Gas Powered Games CEO and creative director Chris Taylor is currently hard at work on Supreme Commander, the RTS that's been labelled the spiritual successor to his ground-breaking real-time strategy classic Total Annihilation. Not too many moons ago we got to interrogate Taylor about his latest project - here's what he had to say...
One thing that's amazed me is just how much fun Supreme Commander is to watch, even if you're not playing. Why do you think that is?
Taylor: It's because the game has a lot of original components, it's big and there are a lot of possibilities for players to go in different directions - big super weapons, lots of little ones... It's a function of it being original and it being a game where anything can happen. You know when we watched that big Soul Reaver go across and crash on that giant heavy-range artillery? That was hilarious! That big bug corpse? That was funny as shit!
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So how are you propping up the multiplayer end of SC?
Taylor: Well, you're going to find a lot of things that you look for in multiplayer: up to eight players, teams, different victory conditions and commander options if you kill the other player's Supreme Commander. Plus, we've also got what we call GPGnet, which is our matchmaker - so you can get a rating when you play, get matched against other players with a similar rating, create clans, compete in ladders, have chat and friends lists. You can launch Supreme Commander from within GPGnet if you want as well. We have a lot of cool things that we're now able to do - for example, you can start a replay that's taken as you play and broadcast it out in real-time - so your friends can come along, click and watch the whole game.
So with three months to go, all the features are in there - are you doing loads of balancing at the moment?
Taylor: Yes. RTS games are hard to do, so they'll never be 100% balanced even when the game ships - it's a work in progress. After people play it, hundreds and thousands of them - maybe even millions - then you get better data and can do a better job of balancing the game. We're going to balance it, don't get me wrong... But we're just not going to get every last thing tied down till we've had some time pass to really study it. Heck, Blizzard brought out a patch for StarCraft in this last year. I mean, that's eight years later! The more complex, interesting and dynamic a game is, the more balancing you need to do...
Are you going to be releasing new units on the Net, as they were in the days of Total Annihilation?
Taylor: We are - but we're not promising a new unit every week like we did back then. There's something positive about saying 'a new unit is coming' and everyone gathering around for midnight of the day it's supposed to be coming out. Saying that, it does put a lot of pressure on development to put a unit out whether or not the game needs it. Back then, we wanted to study what was going on - but we were forced to get these units out: one a week, one a week, one a week, Christmas, New Years... We want more flexibility now.
So what's your favourite unit in the game?
Taylor: It's hard to pick a favourite. I like the Galactic Colossus as it's a character - it's like a big drunken Frankenstein. Like Frankenstein's monster could get any weirder... But I like them all - it's like being asked to pick your favourite child. I love them all the same - all the units and factions. Although I do lean towards the Cybrans.
Is there anything you really wanted to fit into the game that you just couldn't?
Taylor: There are so many things I wish we'd fitted into the game. We had this whole system of alternate abilities - every unit had them if you held down the Alt key. So those little bots could jetpack. However, we had to cut all of the Alt abilities right across the board, which was a real heartbreak because there was a great deal of really cool design done there. But no-one's going to miss it, as no-one knows it exists...
With Company Of Heroes out and C&C3; on the horizon, how do you think Supreme Commander will stand up against these other big RTS contenders?
Taylor: Well, it's a very different game - those other games you describe are much more tactical and close-in. We're not the same, we're in a very different part of the genre. I'm really quite xen about competition, there was way more competition back in the old days when I did Total Annihilation - somebody said they counted 100 RTS games back then.
Plus, I think C&C;: Tiberian Sun came out about a year after?
Taylor: Yeah and there was Dark Reign... There was a glut of everything you could imagine. Everybody was doing RTS games, and management just looked at me and said: "Are we really going to succeed with this game?" But in the end, we managed to come out of the fog - we stuck our head up out of it and did OK. I'd say we did great, all things considered.
