Do you think Sanctuary will replace FAF?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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@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
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- 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).
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@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.
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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.
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@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.
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.
What in Halo’s singleplayer taught you the skills necessary for pvp? The harder you make the sp experience in Halo you actively learn poor skills for translating to mp. Most of the skill overlap between the two is just learning guns and weapons.
People just need to accept they’re two different environments that have different things that make them fun.
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@ftxcommando the issue is a SP campaign is stationary while multiplayer meta is dynamic. Obviously SP could teach certain concepts that are core fundamentals but sometimes devs don’t know how multiplayer will develop (like in a new game).
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Not very comparable since FPS games are much simpler mechanics wise, and I haven't played Halo. Regardless, in all these games they spend time teaching you how all the mechanics work. It's been a long time since I played FA singleplayer, but when I did I certainly didn't come out of the experience understanding what reclaim was, what stalling mass/e really does, what buildpower is, how the flux economy even works, and I didn't even know you could upgrade mexes. There's never even anytime where your opponent is playing with the same rules as you. They don't use reclaim and mexes to make their units, they just spawn out of nothing, so you never even properly interact with the mechanics of the game. Not understanding what;s going on is not core to the singleplayer experience, it hinders it. You have more fun when learning new things and understanding what's going on.
It is clear to me that you could create a campaign where you start out by learning how to collect mass, through mass extractors, and converting it into tanks. Shown that there's a simple ratio of factories to pgens or mexes to pgens. Once you are competent at that you get sent out to the field where you are instructed to secure the mass deposits before the enemy, so that you can produce more units and defeat them. You can introduce reclaim in a similar way. You can be instructed to raid their engineers before they build the mexes and get the reclaim. You can be instructed to drop areas with transports to get them faster. You can encounter an enemy that has a T2 factory and be instructed that once your opponent has T2 tech you should probably get it too.
You can do all of these things while still having a storyline, and still having scripted events and units spawning out of nowhere as well. It is how every decent game operates these days. You get a trickle of mechanics over time and instructions how to use them, mixed in with scripted events where using those mechanics is necessary, and mixed in with a storyline, and mixed in with scripted events and whatever. It's literally what game design is.
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That stuff isn't fun though. People get into the game cuz of the big cool stuff, not learning how to make it in sub 15 minutes.
Your campaign would have a lower attrition rate for people getting into pvp while drastically lowering the amount of people that care to even get into the game.
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I strongly doubt they will produce something at the level of sup-com. I love how ambitious they are but I don't think they can outdo Gas powered games with hundreds of ppl with actual game design experience.
they also send mixed messages. sometimes I hear it's an endi game... then they announce features that will be groundbreaking . they might be better than supcom in some aspects but they wont be better overall
