Starcraft 2 campaign orbital command planetary fortess

STARCRAFT 2 CAMPAIGN ORBITAL COMMAND PLANETARY FORTESS PLUS

But do you mind? IвЂ™m trying to play an RTS here. Okay, Planetary Annihilation, you look suitably like a physics driven clockwork solar system. At that point, youвЂ™re just annoyed that you have no easy way of gauging the distance from one moon to another planetвЂ™s moon because the path your ships travel is a вЂњrealisticallyвЂќ circuitous set of gravity slingshots, as if calculated by an unmoored spirograph. But then youвЂ™re zoomed in and zoned in on the personality-free armies and resource management and you can no longer be bothered to notice the tiny wonder. ItвЂ™s quite lovely when you first notice this and perhaps a few times thereafter. As youвЂ™re playing, on the horizon behind whatever base youвЂ™re building or battle youвЂ™re shepherding, you might see a moonrise, a sunrise, a planetrise, with the stars wheeling silently in the background. The first is the rather precious conceit of Planetary Annihilation playing out on an intricate orrery, where moons spin around planets, and planets spin around a sun. So why all the planets? Why a battlefield that consists of several globes, with you only gazing down at any given globe one at a time, like Saint-ExuperyвЂ™s Petit Prince pondering his patches of scrub and his tiny teakettle volcano? I suspect there are a couple of reasons for this. The design of Planetary Annihilation, and the lack of an interface that can wrap itself around the design, guarantees the player can only ever see a fraction of the map. Where? Which of my three planets? My thumb drums reflexively on the space bar to no avail. And why furthermore spread the game across multiple globes with no provision for minimaps or a useful alert system? вЂњUnit under fire,вЂќ the female voice says. So why base Planetary Annihilation on the idea of a 3D globe where you can never see more than half of the map at any given time? You gain nothing and you lose half of everything.

For instance, why make this game when you could instead just play Supreme Commander, which plays like a more convenient and more fleshed out version of Planetary Annihilation? Or, to put it another way, why would Uber go to all the trouble of making a version of Supreme Commander with so many features stripped out, ranging from content, to functionality, to tuning, to gameplay? Why such a direct nod without a better understanding of what makes the source material work?ДЇor instance, one of the hallmarks of Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation before it was the way you could zoom out for an unprecedented comprehensive overview of the battlefield. Some of the problems with Planetary Annihilation exist at the design level. This is a game that never got whipped into shape the way a good publisher can whip a game into shape. And now theyвЂ™ve built and self-published Planetary Annihilation thanks in part to an enormously successful crowdfunding campaign that got them out from under the boot of cruel publishers, where they demonstrate that maybe publishers werenвЂ™t always such a bad idea. There is only Uber Entertainment, a company capable of making polished and complete games like Monday Night Combat. What kind of publisher would stake its reputation on a mess like this that didnвЂ™t come out just in time for Black Friday or at the last day before a fiscal quarter ended? What kind of publisher would so unabashedly foist off onto unsuspecting gamers something so obviously not ready for release without some sort of scheduling motive? What kind of publisher could have so little regard for the game a developer worked so hard to make?

Planetary Annihilation, an arguably incomplete and poorly made game, is a worst case scenario for crowdfunding. And then crowdfunding came along and game developers who loved videogames got to do what was best for the games, for the fans, for the industry as a whole, for me, for you. They might as well have been selling shoes or plumbing fixtures or alt rock albums they didnвЂ™t even listen to.

STARCRAFT 2 CAMPAIGN ORBITAL COMMAND PLANETARY FORTESS PLUS

The people in the meetings didnвЂ™t actually play games because they were too busy counting money, plus they were above such frivolity.

They took breaks from counting their money to hold meetings in conference rooms where they showed charts that explained how much money they would make if a game came out on a certain date, usually just before a fiscal quarter ended or in time for the holiday shopping seasons. Remember what it used to be like in the days of the big publishers who forced developers to release games before they were ready? They did this because they didnвЂ™t care about games, about fans, about the industry as a whole, about me, about you.

Starcraft 2 campaign orbital command planetary fortess