To be honest, we sat down at NVidia's booth and listened to the talk about the Dungeon Siege II expansion because we were tired and just wanted to sit. Then we weren't going to hang around for the Supreme Commander demo, but it started before we got around to leaving.
Let me just say that I apologize for not making time specifically to come and see this game.
The demo started out really smooth with some talk about how Gas Powered Games wanted to put more strategy into the Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre. But quickly they got in to demonstrating how the view of the game smoothly scales from the traditional view of a single battle or battlefield all the way out to the full world map. At the world scale everyone looks like read or blue dots. At the battlefield scale you get the typical 3D RTS view you'd expect. When you move down to the ground level you can watch the battle from the foot soldier's view. The interesting thing that was reiterated here a couple times is that the trajectories of projectiles are real three dimensional paths, they go up and over things and behave as they should. They're not just a 2D projection. That adds to the realism of the game I feel and it's just another extra bit of accuracy whose time has come.
A couple of the units that we got to see included tanks and battleships. An nice thing here is that the scale is more accurate than I've seen in an RTS before. The battleship is battleship sized and the tanks are tank sized. Because of the smooth scaling to the appropriate size for any given battle, it's very possible to have a single unit that doesn't fit on the screen. The upshot of this - and pay attention here - is that you don't get pikemen poking at your battleships and sinking them. The scale difference between sea ships and troops is accurately shown so there's no more need to worry about oddball unrealistic situations were some footsoldiers can attack a ship without any kind of ranged weapon.
As a bonus, battleships can be named and when they sink they do it in a manner that fits a big boat. Losing something of that size from your fleet should be and is noticeable.
They spent a while describing the smooth zooming between scales and showing off how a good their skirmishes look. It sunk in; Supreme Commander looks
nice.
In terms of making strategy matter more than logistics, one of the cool features they showed was the method for setting up routes. You can give orders to units, like waypoints, then send the same orders to other troops. This helps to get units in place at the same time. I wasn't clear on the exact
UI for this, but it looked like just a couple clicks. The showed the process as quickly adding a few waypoints, the route was estimated and drawn in by the game, then they were also able to move the waypoints around afterward before they gave the orders. It sounds nice, I'm not sure how fast it is for getting things out to the troops during gameplay. While I'm on the subject of
UI, one of the coolest things I heard is that Supreme Commander supports dual display. I really wish they'd given us a demo of what the second screen would look like. They said it's just as functional as the first screen, but I wasn't clear on whether it was two identical displays that both interact with the game, or if one screen could be just the
HUD stuff. Oh, actually they did mention that the HUD could be repositioned pretty freely on the screen, so maybe you can customize the dual display pretty well.
As for the other units in the game, they showed some futuristic mechanized stuff, including a troop carrier where the troops clip on the outside and remain active (i.e. can shoot stuff) while being transported. They also had monstrous mobile factories which rolled or walked around the countryside and popped out new units once in a while. To wind up the demo, they started launching nukes. Supreme Commander has "Nukes for every occasion." The long range attacks really show off the 3D ballistics, and the nukes make it really clear that there's a difference between ground-to-ground fire and lobbing bombs.
This game is still a while off from release. It should be coming out in early 2007, like February or so.
You can see the
screenshots I took here and here are my other
pictures from E3 on Wednesday. Candace has better screenshots of
Supreme Commander in this albumn.
Sounds cool. I'm more intrigued by the "smooth zooming between scales" than the "truly 3D trajectories of projectiles". Maybe I'm not getting it, but trajectories of projectiles in other RTSs seem pretty realistic to me...