Greetings!
Lots of exciting things happening with Ashes of the Singularity. With Star Control: Origins released, we've been able to give Ashes some new attention and I wanted to use this post to update you on where we are.
Engine porting
Under the game is the game engine which in Ashes 1.0 was pure Nitrous. These days, we have taken the Nitrous engine and integrated all the cool stuff we've developed over the years (Game engine wise) to create a game-specific engine we call Cider. So right now, we're porting Cider to Linux with Ashes being our first test.
The good news is that we have Ashes kind of sort of working natively on Linux. The bad news is that the performance isn't quite there yet. Vulkan is the graphics platform we're targeting and it's still very young.
New entries in the universe
We are working on a new game in the Ashes of the Singularity universe that we will be announcing next month. Ashes founders will get it either for free or at a steep discount depending on what type of Founder they are.
Ashes sequels
So the short version is that we aren't going to be making new expansions for Ashes of the Singularity I. There might be more DLC but the changes we want to make are a little too radical to have as an expansion. My next post will be talking about what we have in mind for the sequel so you guys can opine on it. But if you liked SupCom or TA then you will really like where we want to take the sequel.
Stay tuned!
Thank you for the information, Ed! I didn'nt know that. Sadly, it won't be a SupCom successor...
I thought you will. It would be nice though, if you you wouldn`t announce more information and then don't give the information. I am looking forward to see what you're working on.
2019 will be ending soon..any updates on updating Ashes Engine?Any updates at all?Please fix the map editor, make it work, so i can go ahead and fix my old maps and create some new ones...
you made it work in Siege of Centuari, so try to fix it for Ashes, or its a lot to ask?
Whats going on with Stardock....? so quiet lately.no ASHES 2 News?nothing you can give us about all your awesome upcoming RTS Games?Hope to hear from you soon.
We don't have an update at this time.
So it's been over a year since the original Roadmap 2019 announcement. It originally stated that there will be no more expansions (there have been), and that within a month you would be announcing more details about the Ashes sequel.
Are we to understand that, given your actions, the sequel has been put on an indefinite hold or cancelled?
Other projects are ahead of the Ashes sequel.
Understandable, RTS is not where the money is atm.
Well age of empires has 1.4k viewers on twitch atm (random time of day). So people like RTS's.
I feel that with a game like Ashes that has incredibly high graphics requirements massively decreases any potential player base. So they basically shot themselves in the foot a bit. Great advertising when it was being used in all new graphic card benchmark releases, but not much translation into players.
High(ish) requirements and stability issues were definitely contributing factors. Larger budget would have helped a lot, but easy to say that looking back.
I think the biggest killer for new RTS games is that they're compared to older ones that already have had years of support and far bigger budgets to begin with.
I don't think that the RTS genre is the problem. People are hungry for a great new RTS and it's a market waiting to be exploited. FAF just had its most successful week ever and that game has been "dead" (no more developer support) for over a decade.
The issue is that a new Forged Alliance style game has to be better than the original. Unfortunately, FA is still the measuring stick for all mass scale RTS games ever made, because it's still the best and most popular.
So it has to improve on that formula in meaningful ways. It has to be accessible to a wider audience meaning the requirements have to be reasonable. It can't have "Stardock graphics" on launch with muddy textures and lack of unit identity forcing the player to have to squint to tell what's going on. Every unit and faction needs to look visceral and unique, even from a distance. It's not enough just to make pretty explosions from a distance and have the Juggernaut class ships be cool. ALL the units need to have that much inspiration and attention to detail. The player has to connect with his army just as he would in a zoomed in RTS. Otherwise most of your potential audience just won't be interested. If all people can see from the trailers is a Michael Bay simulator, they won't waste their time.
If the game feels innovative and inspiring with each unit and faction having a clear and unique identity, accessible to a wider audience, it will succeed.
I do think RTS players are less likely to invest in newer titles for the reasons I said and that in turn hurts the genre. FA is nearly 13 years old at this point and very few large scale RTS games have appeared since then. I'm pretty sure the requirements for FA where very high for it's time too, even now it's still common to have sim speed issues.
Supreme Commander 2 was quite a good looking game from an art and graphics standpoint and was easier to run relatively speaking (as far as I know). That appeared to try being more accessible for players which really hurt it in the long run.
A developer would need quite a large budget and team to compete against FA in every category and I'm not sure that kind of money would be put into an RTS project these days. A massive budget isn't required to make a good experience though.
Even though Supcom 2 ultimately failed, I would argue that's because it suffered from "Chris Taylor syndrome".
Taylor is infamous for making great games with a ton of potential and abandoning them within a short time. In fact, I can't think of a single project he was involved with that didn't share this fate.
Supcom 2 was an amazing game with a ton of potential, but it was abandoned before any of its major issues are fixed. Even now, if you try to play it online, it has the worst netcoding of any modern game I've ever played. It lags and skips constantly. In larger games it's practically unplayable.
Forged Alliance didn't have these problems. How is it that the developer went backwards with the netcoding?
There were also a ton of design and balance issues inherent to the game. Upgraded Commander rushes with no other units were extremely hard to stop. The entire research mechanic was stupid and needed a complete revamp. The game pigeonholed you into a particular specialty (air, sea, land, structures, etc.) which hurt your options as a player tremendously.
Again, Supcom 2 could have been an amazing game. It had all the makings of a truly great RTS. Taylor abandoned it without addressing the core issues, something he is well known for.
People crave RTS games, yet when they come out they are not super successful. Grey Goo, the Act of Aggression which had a C&C Generals kind of gameplay, those were supposedly all games players wanted. Act of Aggression even listened to their player base and released a second version of the game after a lot of work, for nothing.
FAF is going strong, yes, because Supreme Commander is the best RTS there is but FAF is a few thousand people, nothing compared to the playerbase of other games.
For me, Ashes failed not because of the graphics or requirements, it was simply the gameplay. I guess I hoped for a complex gameplay like in Supreme Commander, troop transporters, Eco, more freedom in troop placement and movement. Me and my friends waited for Navy to be implemented and so on. All those things promised before and during release.
I think an Ashes similar or mimicking Supreme Commander with the new game engine could be a major hit. Supreme Commander FA2 on a modern platform that can scale... OMG!
My personal preference is different, I'm not sure if that's just a difference or one is more "marketable".
A big problem I see in RTS games is they (understandably) struggle to do anything innovative.
Shooters, for example, have come from Goldeneye to Modern Warfare (or Fornite). Action adventures from Grim Fandango to Witcher 3.
RTS games like Ashes (or SupCom) just aren't as big jumps from say C&C. (on top of lacking the more addictive elements of an RPG or looter shooter).
I really like Ashes gameplay. It's more like chess with simpler units rather than 50 unbalanced unit varieties. But then, I wasn't looking to play Sup Com 2.
Where I see the future, and what Ashes was doing, was removing the "actions per second" mechanic that make games like Starcraft problematic. If you can offload a lot of that to the AI, you can play more grand strategy.
Which is why, IMO, Ashes just struggled with computing requirements (in part being of a new engine) and marketing.
But I think it's a great game and one I keep returning too.
Nice to see people still using the Forums, I was worried that it was dead.
Sad to hear that Other projects are ahead of the Ashes sequel.
but understandable,
going back to ASHES, will we see more updates?
My next post will be talking about what we have in mind for the sequel so you guys can opine on it.
Were is that blogpost?
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