Yesterday I had a lovely chat with the brainy folk of Oxide Games, developers of Ashes of the Singularity and the forthcoming Ara: History Untold, a historical 4X strategy game that puts a baroque spin on the classic Civilization format, with each player's turn unfolding simultaneously once you've queued up a bunch of commands.
There's a lot to sift through there, which we'll get into next week, but we also found time towards the finish for some off-the-cuff chinwaggery about dream 4X or strategy game projects. What would the Oxide team make, if they didn't have to worry about budget, audience expectations or any of the other commercial factors that guide the creation of videogames? The answers may surprise you. They might also make you hungry.
]]>Stardock's standalone RTS expansion Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation [official site] is no longer an expandalone. Three months after launching Escalation, Stardock have rolled the original Ashes of the Singularity and Escalation into one game and pulled the original from sale. Having them separate was splitting the community, Stardock say. Better to realise that late than never. If you owned either of 'em, hooray! You now own both. If you bought both, well, you still have both (in one) and also a year of free DLC.
]]>From the forum threads full of arguments to the constant tweaking and occasional overhauls via patches – balance has long been one of the pillars of strategy games. It means fairness, a level playing field, and in competition it means that victory comes purely from player skill. But balance, and the quest to reach it, can easily become the enemy of surprise and of the joy that comes from succeeding against the odds.
Balance’s lofty position implies that nobody wants to be the underdog, that conquest is only satisfying if you have the exact same or at least equally effective advantages as your opponents. Sure, when actual money and trophies are involved, this sort of balance is necessary, but when you’re playing for fun? When you’re playing on your own? Give me the imbalanced every time.
]]>Stardock and Oxide's Ashes of the Singularity did a lot of things right in its original April 2016 release. It was a decent traditional RTS experience at its core despite some niggling faults here and there. Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation [official site] is a meaty standalone expansion that rectifies both technical and gameplay issues alike. It also bolsters the unit count and makes everything bigger. Insert double entendre here.
]]>Stardock's gorgeous-but-very-plain RTS Ashes of the Singularity [official site] is getting its first standalone expansion with on November 3rd. Yes, the name sounds very much like it could be a new mode or expansion in nearly any other game, but that's the name they went with.
]]>Ashes of the Singularity [official site] was released last week after months in early access, promising huge Supreme Commander-style battles and furious tactical decision-making. But is it simply walking in the giant robot footsteps of its predecessors? Brendan tells us wot he thinks.
]]>Oxide and Stardock have properly launched their sci-fi RTS Ashes of the Singularity [official site], after five months on Steam Early Access and a few more before that in a paid 'Founder's Program'. It is, I'll explain for those who missed the gentle murmuring or Alec's impressions of an early version, a Total Annihilation sort of an RTS with hundreds, even thousands, of units romping across the map in massive battles producing a great many explosions.
]]>Ashes of the Singularity is aiming to walk in the footsteps of Total Annihilation. The thousands of enormous robot footprints of Total Annihilation, since it's an RTS about flinging hundreds of fighting machines at your enemies across each of its missions. There's a new trailer below which brings with it the game's release date, March 31st.
]]>Ashes of the Singularity [official site] can let you build, control, and display thousands of units in the course of a single battle, but that enormous scale is in some ways an attempt to make manifest the technical progress that Oxide and Stardock's 64-bit, DirectX 12 RTS represents. There are a lot of things happening under the hood that Stardock's Brad Wardell is happy to tell you about, things that will make Ashes a unique achievement compared to all of its predecessors, but they are things that programmers and developers would appreciate the most. For the rest of us, there are these vast armies clashing across miles and miles of terrain, a graphical feat that shows us progress we can appreciate.
For all that Ashes is an attempt to usher RTS games into the future of programming and gaming hardware, however, its design is rooted in some of the most important and promising moments in the genre's past.
]]>There are this many things on my screen: lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots.
And most of them are exploding.
Ashes of the Singularity [official site] isn't made by the same people as Supreme Commander (or, for that matter, its forebear Total Annihilation), but there's no denying what it's trying to be.
]]>Ashes of the Singularity [official site] is best described as one of two things: Stardock doing a land-based version of Sins of a Solar Empire; or Stardock doing their own take on Supreme Commander's formula. That is to say, it's an RTS that operates on a vast scale. You'll be have more methods to see a part of that bigness when it hits Steam Early Access on October 22nd.
]]>Ashes of The Singularity [official site] is the Stardock-published, Oxide-developed uber-RTS in which you control thousands of units. I can barely keep control of one toddler and one cat, so I'm already scared. Apparently the trick is to "build "meta-units" that act together as a single, coherent, massive unit" though, so I guess I'll try a cut'n'shut on my household's junior lifeforms and see if it works out. Anyway, this 'first 64-bit RTS' looks pretty spectacular, but the finished version is a long way off and specs look a little scary to anyone with a humbler PC. A paid alpha's been available for a couple of months, but it's now joined by a benchmarking tool with which you can a) splatter pretty scenes all over your screen and b) compare genital sizes.
]]>Footage of the so-recently-announced-we've-not-yet-covered-it Ashes of the Singularity [official site] has emerged from GDC and gosh, does it look impressive.
Ashes of the Singularity is a forthcoming RTS from Oxide Games. It's apparently aiming to wow us in the same way that Supreme Commander did all the way back in 2007: with impressive scale and gorgeous sci-fi warporn.
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