Gamasutra has the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion post-mortem up. It goes into the highs and lows of the development of Sins Rebellion.
It was a pretty fascinating project. It was often hard to tell where Stardock stopped and Ironclad began and vice versa. The companies shared a global code base of the project (secured high speed Internet FTW) and this resulted in a ton of improvements that never really got listed in bullet points. But those who have the game know what I mean – What makes Sins Rebellion so awesome isn’t just the new features but it’s the hundreds of little tweaks and touch ups that would be absurd to list in a bullet list.
Given its success it’s going to be interesting to see what’s next for the franchise.
www.sinsofasolarempire.com
what!!!!!!
did you kill rebellion???
if not then arrest whoever did, and charge them with murder of a game community!
harpo
Very interesting read, particularly "what went wrong" (which is something companies rarely talk about).
Cool read.
That's an odd way to do it. Why not just tell all your team that they are fired a few months before release and completely ignore beta testers? It works for EA.
They could learn alot from you guys.
I enjoyed that the analysis is clear. Interesting read, props to you guys for hammering it out and making some dreams and dollars come true.
Now lets talk about Sins, 2.0!
sins 2.0? Making it continuous space sim similar to homeworld?
Having players in multiplayer coop mode driving ships in battles?
I'd prefer full multicore and 64 bit support with deeper research trees and customization options than making it a space Sim. Star Citizen looks like it's going to be the dream game for that genre anyways.
This. Sins needs those customization options and a much larger research tree if it wants to truly become a real RT4X game. Hopefully Ironclad goes down that route and not the "make everything smaller and tactical" route I saw Relic go down when they released DoW2.
Exactly. Do NOT Dumb Down Sins for any potential add on, or sequel. That would be a HUGE mistake. They already tried that with Supreme Commander 2, and look how that turned out.
I will let you in on a little revelation.. Sins IS the RT4X genre. No other game compares. It is a niche genre on its own. Any future expansion, or sequel must build up on the 4X component. Not go backwards, and remove features that made the game fun to begin with. Like many other games do.
It would be nice to add more "Homeworld-ish" options to the tactical battles. Especially full 3D movement, Dynamic ship movement to target "weak spots", True Formations, Tactics (aggressive, defensive, passive), More defined weapon firing arcs, etc.
I'll agree with most of this, but I don't want Sins to become a game of sniping hardpoints, or all eye candy of fully rotating turrets etc. When you're commanding hundreds of ships that doesn't really matter much.
2.0 for the complete win.
Then they will know fear.
I was thinking more in the lines of Homeworld 1 that had all of the formations, and tactics, but didn't have any targetable subsystems. You are thinking of Homeworld 2. I agree. I most certainly don't want a subsystem snipe fest ether. I was thinking that ships could have weaker shields, or armor in the rear than the front. However, We don't want to make things "too complicated". That could be just as bad as dumbing it down.
Or IC/SD could surprise us, and do something completely different.
I'd much rather see Sins expanded rather than something completely different. Completely different got us SotS2, and we all know how that ended up.
SoTS 2 happened because Kerberos had some very bad ideas that looked good only on paper. Plus they took everything that made SoTS 1 fun to begin with, and REMOVED it! SoTS 2 is a glaring example of over complicating things. They added so much crap to it that no casual gamer has any clue what to do with it. SoTS 2 is NOT for the casual gamer. I believe its target audience is the hardcore advanced 4X gamer. Plus the rushed release, and fail didn't help them in the least. NOW over a year later its playable... Enjoyable is another story. Like i said you need to be a hardcore 4X fan to remotely get into it.
As I said, they tried something different and they created a game that's just not enjoyable for most people. The concept behind Sins of a Solar Empire is fundamentally sound and Ironclad managed to hit the balance just right between strategic and tactical. That being said, I wouldn't say no to an expansion in the strategic area as long as they don't diminish the tactical portion. The massive real-time combat is what separates Sins from all other 4X games and for me, makes building up my space empire worthwhile.
This way you could have all ships from that factory deploy to the rally point and adopt the settings without having to coral each and every ship as they came out, and then assign its settings. For instance; when you are producing LF's in a grav well to a rally point at the edge of the grav well while staging for a phase jump, and you don't want them to stray off from the formation to chase a scout that jumps in and pulls them all they way to the other side of the grav well, meanwhile a vas sb jumps in with combat deploy and your "formation" is 30 seconds away.
Okay, now production and new unit orders could still use a lot of improvement. Supreme Commander style repeat build orders to allow you to build ships in a set proportion automatically until you run out of fleet supply would be amazing.
All of this.
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