Total Annihilation's spiritual successor

[Marek]

GameSpy has the first preview. Looks nice.

[Kolzig]

I love how it resembles Total Annihilation so much but still seems so fresh.

And those big superunits look very cool.

[DanJW]

It looks a little too much like TA for my likeing. It was a really good game, but I never found myself able to get into it.

[Steve]

"Looks nice" as in "looks like it'll be fun," or "looks visually appealing?"

Because I think it looks ugly as sin.

[netmonkey]

Wow, they even got the lighting exactly like total annihilation. Is that legal?

[Roderick]

Ditto, I never really got into Total Annihilation, also because the blocky robotunits and characterless tanks didn't do anything for me. But this game, Supreme Commander, looks like it *could* be special. The zooming-function (THAT'S what next-gen is REALLY about, zooming to absurd levels, as demonstrated by Spore) and ridiculously large units dwarfing the rest could be awesome.

[Oath]

Don't worry, they're taking stuff from other games too! Like the Marathon logo, which has magically turned in to the logo for one of the games factions.

[Thrik]

Yeah, the screenshots are kind of unimpressive after playing the likes of Dawn of War. Maybe it'll look better when in 3D motion, since still shots can never capture an RTS anyway.

Hopefully it'll be good though, since I haven't had a fun RTS to play since.. well.. DoW.

[spaceship789]

I simply love that look!

(the look of the units that is)

I remember seeing an animated "alternate starwars prequel" circa 98 where all the goody spaceships had white mechanical details, and bright blue/green stripe here or there. and the baddies had grey or black mechanical details with red stripe here or there.. and thinking, man I wish starwars prequel spaceships looked more like that.

it really gives the units character. Its like the old days when soldiers unifroms were bright colors. The soldiers looking dashing, and full of loyalty to their country.

[Kester]

Oooh, this is definitely on my watch-list! My one reservation is that I'm not sure Chris Taylor is actually the ideal person to make a TA successor - like people have pointed out already, TA wasn't exactly bursting with character, and the kindest word I can find for those Supreme Commander screenshots is "generic". Hopefully theres someone on the dev team who can make him realise you need to make people want to play your game before they'll realise how great your revolutionary gameplay is. Got my fingers crossed for this one turning out well though!

As a side note, I do like the way RTS developers are slowly catching onto the idea of making RTS games more about prioritising your attention onto different theatres than on empire/base-building: Dawn of War also had this to an extent with the control point system. Here's hoping to it catching on with more people!

[Marek]

To be honest I don't know what caused me to say "looks nice". It doesn't look nice at all in terms of artistic direction, and the story seems very boring. But I liked TA a lot despite some flaws, and I'm hoping this game will have good gameplay too.

[OftenK]

Yeah, I saw this one in PC Gamer. It may not be the prettiest game on the block, but it sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun to play.

[Trithemius]

It seems less a spiritual successor to TA than its "offspring cloned in a lab from collected DNA".