Supreme Commander 2 Continued

06 Jul 2009 at 12:52:02 by Tim McDonald

That latter bit is why the technical specs came as a surprise. “This game will run faster than Supreme Commander did,” boasted Taylor. “You've got this game coming out many years later, and it'll run on that same hardware even better. [Performance] was one of our top goals. We hope to go back three, maybe five years, in terms of hardware, so that we have more people than ever that can play the game.”

Part of this is down to the pathfinding, with the new algorithms making sure that you won't encounter late-game slowdown when trying to move hundreds of units. Part is down to being careful when designing assets and reworking the engine. The claim that the game will run on the same systems SupCom did, but better, seemed substantiated when Taylor revealed that the machine we saw running the game - at 1920x1080 resolution, with 8x anti-aliasing and 16x ansiotropic filtering - was a couple of years old.

This also implies that the somewhat ill-fated Xbox 360 version of Supreme Commander won't be followed, with the sequel's appearance on 360 having been thought out a lot more. “Controls are everything, and you've got to have the right game design,” says Taylor. “Thinking about [the controls] - you have a group of tanks selected, say. If you wanted to select a factory, then you'd lose the tank selection. Now, you can hover over the factory, queue up a bunch of units with the radial menu - still holding the selection - then go back out. That one little subtle change radically transforms it on the console. We've probably got another five, six of those subtle changes that'll make the console remarkably playable and you'll go 'Oh! Why didn't they think of this five years ago?' It takes time; it's an evolution.”

The story, too, has evolved, both in the game and in the company. Square-Enix are publishing this sequel, and it's honestly hard to say, in part, whether or not some of the decisions are down to their influence, or whether Taylor just decided to go about things another way.

“War is often seen historically from 30,000 feet. We talk about war, and this side won, that side lost – but it's about people, about individuals,” explained Taylor. “We're going deeper [in SupCom 2] and telling a personal story in the campaign, about three friends who found themselves on different sides after the war broke out. It's actually one long continuous campaign – well, it's three campaigns, but told sequentially. It only has one outcome. With TA and SupCom, you had different victors, and then you go to make the expansion pack and the sequel, and... um... this one won!” laughs Taylor. “I've been stubborn. Now I'm going with the common sense approach.”

The common sense approach is a design philosophy that shone through the whole preview. Supreme Commander was a game of excess, both good and bad – huge maps and wide designs gave birth to something that crawled on all but the most powerful system, and that had some design issues that gave it character, but occasionally left the gameplay lacking. There's a worry that Supreme Commander 2 may go too far the other way, but it doesn't seem too well grounded. There are still huge units that swat the others like gnats, and there are still utterly gigantic battlefields that expand out, and out, and out. But now it looks more sensible, and a tad more accessible, and that's not a bad thing so long as it maintains the feeling of conflict that the first game possessed. Roll on Spring 2010.

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