barely fatal

It’s Star Wars, and it’s real-time strategy. Meaning: Very high suck-probability. However, this could become the one, first “good or better” title of that franchise.

Part one: Introduction & Space

Empire At War is a little different than most RTS games. It’s actually three games: Ground combat, space battles and board-game like strategy on a map of the galaxy. Your goal: Conquer all planets and win the war for either the evil yet cunning Empire or the noble yet farmboyish Rebellion.

The demo comes with five tutorials, and you need those. Where I expected to get delivered just another simplistic, effect-heavy piece of software it turns out that it’s not that simple. You build up your space fleet and planetary defenses on the galaxy map. Each unit costs time, credits and unit “slots”. Time means a clock that ticks away galactic days. Money means the amount of cash you get every day, depending on how many planets you own, what kind of buildings you have there and if you’ve sent out any smuggler (for example) to steal money from the opposite faction. Unit slots mean you have a unit limit – bigger ships take up more unit slots – so your army or fleet size is limited.

On the map you can move your fleets from one planet to the other, group them, land troops, deploy special units and so on. If you meet the enemy, a space fight starts, and the game changes to a 2D-top view perspective of the current sector. When you successfully eliminate all enemies – not that easy, considering your fighters are not always willing to do what you tell them to do – you may start landing your troops (planet) or you win the battle and and own that part of the map (‘roid field for example).

As mentioned, space battles are … complicated. You tell your X-Wings to protect the Y’s, the Y’s to attack the enemies turrets and the frigates to attack cruisers. So far, so good. There are ‘roid fields and nebulas that add a few tactical possibilities, but I have yet to find out what exactly good or bad they bring. Unfortunatly, your ships are dumb. They don’t attack if not told to, they fly in erratic, illogical patterns and with all your units and the enemy’s attacking, you get lost pretty easily. I really hope they will improve the AI in the full version, and maybe the battles just take practise to master. In the demo however, I won with numbers, not brains.

The space graphics are functional, the map looks … like a map, nothing special there. The ships are small and also not too fancy. 3D ships on a 2D map – it’s a good thing they didn’t go for all dimensions, but it feels a little flat, if you ask me. Sounds are naturally mint.

…to be continued

Read this, this year’s E3 forces booth babes to actually walk around fully dressed – where’s the fun in that? Is the world about to lose just another great example of gamer’s culture?

Will they ever stop? Next time they’ll sue RockStar for the risible hidden sex mini-games in GTA: San Andreas … no wait … it’s a conspiracy! Male gamers, unite! Female gamers, stand up and demand booth handsomes!

Supplemental: Comic

Supplemental 2: Another comic

Probably starting on February 14th, first-person shooter MMO Planetside can be played for free for one year. The only drawback you get as a free subscriber will be a rank limit.

For details see the Planetside boards.
Now, SOE, what’s up? Got all sentimental, all of a sudden? Or just the usual glitch in the Matrix?

Ignoring the rest of the game for now lets have a look at what crafting is like in AA. Crafting has been attempted in many games but so far none’s got it right. Unfortunately AA is not the one to break the mould as it follows a fairly standardised and simplistic crafting system. That being said it’s not without merit and does indeed put crafting in other games (SWG and WoW come to mind) to shame.

Crafting requires resources (no surprise there) and those you get by blowing stuff up. Certain elements within the game are predisposed to drop certain commodities that can be refined or used directly in the crafting process. Obtaining resources is easy and anyone can do it. These can be sold to shops or crafters, assuming you can find any that are interested in buying.

Resources need to be refined before they are useful, the more a resource is refined the higher grade it becomes but the more resources it consumes to get that way. When you stop to think about it this is a very good system, it adds depth to the game play if you need to process the materials before they can be used in any fashion. While it’s a nice system and well implemented its also not new. Those who have played enough games will find this system familiar to another game out there. Not saying which one just yet though

Now we flip the coin and look at the other side of the crafting system, the actual assembly process. We start out by finding a broken item of some sort, examining it we see what components it needs in order to fix it, were to do it and what level you can do it at. Fair enough those are all things one needs to know if there’s going to be any chance at fixing it at all. So you look at a gun and it says it needs a Barrel and patched metal. You have those things, you take it to the appropriate place click a button wait a second and the thing is fixed. Rather simplistic, appealing mostly to the people that don’t generally craft in games.

When you craft an item you have a chance of memorising it. When that happens you can churn out copies of it for as long as you want, as long as you have the parts. Here’s the weird part though, if an item took 1 barrel and 1 patched metal to fix and you memorise it you can then make that item as many times as you want using 1 barrel and 1 patched metal each time. This means that you can make a very complex device, like a weapon using 1 barrel and 1 patched metal, nothing else needed. Like I said… the system is simplistic, not only that but its pretty much idiot proof. Unlike the profession window which is set up in such a way that your only 2 miss clicks away from unlearning a full crafting discipline, hopefully something that will be changed before the game goes live or the GMs will be very busy dealing with complaints

To round it all up you need to pay in order to craft. To unlock skills you need to pay, to upgrade skills you need to pay (nothing new there) to level skills you need to grind and buy/gather resources for it (again nothing new). To refine materials you need to pay a set amount per resultant item. And when it comes to final assembly again you need to fork out in order to create the final item. This must get expensive as you craft higher and higher level stuff.

Another aspects present in the crafting system is the chance to generate slots, which can be filled with certain items to enhance the item in some way.

Now then, before I mentioned there was an older game that had a similar crafting system but unless you’ve actually played it you’re not likely to recognise it.

Lets sum up the basic process:

• Obtain resources/parts
• Refine resources
• Use resources/parts to assemble item
• Reverse engineer item to try and memorise and mass-produce
• Chance to generate slots during assembly

What game am I thinking of? Neocron!

The AA system has its differences of course and in some aspects enhances on the basic concepts, for the most part it just introduces boredom to the process though.

The underlying system however is so close to Neocron crafting its freaky. Was it a blatant rip off of a proven system or just an honest attempt that took a similar path? Personally I don’t know and, honestly, I don’t much care. At the end of the day it is a pretty decent attempt at a crafting system. Not ground breaking but entertaining and simple enough so that anyone can try it.

Were AA shines is that crafting is open to every class and you don’t need to gimp your character to do it. Shame the game itself isn’t much of a challenge, and the vehicle meshes look outdated and blocky when compared to the rest of the graphics in the game world. The avatars in towns look nice and polished making the cars, were you spend most of the playing time, look like crap by comparison. But I digress…

Crafting rating.

6 out of 10 – Good but not great.