“Ships that sprouted legs, and other outrageous stuff, all came into play after we started,” Chris says. “The Recyclers never really felt right, because when you create a new unit in a factory from raw resources, how can that be made of spare parts?” In the finished game, all three factions are human: Earth became the UEF Aliens became a human faction using alien technology, the Aeon Illuminate and the Recyclers became the Cybran, cyborgs ruled by a brain in a jar.Īs the fiction was nailed down, the design became more adventurous. Internally, the game's three factions were referred to as Earth, Alien, and Recycler.
"You can zoom smoothly from the scale of a truck-sized robot to seeing an entire 6,000 square kilometre theatre of war all at once." It became the game's defining feature: you can zoom smoothly from the scale of a truck-sized robot to seeing an entire 6,000 square kilometre theatre of war all at once. “The whole idea of 'strategic zoom' didn't come up until we were into development,” Chris says. Top-tier units are around a hundred times the size of the standard attack bot, so no single zoom level could accommodate the huge differences in the scale of the battles you fight throughout the course of a game. The sheer scale of the thing defied a normal RTS perspective. And you can set up perfectly balanced build orders for your factories to follow on an endless loop. You can tell air transports to run repeating ferry trips to pick up and drop off every land unit who needs to get to the front lines. You can not only queue up orders, but specify the formation you want your army to move in as they follow them. That meant using all the smart interface inventions of Total Annihilation, improving them further, and using that elegant control system to let the player build and command armies of ridiculous size. That was the core of my inspiration for making the game bigger than ever.” I wanted to see if I could give the player the right context for truly employing strategy, like when the Allies were planning Operation Overlord. "I have a saying: strategy happens before the battle, and tactics happen during the battle. I wanted to make the strategic part of the game even deeper." I knew that I wanted to make big maps, but I wanted to see if I could make the strategic part of the game even deeper." "I wanted to see how far I could push the RTS genre.
“For the most part,” Chris says, “I wanted to see how far I could push the RTS genre. It would be more than a TA remake or spiritual sequel. But as soon as Dungeon Siege shipped, I started shopping Supreme Commander around.” “I seem to remember not wanting any legal 'fog' hanging over GPG, so it made sense that we do something completely different. He formed Gas Powered Games with the intention of ultimately making a successor to Total Annihilation, but decided to make a very different game first: hack-and-slash RPG Dungeon Siege. “I had something to prove out in the world.” “I might have stayed if working inside a large company was something I personally enjoyed doing,” he says, “but not back then.” He'd always wanted to start his own gaming company, and he decided it was time. Cavedog had grown, but that wasn't necessarily a positive. Not long after they finished work on the expansion, Core Contingency, Chris left. We were so busy supporting TA, releasing patches and those weekly units, we didn't have time to do much else.” They released new units for TA each week, developed an expansion, and started work on a sequel.Ĭhris was involved in the early stages of that sequel, but he didn't get far with it: “I remember writing a page or two,” he says, “but that was about it. But during its development, Ron sold Cavedog's parent company Humungous to publisher GT Interactive, partly to enable them to grow into a bigger company. Total Annihilation was a success: it got glowing reviews and earned a cult of devoted fans, many of whom still rate it as the greatest RTS ever made. But it would be a while before it got made. All of this let you build and control more units with less clicking, laying the groundwork for a game of a much grander scale. You could even set units to patrol on a repeating route. That not only let you set waypoints for your attacking forces, but it also applied to build orders: you could queue up a whole base worth of buildings and your commander would just get on with it. TA's other innovations also helped you focus your attention where you wanted: you could queue up orders by shift-clicking, and your units would follow them in sequence without further babysitting from you. But it would be a while before it got made." "Total Annihilation lay the groundwork for a game of a much grander scale.
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