Jeff Buckland over at AtomicGamer has written up something that I wouldn’t normally dream of reading, a wish list for a game. However, this is one game that I happen to think was overlooked by many strategery fans for the minimal things in which it was lacking, instead of the greatness for which it is.
So, What does Jeff want for Supreme Commander 2?
For all of Supreme Commander‘s talk of epic scale and millions of lives hanging in the balance, we never saw a single one of those people we were fighting to protect. The whole battlefield was full of robots with humans only occupying the ACUs, and you never seem to fight in population centers or heavily inhabited areas. Other than what the story dictated to us, for all we knew we were just fighting with robots out in some field somewhere for fun. For the sequel, having fights in cities would be incredible, and would probably do a better job of showing off the scale of the units than the original game did.
And that is a point with which I couldn’t agree more, the main thing that lacked in the first game was atmosphere and personality beyond robots. I didn’t care for the single player at all due to the restrictions placed on the tech tree throughout and would have loved to have played some multiplayer missions through SimCity style cities as they’re pulverized beneath the feet of my giant robots.
It is like that old science fiction trope of “What is the point to conquering the universe if you won’t have any sentient beings left under your control once you do it?”
So what then is the point of having giant robots if there aren’t any squishies (and their dwellings) for the giant robots to trample underfoot?
In any case, read the rest of Jeff’s article. Not because it talks about giant robots, but because it is written in the style of a real Supreme Commander fan instead of the generic “fan(s) of the genre” tone you might get on other sites.
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