FAF Spin-off title & Plans to take Supcom to the next level

Hello,

So I dreamed up a fairly lofty plan for FAF and it sounded good enough to be work sharing with you all. So as it currently stands, FAF game-play and especially the multiplayer game play hardly resemble the most recent steam release. A tremendous amount of crowd-sourced work and passion has gone into modernizing the multiplayer experience, revamp balance, and keep the meta-ever evolving and exciting.

So what I am proposing is that the FAF top folks, the digital rights holders, Downloard, Gyle, Forum Chieftains, and us the players all find a big new investor, or open a crowd-sourced pool of investment. Use the money to properly compensate the capable to push out a fully integrated release on steam that encompasses all the input the client holds. Whip a version identical to most modern FAF with its last bit of feature updates, put in a VR comparable floating camera update to allow steady camera positions at new angles and increase immersion.

Then we pus the lions share of the investment into advertising on various game interest platforms and turn a strong buck on new incoming customers. (i'm sure most of us vet's will grumble a bit at a new 20-30 dollar release but will appreciate what were buying)

So hopefully this can get a few underpaid people hired, make money for someone investing, and reinvigorate the incoming player base. Final goal will be to get into tournament play to bring more eyes on like Starcraft II or Cs Go. I think there's a strong chance to focus on formed teams and up the prize pools and increase the production and casting around these tournaments. 6v6 seems to be the more exciting size and gives players role based choices and requires teamwork and coms play. I'm sure 1v1 tournaments will also get some attention, but the large players on each side would be novel topping the max 4v4 size in SC II and low popularity on that platform.

Ok so respond with your ideas. Step one here is getting agreement from all the would be parties, and we can go from there.

Spy_Emanciator

@Spy_Emanciator said in FAF Spin-off title & Plans to take Supcom to the next level:

the digital rights holders

AFAIK Squeenix didn't respond to any FAF mails about other stuff, so I don't think there's much hope of getting them aboard anything.

@MazorNoob Profits and the long term chances for more releases should win them over, even if their running a strong shit-screen.

Also 2 more ideas i meant to post above:

Rework the framework around regional servers, make the clients input engines, make the core simulation run server-side, then stream data back to the player. This will help with anti-cheat, and free up alot of wasted cpu processes error checking each other's clients. A new release should bring in the money needed to maintain this.

Also as far as continued releases go, a periodical story-line release would get people chipping in for single and co-op experiences, while still maintaining multi-player access to the core multiplayer. The payoff per work for this should be fairly high end, just a few phone calls to voice actors (and maybe new ones) and a mostly technicality free setup for missions.

Niche game within a niche market (RTS), pulling in profits.

This will probably forever stay a dream. The more modern RTS inspired off of Supcom and TA were not commercially successful compared to the likes of other offerings and with more iterations of rehashes it becomes increasingly difficult to convince an old playerbase to part with their cash for a new shiny dream, that doesn't meet expectations in reality.

On a sidenote, even suggesting a server based system and not a p2p system is itself a money trap, unless you can implement a HAT Market. Its not happening. No games company provides such a service for an extende period of time if the only purchase itself is a one time of the shelf buy.

The only exception to this AFAIk is Blizzard who subsequently went about updating there games to incorporate a hat market.

@Psions Yea, requisite salt noted. I mean look at FPS, you ask what the top tournament games are and cs-go has like 6-7 big competitors. With RTS there's just not much close to SCII, really a big deficit especially in tournament style play and tournament viewership. The thing that propelled starcraft was its association under blizzard and its connection to the older and more broad world of Warcraft audience so they were able to save on advertising in a big way by simply existing in the same house.

No one in Korea hardly plays FAF, this is a problem, get that market with a targeted campaign and all the underlings below their pro scene will follow internationally. Also general advertising to game interested people, and on twitch/YouTube will pay off. You just need an integrated release.

Bottom line is the game is currently underground and the only way to do that is get some of the trophy award syndrome kids playing kitten cannon and angry birds doing something competitive and challenging.

