@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.