One of Valve's yearly, player-voted Steam Awards is called the "Labor Of Love" award. It's designed to reward a developer that has been continually updating a game for years. Naturally, the award goes to games with big, satisfied communities with lots of players to vote, and in 2020 the award went to Valve's own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The other nominees were Among Us, Terraria, The Witcher 3 and No Man's Sky.
Worthy games, but I'm going to make a belated pitch for a left field contender: Planetary Annihilation: Titans, a real-time strategy game that hoped to follow in Supreme Commander's big robot footsteps, and which has been quietly humming away under new developers for the past couple of years.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Planetary Annihilation [official site] got a mixed reception. On one hand, the premise and eventual game wasn’t too shabby. It took the plague-like swarms of units from Total Annihilation and the hefty robot generals of Supreme Commander and brought the whole RTS genre to it’s most ridiculous conclusion, forcing you to wage war on multiple globes. If you survived long enough against your opponent, you might even be able to build a massive thruster and launch one planet into another: the game’s ultimate superweapon.
]]>Announced and released today, Planetary Annihilation: Titans [official site] is an expandalone version of Uber Entertainment's Planetary Annihilation. The original game, Kickstarted and released last year, was trapped in the orbit of two RTS giants – Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. Staff at Uber had worked on both games and their new venture was seen as a spiritual successor of sorts, pitting enormous robotic armies against one another, backed up by Commander units, supply-and-demand resource management, and base-building.
Titans adds, tweaks and modifies but does it do enough to make Planetary Annihilation worthy of a second look? I've been playing since late last week and here's wot I think.
]]>After studying key performance indicators, applying performance improvement procedures, and following a robust phase of knowledge implementation, developer Uber Entertainment has decided going forward to suspend work on the Human Resources Kickstarter.
That means that it's cancelled. The strategy game was shooting for $1,400,000 with which to pit Cthulhu-esque old ones against Skynet-esque robots, but after a little over two weeks it had become clear that it wasn't going to hit its target.
]]>A lot of people are down on planet-slinging RTS Planetary Annihilation, criticising its recently out-of-Early-Access release for missing important features. One of those features was the ability to play offline, as currently even singleplayer matches against bots require you to have an internet connection. That's going to change on October 9th when offline play is added to the game, as announced on the Uber website.
]]>Human Resources has one of the finest elevator pitches I've ever heard. The Singularity comes to pass, the machines rise, and humanity awakens a host of Lovecraftian horrors on the same day. It's a tale of duelling apocalypses. Skynet vs Cthulhu, with humanity caught in the middle. The Kickstarter page has just gone live for Uber's strategy followup to Planetary Annihilation, and I spoke to design director John Comes and art director Nate Simpson to learn about the end of everything.
]]>Planetary Annihilation is best enjoyed if you are a robot. A cold, cybernetically enhanced supercomputer capable of thousands of thoughts per nanosecond. No emotion, no mercy. Just a deathly, speedy logic and a finger that clicks like a woodpecker’s beak. It is a brilliant, ludicrous RTS and I will probably never try to play it again. Because I am a frail, fleshy human being whose idea of multi-tasking is using a fork AND a knife at the dinner table. But you may not be like me. You may be one of the Machines.
]]>The practice of releasing alpha or beta games as part of an "Early Access" plan is not, in itself, inherently harmful. It can be quite good for a game when developers priorities are in order and everyone is given plenty of information about what they're getting into upfront. Planetary Annihilation's early access version on brick-and-mortar store shelves, though? In a box, packaged up all shiny and new, bristling with implied promise of completeness and even going so far as to say, "includes free upgrade to full game"? Welcome, friends, to Murky Territory.
]]>Annihilating planets with other people - orbited by warm smiles and booming laughter - is all well and good, but sometimes you want to be alone while decimating armies and grinding celestial bodies into stardust. It's a good time to think, to take stock of your life and what it would be like to have it destroyed by space ships. That's what single-player is for, but for quite some time Planetary Annihilation didn't really have it. TODAY, though, that all changes.
]]>Uber Entertainment are making impressive progress with Planetary Annihilation, and we can now leap into both a multiplayer and AI skirmish mode on the Early Access version of the game. Ever the fellow to be interested in varieties of robot war, particularly when fighting large scale battles across worlds whose flavours include metal, lava, and earthy, I set about finding out more. I used my towering review unit to erect a large futuristic facility in which the current state of this Kickstarted strategy could be examined.
Read on for my findings.
]]>Planetary Annihilation, Kickstarter mammoth, has launched its pricey beta. To celebrate, there's a video of a lot of things blowing up. That's the way.
]]>Writing is hard. For instance, that sentence? It took me 37 hours to think up. 43 if you include the time I spent watching that bug live out its entire lifespan. So you can understand why Planetary Annihilation developer Uber isn't exactly in a rush to reinforce its (so far campaign-less) real-time warmonger-er with reams upon reams of lore. At this point, after all, systems matter first and foremost, and that's really why most players backed the ludicrously large-scale Total Annihilation spiritual successor anyway. But people don't just strap rockets to planetoids and play intergalactic bumper cars for no reason, and Uber is in the process of coming up with reasons. They would, however, be oh-so-grateful for a little bit of your assistance.
]]>In other months-old news, EARLY ACCESS TO PLANETARY ANNIHILATION COSTS $70. That's $20 down from the original asking price, but still: yikes. Here's hoping the beta asteroid surfs into reasonable territory - away from the alpha's orbital space base in Ludicrous Land. If nothing else, it'll be bringing some pretty immense new features to bear when it goes live later this month. For instance, interplanetary war, which is kind of what the whole game is about. More details below.