@Spy_Emanciator
Nothing will sell unless it's truly innovative and brings the RTS genre forward. FA with a fresh coat of paint would sell alright but that would take a lot of work to modernize, plus the engine would need to be completely rebuilt for modern hardware. I remember watching an interview with Chris Taylor and he said that base game supcom cost around 11 million dollars to make over the course of 4 years. Modern game development requires way more resources and talent to pull off even for a B+ title. If there ever were plans to make a true sequel then it'd be very expensive, AAA and nothing less. Also I believe that the technology isn't there yet to make a groundbreaking sequel (which if it is anything less than groundbreaking it will dissapoint, we're talking about supcom). What i'd like to see is the RTS genre head towards cloud based processing to get rid of desync issues and allow for more units/scale. Something like Google Stadia where all of the sim work is handled in one location instead of all clients having to simulate and check on each other's versions all of the time. But that'd require monthly subscriptions

@Cascade Yes the rework of the under the hood stuff is where an investor would have to come in. Look at what AOE 2 did in 2019, Microsoft hit a gold mine re-releasing that with a little bit of polish. Doing a core rework wouldn't need to cost 11 million (an outlandish figure) I was under the impression that the game was developed much more cost effectively by a small dedicated team. That all has changed with FAF and now hordes of devotee's pour in unpaid time.

The problem here is that it is falling behind the modernity threshold and needs to be kept available as a contender RTS in this new decade. So get a periodical release going that people can opt into to enjoy new storyline stuff and that will keep the money mill moving. You can keep the FAF ball rolling the way it is with access to just the First release, then keep people paying ever 1-2 years or so on new campaigns and co-ops (some of which can just be released from community content).

I want see this game played 6v6 on ESL with hordes of cheering Dutchmen or pollacks.

From what we know nobody, not even Square Enix, has an existing copy of the source code. So as in contrast to AOE 2, there won't be a remaster - ever.

A spin-off from SupCom wouldn't be SupCom anymore and therefore split the community eventually. There are people happy with FAF the way it is (or even was). We already lost players to to changes in balancing. Imagine what happens if you change larger things.

?!? Seriously Brutus? On one hand that is unbelievable given well are playing it right now but second hand, wouldn't surprise me through (or this its own by like 5 different people issue)

Well you need to see it from a legal & business perspective: When the gpg developers were layed off, they returned their devices and/or deleted everything that they legally didn't own.

Square Enix bought SupCom for the intellectual property, not for source code. They have no interest in doing any patches of SC1 or SC2. People are buying it as is, all they need is the binaries. So it seems like nobody cared to archive it (all of this is hearsay of course).

Also when I spoke with GOG on their release they told me they needed to make changes (e.g. remove gpg lobby integration) and did it without access the original source code as well, so it sort of confirms the rumour.

Fascinating so even if Square did give us offacialness we'd still not be much better off then we would be today really. Cause we wouldn't get the source code either way.

In theory, someone might still have the source code. If they did, they would probably be breaking the law.

IF we did acquire the rights to Supreme Commander game(s), we could offer to pay anyone who came forward with the source code. Sure, they would have broken the law, but no one would care about punishing them. So we could offer to pay them for the source code "no questions asked."

It's all theoretical until Squenix decides it's even willing to entertain sale of the IP. If they committed to a particular price, we could see about creating a crowdfunding campaign to attempt to reach that price point. That is basically the only way that this could ever go forward--that or a single very wealthy person suddenly taking an interest in FAF and negotiating directly with Squenix for the rights. If someone had a big enough bank account, Squenix should be willing to talk to them.

A single very wealthy person had already taken an interest in FAF and negotiated all of this. It’s why we know Square Enix doesn’t have the source code. I very much doubt a crowdfunding will get anywhere close to the source code and frankly I don’t even think it’s a good use of such absurd quantities of money.

This thread reads like a project plan where the first thing in your plan is “assuming we have a paragon for infinite money.”

Also access to the source code doesn't make things suddenly move forward. The things people dream about is eventually a rewrite from scratch.

Love the energy Spy but i I'm afraid a lot of the negative Nancy replies on this thread have a lot of truth to them. Square Enix seem happy to let us tick along the way we (because our community is still getting some copies of the game sold which is extraordinary for a 13 year old RTS) but ultimately they seem very disinterested in any kind of development for the title. I don't really blame them for it, It's their IP and we operate completely outside of their control. They may or may not decide to do something with the franchise again at some point but its not good business sense to let outside interests mess with your assets either way.

