Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?

no. but i hope it goes well for them.

Lovers of this subgenre tend to appreciate new entries. Planetary annihilation and BAR are still going strong. We need another RTS Triathlon. or maybe an olympics with Total Annihilation, Balanced Annihilation, Sanctuary, and Rusted Warfare added to the lineup.

i've been enjoying Rusted Warfare a lot recently with it's crossplay pixel art. Very accessible.

@deribus said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

There's little to no point making any judgment on Sanctuary until people not involved with the project can play it.

a thousand times this. it's vaporware until then.

Sanctuary will be vapourware. They're at the stage Star Citizen was in for it's first 5 years. Shiny tech demos and videos. I haven't seen anything good they've displayed that wasn't solely responsible due to the in-built features of the game engine they are using. They don't have the experience or funding runway to create something that will compete with FAF.

They've never mentioned anything in their blogs or anywhere else, as far as I know, about improving the steep learning curve and making it easier for new players to transition from single player to online play. Which are the actual design problems needing to be tackled. They just talk about adding even more mechanics, like weather and terrain destruction, to a game that was already too unapproachable from the start. Their focus seems to be on technical features rather than game design.

It's possible that it will still be good enough since there's no real competition for this type of game. Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance were both horribly balanced, barely ran on peoples computers, and lacking all the usability features FAF has added since, yet they still did pretty well and we're still playing them.

Everything they have shown so far does just looks like the FAF map editor with some stuff tacked on still though.

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

They've never mentioned anything in their blogs or anywhere else, as far as I know, about improving the steep learning curve and making it easier for new players to transition from single player to online play. Which are the actual design problems needing to be tackled. They just talk about adding even more mechanics, like weather and terrain destruction, to a game that was already too unapproachable from the start. Their focus seems to be on technical features rather than game design.

Ngl I like this. Whenever some "designer types" have tried to make RTS more "approachable" it has ended badly. When I was a kid I just wanted a sandbox with cool toys to play with, and there was a sense of bewilderment and awe that one could play against other people in any way that would be remotely efficient. Whenever you try to streamline the experience in order to attract more players the game loses its charm to some extent. Imo the best you can do is have a good set of single player and co-op experiences that blur the line between single- and multiplayer.

I don’t think so, they don’t guarantee a game/demo to their current patrons, they are using volunteers (to make a paid game, mind you), and they invest more into marketing and shiny displays than significant stuff…

Supcom took 3 years of a full time staff to be done, a full PAID staff of experienced devs. Sanctuary has 2k a month to pay themselves and then uses volunteers as free labor to their paid game…

I don’t think they’ll be able to come even close to FA, they just don’t have the resources for it. I think they have 2 years in development and they still don’t have any decent gameplay whatsoever?

To me it all sounds like they are thirsty for investor money and that’s why they are focusing so hard on the marketing department

To me it all sounds like they are thirsty for investor money and that’s why they are focusing so hard on the marketing department

i guess chris tylor wished he did it in this way.
well we will c

I’m surprised that lot of people think that it’s a scam or vaporware, whether you think the game will be good or bad notwithstanding. If you’re part of their Discord you can see tons of bugtesting, pathfinding development, modeling and mapping. They’re using Unity which actually is a very flexible and robust engine, Unity sometimes gets a bad reputation since it’s pretty easy to use and therefore lot of indie games use it, and a lot of indie games are shovelware. But it’s actually a good choice for making an RTS game of this scale, definitely more than Unreal. It’s true that they are looking for more private investment, but they plan to do a kickstarter whether or not it materializes. The patreon they currently run is donations only. They plan that some aspects of the game, like a naval theatre, would be trimmed if they have a lower budget.

I know I sound like I’m shilling the game, but I have no problem with people saying that they don’t think it looks good or that FAF will be superior. I do have a problem with people insinuating it’s vaporware, or comparing it to Star Citizen. That’s just egregious, and unfair to the people working on the game. You could be turning away people who are potentially interested who don’t know what you’re talking about.

This thread was kinda asking for it when it begins with the premise of thinking Sanctuary would replace FAF as a "proper replacement". Might as well as go onto BAR or Zero-K forums and ask them if they expect FAF to replace them in 5 years. Or ask one if the other TA variant will replace them. It's just tone deaf and insulting, really.

@ftxcommando

To be fair, Sanctuary is definitely patterned more after Supreme Commander in its game mechanics than those other games which are mostly patterned off of Total Annihilation. It doesn’t mean it’s a zero sum game but they have essentially made it their goal to make a worthy Supreme Commander spiritual successor.

To be fair, many of the people here have dumped more hours into making FAF than they have into making Sanctuary. If their goal is to "replace" FAF then I actively hope they fail. I'm sure other people feel just as defensive about it and that's why you get the responses you get.

To be fair, considering their history with FAF, this thread should have either never existed or have long been locked.

Let's not have any accidental advertisements ̶a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶.

Why is everyone ignoring the 2nd part of my opening post that they have access to their source code?

