In his mostly glowing review of Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, Bill Abner hits on one of my personal annoyances with RTS campaigns – the boss battle. This annoyed me in the original game and it doesn’t serve its purpose any better in the expansion. It just makes no sense to me at all […]
Entries Tagged as 'Design'
Large Scale RTS and their intimacy problems: SupCom 2 report
March 10th, 2010 · 12 Comments · Design, Gas Powered Games, Me, RTS
At this week’s GDC, Gas Powered Games boss Chris Taylor told Greg Tito of The Escapist that Supreme Commander 2 was one of the best games he’d ever worked on. (I’m still working my way through the campaign, but I’ll let you know if I agree with him soon.) He also said that SupCom2 was […]
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Zacny on EU3
February 16th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Design, Paradox
Rob Zacny, whose performance on our Heir to the Throne episode of Three Moves Ahead convinced us to make him a regular voice, has written a column on the game for Gamasutra.
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Theme Parties
November 30th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Design
In his Decade Retrospective essay on Combat Mission, Bruce Geryk wrote one of those lines that still make me envy his writing skill: If you give players a hook, they will hang themselves on it every time. In most cases, a strategy game’s hook will not be the mechanic or the appearance but the theme. […]
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Turn Based vs Real Time
November 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment · Blogs, Design
I’ve always thought that the division of strategy games into turn based and real time categories was artificial. How a game tracks time is, in my opinion, less important than what it expects the player to do within that time. Soren Johnson seems to agree with me. He just posted his August Game Developer column […]
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Three Moves Ahead Episode 34 – The EndWar show
October 13th, 2009 · 7 Comments · Design, Podcast, Three Moves Ahead, Ubisoft
Ubisoft’s Michael de Plater joins us for a fanboy grilling from Tom Chick. Why EndWar worked, its relative success and why Bruce never got to actually play EndWar for very long. Apologies in advance for Michael’s sound. His plug-in mic was not working for some reason so he talked to his laptop. Through a tin […]
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