Worthplaying is wishywashy about SotS

[Naked_Lunch]

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<p><a href="http://www.worthplaying.com" title="sss">Worthplaying</a> has typed up a preview of the highly-anticipated (At least<em> for me</em>) 4x game <a href="http://www.kerberos-productions.com/sots.shtml" title="sss">Sword of the Stars</a> . Here's what they thought of the fancy-pantsy 3d star map:</p><blockquote><p><font color="#000000">Take, for instance, the 3-D star map. Most of the game is spent looking and manipulating this huge 3D assemblage comprised of over 100 shimmering points of light, with each glowy orb representing a star system. This is where the strategic action of the game takes place &ndash; where you manage your colonies and command your ships. I find the entire idea of having the universe be rendered in 3-D to be very cool, and it certainly is pretty sweet to look at and rotate around. However, from a gameplay standpoint, I find it to be severely lacking in terms of ease of use. Trying to do simple things like keep track of where your ships are in relation to each other and gauge the distances between star systems is difficult and time-consuming, and I have never had to deal with this in past games, which used a simpler (and flatter) universe.</font> </p></blockquote><p>I hope <a href="http://www.kerberos-productions.com/" title="sss">Kerberos Productions</a> fixes this or at least makes it more usable. Gameplay should never EVER be jeoprodized for looks. </p>

 

[Jason]

Here's what Rorschach, who has been playing the preview builds for some time, said about it at the Kerberos forums:

As you may know I've been playing preview builds as well. I think I'm in a position to offer another opinion on some of the WP previewer's "concers."

3D Starmap - You cannot play SotS statically from the starmap. You need to be willing to change focus on objects, zoom in for more detail and zoom out to get the bigger picture. As your empire gets bigger and more widespread a static camera view just won't work. You need to pan and tilt as well to get the angles and spacial relations between objects. Figuring distance and direction is as easy as left-click dragging between two points.

I've got a friend who isn't a gamer and sat him down in from of SotS. With some coaching from me it took him about an 30 minutes to be working the 3D starmap interface without my help.

Voice Acting - To me the voices add a lot of immersion factor. Each race sounds different and there will be different voices for different functions (the designer is different from the refueller voice). There's also some nice effects to make the aliens sound more alien. The cuts can get bombastic at times, but space empire management is all about scale.

Combat - Combat can be simple, and it cam be complex. It depends on how you want to play. By setting the fleet to "close to attack" I can let the AI run the battle for me or I can change the heavy beams and torpedos to the 2nd weapons group and target the mission section of the enemy CnC ship while the port side lasers engage the destroyer screen and the starboard banks engage the guarding defense satellite.

Tactical options also change with more research. The sensors screen in particular changes radically in function as you progress up the C3 tree. And we all know about fleet management.

"Very little to do" - I think my turn by turn posts can refute that.

Keeping track - As my empire grows I find myself using the empire management screens more and more. There you can see summaries of all your colonies, fleets, explored planets and enemy planets. Just a single click to get more information on it and a double-click to go back to the strat map with that object selected and camera focused. There's a notes system for each planet and you can rename fleets at any time to call out their tasks. It's pretty easy to me even when I've got 30 fleets, and 20 colonies spread out over 1/2 the map.

After which I added my usual dab o' genius:

I'm surprised he listed the starmap as a fault. It's very easy to use and probably the most impressive thing I've seen so far. The screenshots don't really convey how it "feels" at all. After I quit the game the first time, I opened up my hard drive and started trying to "rotate" around the folders to find what I was looking for. It took me a few seconds to realize what I was doing wrong.

He's right about the voice acting, though. It can be very annoying.

So yeah, starmap = good thing. I had no problem with it and I'm legally retarded.

 

[onerobot]

I'm more worried that the site states these as the main selling points:

A return to the action-packed roots of the 4X genre with some new twists, including a 3D starmap and real-time combat resolution in a 3D environment!

The starmap is the least of our problems.

 

[Jason]

The "action-packed" real-time stuff doesn't bother me because I knew from the outset that it was being made by some of the Homeworld developers. And Homeworld was all about real-time 3D space battles.

In other news, it seems that Worthplaying was a little unhappy about their own previewer.

The preview has since been re-worded in many places to, err... "enhance opinion neutrality".
Much as I hate the 'revisionist history' overtones, we felt it was a necessary step to preserve our journalistic integrity.
Possibly too little too late, but we've done what we can after the fact.

Kind of strange.

Also, there's a SotS preview on Warcry.

One of the neatest aspects of the game is the randomization of various elements, from starmaps to the dynamic technology research tree. There are over 150 distinct technologies to research, the ones that are available change from game to game. While the core technology is consistent, certain branches are random from game to game. There is no perfect path up the tech tree to memorize and exploit, because the path keeps changing.

 

[onerobot]

Maybe my last post was a little... uninformed. Also known as stupid.

I had only read the marketing blurbs that really made the game sound like another RTS with the thinnest gameplay possible stretched over AMAZING 3D GRAFFIX with 4x elements tacked on as a dupe, but the wiki cleared that up. This honestly looks very well designed and quite innovative. That of course means that it'll be horribly broken when it ships, but fortunately I was already sold at the innovative line.

3D starmaps are really nothing to worry about. As long as the view isn't moved and planets don't end up right on top of each other its fuctionally a better looking two dimensional map.

 

[Jason]

" That of course means that it'll be horribly broken when it ships"

So far, no. But the publisher gave them an extra 2 months by delaying the game so it could be launched simultaneously in North America and Europe. And that means they have 2 months to potentially fuck it up. Most likely, though, they'll spend that 2 months just bug hunting and not adding extra features. I hope.

 

[onerobot]

There's no way that this wont get horribly messed up before lauch. Somehow I've been completely unaware of this game untill now, and it just seems too good to possibly exist. Something has to go wrong.

It's like finding out that Bethesda sold the Fallout rights to a company that wouldn't rape it hollow, and that it's amazing and is coming out in two months. I'm just too pessimistic to consider such things.