FAF: "Sorry, can't change that, we tried."
Sanctuary: "Let me scratch my butt and see what I can do."

@ftxcommando said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

I actively hope they fail

Could not expect anything else from you.

There's not a single thing I would like to see in FAF that involves changing the source code, except maybe fixing the sound bug. An entire new game with a better campaign, cutscenes, coop, all new units and factions, and everything could be made without the engine source code. The real important factor for me is that Sanctuary can actually make money, which means they could have regular tournaments and updates.

I don't think Sanctuary is a scam or anything. Just these type of things have a tendency to suck. PA had millions of dollars and an experienced team, but I couldn't play it more than a couple hours and then never touched it again. All the other similar games are even worse. I don't think it matters if they are paid employees or free volunteers, or if they use Unity or whatever. Creating the game today is significantly less difficult than it was in the early 2000's. You can find countless resources about everything you need to know and what the other games have done.

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

There's not a single thing I would like to see in FAF that involves changing the source code

Really? There are loads of things (balance and taste dependent) which could potentially be better:

• improved pathing instead of all this bumping into each other
• sub depth not fixed
• radar and sonar shadows (no more hiding radar behind a cliff)
• no free intel from mex/factory upgrades
• possibly some different intel models such as deployed drones with limited lifespan
• modular units without the clunky upgrade system (e.g. in game unit designer)
• better damage models
• better unit AI (e.g. auto dodging, raid mode): for those of us who don't think the game is about unit micro

• I don't find pathfinding to be as bad as everyone claims and it is entirely manageable by playing correctly. Why should massive amounts of units driving around in an active warzone flow perfectly around one another? It looks and feels unnatural.
• Fixing submarine depth would be okay, but who cares.
• Radar and sonar shadows would be annoying and make the game harder to play than it already is. Same for removing intel from upgrades. FAF is clearly too hard for most people to play already and there's too little scouting and awareness in 100% of games already, so intel gathering should not be more difficult.
• Idk what deployed drone intel means, I'm sure it would be trivial to create drones with a limited lifespan in FAF.
• FAF unit upgrading system is good enough. You don't want to have many upgradable units or upgrade choices as it makes the game unclear. Having multiple ACU's and multiple experimentals on each tech level, that you customize and lock-in before the game starts would be cool though. Adding a small deck building aspect to the game and increasing variety. It's probably theoretically possible on FAF.
• Damage models or armor or whatever would also have to be used very sparingly. When you are dealing with hundreds of units at a time they need to behave consistently, doing consistent damage and having consistent HP.
• Automatic unit micro is certainly possible in FAF, but is banned (rightly so).

@thomashiatt said in Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?:

A had millions of dollars and an experienced team, but I couldn't play it more than a couple hours and then never touched it again. All the other similar games are even worse. I don't think it matters if they are paid employees or free volunteers, or if they use Unity or whatever. Creating the game today is significantly less difficult than it was in the early 2000's.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

Planetary Annihilation raised $2,229,344. That is a truly shoestring budget to make a 3D RTS game from scratch. The budget for the original Supreme Commander was many times this, it was a full AAA backed by a major publisher. Now to be fair a lot of the budget for Supcom went to things like a campaign, story, pre-rendered cutscenes, voice acting etc. but PA was doing something very ambitious on a pretty tight budget. Especially since Uber Entertainment hadn't ever made an RTS game before, they had only made Monday Night Combat iirc. On top of that they were making their own game engine from scratch, and it had to handle multiple spherical planets as well as scripting to destroy them via megaweapons. The volume of units was also orders of magnitude higher than Supcom, which meant that to save performance each unit had a very quick time to kill so it could be removed from the game more quickly to make room for more. There also was only one faction at launch (there is another with the Legion mod but that came out far later).

The fact that Sanctuary is being made on a popular and well tested engine and the mechanical gimmicks are less ambitious makes it a pretty different situation imo. People on the dev team also came from the Nomads FAF mod which means they have experience making RTS games.

Several of the people working on PA literally worked at GPG making supcom, they had plenty of experience. The main problem is that the spherical map idea is total garbage and should have been thrown out after initial prototyping. It's just not fun or playable.

A good campaign, story, and all that crap is pretty essential for an RTS game. As everyone has been discussing lately, most of the players are casual. These things have to be there and they have to give people a proper idea of how to play the game and make it simple to transition to multiplayer in order to maintain a playerbase.

I haven't played the Nomad's campaign, or any of the coop missions, but I'm pretty sure they still aren't teaching people how to play properly. People could have made a good campaign and tutorials for FAF, but they didn't. The same people are making the campaign for Sanctuary, so I have to expect it will be equally lacking.

I'm also concerned that early access, without the campaign and tutorials and such in place, could be disastrous. People used to understand the importance of first impressions, but now everyone just launches unfinished games. If the new player experience isn't exceptional from the start then it's likely many potential players will try the game early, be unimpressed, and never come back. I know I never gave BAR or PA or anything any more chances after I tried them the first time and was unimpressed.