The relative budgets of each game translate into more green wins.īut I’m still going to do it since I’ve worked closely with the developers of the other games over the years (Stardock was GPG’s publisher, Blizzard’s contracted expansion pack maker for StarCraft: Retribution, and we’re friends with the UberE team). Third, many of the weaknesses of a given game are either design choices or budget choices. Second, yes, it’s even dumber to argue that competing games are objectively better than your own game. No one will agree on this so I’ll just give you what I think it will have and as always, my opinion is subject to change based on persuasive arguments from players and this is all just my opinion obviously:įirst, yes, it’s totally inappropriate for me to even engage in a public comparison like this. From here to thereįirst, we have to decide what the ultimate Ashes RTS needs to have. Content is expensive and we live in an age where someone can just buy Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance for $5 on a Steam sale which has years of added content. But we’ll talk about the modding in the next section.Īnd this is the biggest challenge for us.

But we still need a lot of core RTS features: The ugly fact is, the RTS market is small and you can’t spend a huge amount on an RTS up front if it’s new IP.Įscalation was a big step in the right direction for serious RTS players and lets us move the base game into being an introduction to the genre. With a fraction of the budget of Planetary Annihilation and around 1/17th the budget of Supreme Commander, it’s a tough haul to compete.

The original release of Ashes was an impressive, albeit limited RTS. The short version is that having a core neutral GPU engine is very hard to develop and Nitrous is the first and so far only one we know of that has shipped a game that does it (though Frostbite might be there). PC World investigated this claim earlier this year. go here.īroadly speaking, a next-generation RTS that wants to compete with Ashes will have to develop an engine to do it. If you’re interested in the technical breakdown. I wrote about this earlier this year for IGN.

That’s why until Ashes of the Singularity, it had been many years since someone has made a new one. But we’ve already done the hard stuff first. There are a lot of things we have to do to get from where we are today to where we want to be. We want Ashes to become the ultimate RTS game Let’s break things down into bite sized chunks to understand what we have today. That’s where I want us to eventually get in terms of battlefield flexibility.Ĭheck these screenshot from a mod of Total Annihilation: It’s a huge naval map with bits of islands in it.

In Total Annihilation there’s a map called Caldera’s rim.

Ashes of the singularity mods