]]>Everything is in place for Chris Taylor to make a sequel to Total Annihilation, thanks to Wargaming picking up the Total Annihilation IP in a recent auction of Atari properties. Taylor, of course, came under the armoured umbrella the World Of Tanks company when they purchased Gas Powered Games earlier this year. By connecting the inevitabilities, we can see what needs to happen here. Wargaming also picked up Masters Of Orion, while Rebellion got Battlezone (I predict a speculative nostalgia Kickstarter there) and Stardock got the Star Control IP.
]]>Ultra-handsome Kickstarted Total Annihilation spiritual successor Planetary Annihilation is now available on Steam Early Access, and bwuuuuh it weighs in at a soul-collapsing £67.99. This is the price because it is equivalent to this Kickstarter tier: "June through August: $90 for early alpha access, during the time where we're still locking down features and making tweaks to the flow of the game. This access is permanent access - you will be able to play through alpha, beta and on through retail."
Hmm! I've posted the most recent videos below to see if that coaxes $90 out of your wallet.
]]>I didn't back Planetary Annihilation, because my RTS win-loss record is me 1, everyone else infinity wins. But I've been enjoying the developer diaries immensely. I love how developers Uber are making a game with the doors wide open. I suppose it helps that it's an RTS, but it's rare to see the ground-up meat that goes into game sausage. Planetary Annihilation isn't even at the cooking stage: right now I'd say it's a pile of mince that's being lightly spiced with hints of dynamic lighting and just a pinch of pathfinding. Excitingly, the video below also tells you when you'll be able to cram this meaty mouthful into your tummy hole, and it's sooner than you probably realised.
]]>It perhaps goes without saying that I was fairly excited about Planetary Annihilation at the point at which the Kickstarter appeared, but than that excitement was cubed by an interview I did with Jon Mavor. It was with some trepidation, then, that I watched the first in-game footage reveal, presented by Mavor and Steve Thompson. You can see it too, below.
]]>Biomes! Double Craters! Height ranges! I apologise for shouting! This is totally cool, even for someone as RTS-unsavvy as I am. The Planetary Annihilation developers are very serious about the planets that make up the game's maps, and have created the longest video ever to show you all the attributes players will have control over when they make their own planets. You know how some trailers and videos have production values? Not this one? It's just two guys with a game engine that makes painterly planets, and it's really rather fascinating.
]]>Planetary Annihilation was undoubtedly one of the strongest Kickstarter projects to have appeared since Double Fine set off the goldrush. A stellar pitch, a cap doff to Total Annihilation, and the tech lead from Supreme Commander pouring all of his ambitions into it: few games can boast anything like this, and consequently this game threatens seismic effects in the RTS genre. The man making that happen is Jon Mavor, and I thought it well overdue for us to catch up with what he was up to, and why he is making one of the most exciting games of 2013.
]]>Yesterday, Chris Taylor announced his new evolution-thwacking prehistoric RTS-RPG Wildman, so naturally, we talked about that until we, ourselves, evolved extra mouths so we could more efficiently talk about evolution. But what about, well, everything else? In ye olde year of 2010, after all, Taylor and co debuted Kings and Castles, a "biggest ever" fantasy RTS with dragons, chickens, and hopefully - for the sake of competition - a few things in between. But then it went on hold and dropped off the face of the Earth. So, is it dead along with the "old Chris" who focused on size to the detriment of substance? In addition, we discuss Planetary Annihilation, a GPG-developed, Supreme-Commander-inspired mod platform/operating system called Project Mercury, and why he certainly doesn't plan on being the first high-profile Kickstarter to fail on the follow-through.
]]>Uber Entertainment's Total Annihilation-inspired Planetary Annihilation bid has already long surpassed its $900k goal, but is now soaring over $2m, with just hours to go. This means that a huge stack of stetch-goals have been unlocked, including naval units, orbital units, gas giants, and metal and lava planets. $2m means that the game gets a full orchestra-produced soundtrack, too. Amazing stuff.
This is an interesting pitch: nostalgia for an old franchise mixed with a genuine vision for the future of the RTS genre. I'd argue that the pitch video that Uber did for this - which you can see below - is one of the most convincing produced by any crowd-funding attempt. If you've not seen it, take a look. You'll smile.
]]>I suppose we all knew this deep down, but it's startling to see it laid out in pretty graphs: 2012 has seen a massive, massive increase on games funding through Kickstarter. Eye wateringly huge. In six short months they have exploded from the eighth most-funded category in Kickstarter history to the second most-funded, and the first-most funded category of the year, having raised a staggering $50,330,275 in 2012 alone. I mean, just look at that graph. JUST LOOK AT IT.
And I do mean in 2012 alone. Look at 2011! Nothing! Pittance! Pennies compared to this year.
]]>That headline may seem obvious, but wow. So Total Annihilation (and, more recently, Supreme Commander) were big, but Planetary Annihilation is shooting for the stars. And potentially shooting at them, as well. It's all the absurdly large-scale mechanized warfare you've (probably) known and loved since the late '90s, but now you can zoom out into space, build a fort on an asteroid, and then crash it into an enemy planet. So basically, total insanity. After the break, you'll find a video from Super Monday Night Combat maestros Uber Entertainment explaining their ambitious RTS (ambitiouRTS, for short) and - yes - asking for money.
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