When I went to see Gladiator many years ago, I was pretty hyped up for it. I didn’t expect an historically accurate movie, of course, and I was told it was a fun time with great special effects, strong acting and cinematography to die for. Plus Oliver Reed in his last great role. This was a serious sword and sandal movie, the harbinger of a new age of historical dramas where technology can fill in the blanks and keep costs reasonable.
Of course, it turned out to be a bland and uninspired piece of “good enough”, with too much fast editing in the arena, a boring Russell Crowe and a lot of characters with unclear motivations (some of which were apparently clarified in the DVD version.) As a movie fan, I can forgive violence to history. It’s harder to forgive unsatisfied expectations.
Supreme Commander is like that.
Supreme Commander reminds me of all the RTS games that I’ve yet to really explore, held hostage by an uneven start, too much complexity, or a lack of heart.
Play a bit more, you’ll like it. It’s complex, it’s slow at times and when you compare it with TA it’s definitely not always better but if you ask me it’s still the best RTS of 2007 (and of 2006 if beta’s count as well). Forged Alliance makes it even more interesting.
I don’t even know what big “expectations” could remain unfulfilled if you play it. Yes, the campaign and AI don’t work around well the game’s possibilities and coordinated attack is a hit-and-miss feature since it doesn’t always function like it should but that doesn’t mean much once you get a grasp on the game. SupCom delivers big-time on the sci-fi mega-war promise and has some control commands that should be available in any RTS, period.
You are right about Gladiator though. :)
As far as SupCom goes, it really comes down to expectations. That is to say that expectations for a modern RTS have gone up tremendously during the intervening years since TotalA. It isn’t that SupCom is bad, it’s just that there are so many other good offerings available now.
I don’t disagree with that, with games like CoH, WiC and even C&C3 there is a lot of variety in the RTS-genre and they are pretty much all of high quality. Those titles have their specific strong points and thus I think expectations for a game like SupCom should be different than for a game as CoH for example, they’re just way too different in design.
And idd, a lot has changed since TA came out (1997, year of the big RTS-flood) but even now TA could still proudly stand next to a lot of recent RTS games, also because there are barely any games, outside of TA:K and SupCom, that tried to emulate the things that made TA so great. The exact same thing can be said for a game like Dark Reign, sometimes you would wish that certain forgotten RTS-features get copied a lot more.