Does anyone out there remember the epic RTS game Total Annihilation? Well for those of you who don’t know much (or anything) about it, the basic idea was that the game play was monumental in that there were so many units a player could not simply create all of them.
Nowadays RTS games typically have a reasonable and modest collection of units that the player can create to have a diverse army. In Total Annihilation, the unit diversity count was over a thousand with armies differing in strategy every single–and I mean every single–time you played.
Unfortunately, after the game’s 1997 release (from Cavedog Entertainment) nothing else was released other than fan-made mods. This was disheartening because there wasn’t another RTS maker that could rival the sheer size and diversity that this game could offer both in single player as well as online multiplayer competitive play.
Good news, everyone!
Although this might sound like “old news,” a new and spiritual successor to Total Annihilation has since been funded on Kickstarter in the form of Planetary Annihilation from Uber Entertainment, and funded is an understatement. The two leads on this project are Jon Mavor and Steve Thompson, both of whom worked on Total Annihilation in great depth (Mavor in fact wrote the graphics engine for Total Annihilation).
Now I say this may be old news because the Kickstarter was successfully completed on September 15, 2012; they received $2,229,344 of the $900,000 they were looking for! Since then the extremely experienced team of designers, developers, and digital artists alike have been cranking on the game in an effort to release the title this year.
Looking at the videos and screens of the game, it’s not hard to see that this team was looking to break the mold of RTS games because they have management to streamline interplanetary combat to the likes of which we haven’t seen before. You may be saying “Hey! What about Sins of a Solar Empire (or similar titles)?” Well let’s be perfectly honest, those games were slow and boring and, although they may have been innovative, the execution of the game was lacking due to the improper scaling of movement speed and size.
Planetary Annihilation looks to be a cartoon-style RTS that has its scaling done right between the size of inhabitable zones to movement speeds, and relative sizes of units and animations. I am a huge RTS fan and I honestly can’t wait for this title to come out. The pre-orders are available and I have to admit that mine is already submitted.
Planetary Annihilation is set to release in late summer. Be sure to check it out here for more information and details. If you are looking for the next step in RTS evolution, this may just be it.
