Shattered Suns To Break New RTS Ground?

According to IGN.com, the newly announced space based RTS, Shattered Sun, is set to revolutionize the RTS genre. Reading through the article (and that’s all it is, no screens as yet) it doesn’t sound all that revolutionary to me. I’m here to deconstruct the hype and put things in a little perspective

Three-dimensional battles were done years ago by Homeworld and Homeworld 2, so being able to attack your opponent from above and below is nothing new. Not a good start to the list of supposedly “unique” features.

Player designed units have been done up to a point before as well. Various RTS titles have given players the option of being able to build units from modular parts to fit your particular strategic vision, Warzone 2100 being the one that springs most readily to mind. Whether Shattered Sun will go further than this remains to be seen.

Unique economic challenges, many games have made this claim and only a few have lived up to it. Dawn of War introduced the concept of capturing strategic points to ensure a steady stream of resources, if you lost a point you lost the income it generated. Ground Control also changed the economic dynamics of the RTS in that you didn’t build factories on the map to use your resources, instead you gained resources for completing tactical goals, destroying enemy units, holding strategic locations, etc., and you could spend those points on reinforcements which were shipped in from off map. Shattered Sun’s system of a distributed economy with individual space stations only being able to use resources that exist at their location is not that much of an innovation. You still have to send out workers to collect the resources, though the possibility of pirating supply routes between stations is intriguing.

An interactive campaign, well what can I say, the whole point of a game is that it is interactive. You’re not just sitting there watching a movie, you interact with it to some degree or another. I think what they mean here is a non-linear campaign, where you choose the battles and the battlegrounds, making the whole experience more strategic. Sacrificing ground in one place to stretch your enemies forces and make it easier to counterattack and the like. The way Shattered Sun’s campaign is described makes it sound more like a combination of X3 or Darkstar One and Homeworld. Building up your forces by interacting with characters and then choosing where to attack. The ideas on their own are not unique, the freeroaming element in space combat titles has been around since Elite, while you’ll be familiar with the kind of strategic campaign structure from the Total War series and, to a lesser extent, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. The only thing unique about it is that the division between strategic and tactical elements has been made more transparent and less based upon pure number crunching.

Now to the last of the hyped features; moving  battlefields. Not, as I first thought when I read the first paragraph of IGN’s article, the actual playing area moving around on a kind of meta-map, the borders of the play area moving around, but the scenery moving around. Planets will orbit their suns, moons will orbit their planets, as will stations. This will give players a whole new weapon to use against their opponents: Timing. If you want to take over a planet, attack it when its on the point in its orbit which is furthest from it sources of reinforcements. Hide attack fleets in the sensor shadow of a system’s star. Because of the orbital nature of the terrain in a star system, timing will be everything. This is the only feature of the game which I believe will be truly revolutionary and looks set to influence RTS titles of the future. Imagine being able to plan a ground assault in C&C to conicide with favourable weather conditions, in real time. This is the only element which sounds truly ground-breaking, as such it may make or break the entire game depending on how well it is implemented.

In all I’m going to reserve judgement at least until I see a demo, or the game is finally released, which IGN has down for October this year in the US. Though I have to be a little critical of IGN for not really doing their research, of the “five unique features” only one stands out as being truly unique, with a others being dependent on how far the devs take them.

See the original article on IGN.com

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