Having said that, if some business guru with a passion for FAF wants to come along and start working miracles, I'll happily prostrate myself before them and declare myself their slave.

Honestly from the sounds of it, this seems like rumor creep based off earlier half-witted attempts to do the same thing. Again, I understand having a strong shit-screen, and I understand running a lean operation to keep money flowing in and not risking angering the community.

I just have to re-iterate how large the success was with AOE2 2019 release, and what would be illegal is deleting useful project files in an ongoing business, even if your being laid off. That being said, all of those small losses can be replaced with a properly funded and stream-lined initiative.

I'll be honest I'm working on a side project game, and wanted to share some of the ideas here first because its very sup-com inspired and doing simple fixes like 1st person and floating camera options and VR compatibility (eg fix camera to floating point then allow head looking) are quick and allow attraction to a broader audience.

The game itself deserves the legitimacy that an all in one client could give. Just try and find the group ethic to get Square Enix to explore this idea, and lets wee where it goes from there. I want to see hordes of new players pulled off advertisements flooding the ladder and multiplayer games. That's the real goal here, game health, and health of function. Just think if FAF / Supcom rushed an almost identical product forward with VR, it would be ground breaking as the first title to provide VR environment for elo score. I think that would be a big deal, and it would set precedents for many titles to come into the extended future.

@Spy_Emanciator said in FAF Spin-off title & Plans to take Supcom to the next level:

Chieftains

Ung-grungung, chieftain of the mapping tribe here.

Just thought I should remind the thread that this is an idea that is suggested every week.

This is not an exaggaration, it's brought up every, single, week.

If you really want to try and wrangle an IP from a vicious japanese games company for a scenario that doesn't benefit them, you're going to need a plan that you actually iterated and found plausible, not one that you "dreamed up".

I would also like to remind people that the popularity of this game is in part due to having one of if not the largest quanitity of user created content, and repackaging the game or updating the engine will both:

A: likely lose you access to the existing content
B: likely not allow users to create anything as they do now.

It's not something that is bought up but should be one of your major considerations.

The "we should remake the game" bi-weekly conversation should be made into a FAQ. It's honestly insane how many times i've discussed this with people by now, and noone ever attempted to iterate on it beyond what it is and always will be: an utopic pipe dream that crumbles when you have any knowldge of what it would take to acomplish.

Also, you keep bringing up VR. I don't see why would would want to play this game as a first person VR. You wouldn't play pubg with a wiifit board, you wouldn't play dark souls with a duck hunt gun, and you wouldnt play RTS with a vr headset. games are designed around input schemes for a reason.

@biass You sound like you like the idea but are filled to the brim with salt from the ongoing observation of gloom.

my retorts:
A: likely lose you access to the existing content

will monetize existing content into advertising money to expand the number of active interest users

B: likely not allow users to create anything as they do now.

will not change at all as the existing function of the faf client will simply exist within the fast-tracked game client including rewarding contributed content

As for your VR headset retort I see that as a new player access group, and when I watch Gyle casts and he does his camera trickery, I often wish those were options for me to view the game steadily during low intensity moments where I can monitor the larger game by mini-map and fast camera cue switches suing shift-tab and tab. Set that up with a VR headset floating look feature and now I can really feel like i'm in the a battle-space.

Don't whack my dreams with your rigged up street sign hammer...

It seems like the would-be parties are saying, "you first."

Find an investor. Convince the rights holders (Square?) to let us put our version on Steam (they will probably want a cut). Come back and let us know how it goes.

I don't think putting FAF as an add-on for FA on Steam is out of the question. ...if you can get the rights to do so.

You keep saying everybody here is just lazy/disillusioned/filled with salt... what work have you done besides making a forum post?

@Pearl12 Before an investor will bite on a second string of capital investment, there has to be a consensus from the appropriate parties for that the plan I put forward is agreeable and everyone is willing to shift gears a bit and do whats necessary to make that happen. For me to "go first" and seek investment would be inappropriate if all the staff are "burned out" or not looking for any new opportunity.

Search "Top RTS Games" on google and supreme commander comes in at #4. In terms of quality of play its in my option #2 mainly because its reception is somewhat unknown compared to the blizzard machine.