ball post-release and continue to organise events, competitions, prizes, tournaments, maybe even e-sports (which also depends heavily on the game being tight on release).

And GPG should be wary of any upcoming X-craft, CoH, DoW, or C&C titles too…

5) Just please make it feel right…

We’ve all played Total Annihilation. (If you haven’t – get out of here you *!£^&*!?*!). No just kidding, just that TA had an amazing feel about it. It all came together somehow despite its flaws. It just had that awe-inspiring sense of epic fulfilment. The scarred terrain and littered robotic corpses strewn across a battlefield still erupting in violent war of intense scale and attrition. The chaos, the destruction, the madness; the fun.

Supcom never quite ‘got it’. It was an astonishing technical achievement and surpasses any RTS game ever made in terms of features, ingenuity and audacity. But it failed in many regards to recapture a longing for that which Total Annihilation epitomized in title and action.