Comparing Supreme Commander and Unreal Tournament 2004
Can a first person shooter and a real time strategy game possibly have anything in common? I think you might be surprised. Naturally, the gameplay is such that the games cannot be considered remotely similar, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. I think you might be surprised at the parallels I’ve discovered elsewhere. You may not have ever played UT2004, but that doesn’t mean you should just skip over this article, because it is relevant to all SupCom players. It is quite long, so I’ve split it up into ADD-friendly sections.
Who I am
Many here probably do not know me, but I go by T2A` in another gaming community where my name is at least somewhat well known (and potentially quite so). I’ve been around UT2004 and its community since the game’s release in March 2004 and I’ve proven (eventually) to be a fairly competent player with a lot of unrealized potential due to impatience. I missed out on much of the high-level competition that took place early in the game’s lifespan since it was full of long-time veterans of FPS games whilst I was still cutting my teeth. Thus, I’m no top-tier player, but I’m the kind of player who would, with my current skill set, beat roughly 90% (or more?) of everyone who ever touched the game. I currently administrate Insite, a site devoted to reviewing user-made maps in an effort to get more high-quality maps out of people, and I post a lot on BeyondUnreal’s forums. I guess you could say I’m pretty familiar with the game.
An FPS and an RTS can be similar
I’m sure you’re anxious to see how SupCom and UT2004 can be related, so enough idle chatter. Let’s look at some of the obvious and superficial similarities. Both games scored well with review sites such as IGN and both have sold well. You could even say UT2004 sold extremely well since it managed to push out millions of copies worldwide. Both games had (at least somewhat) new gameplay ideas that may or may not have worked out. Adding vehicles to the Unreal universe could’ve been considered a risky move by Epic, but it worked out in the end. I don’t like them, but I’m only one of the millions who bought the game.
Beyond the obvious, what else could these games possibly have in common? How about mod support? The Unreal Engine is known for its ability to be modified to hell and back. I don’t know if it’s official, but as far as I know it’s the most easily modifiable FPS engine available, and that probably has something to do with why Unreal Engine 3 has sold like hotcakes amongst the “next generation” developers. Though SupCom didn’t actually ship with its development tools, the fact that such was the original plan shows that the game was meant to be modifiable. In theory, a modifiable game is one that is good for the player community, because it allows the community to do the things they want and make the things they need without waiting for the developers to do it. Modifiability extends the life of the game long after the developers have moved on to something else. In theory, modifiability is a great thing for any game, and both SupCom and UT2004 have it.
It’s not all pancakes and jellybeans
But enough of the good things, let’s look at some bad things shared between the games, eh? How about computer requirements? Though UT2004 isn’t that intensive, it was intense enough upon release that many of the old UT players and other casual gamers couldn’t play it with decent frame rates. As I’m sure many of you know, SupCom is very unfriendly to older PCs, and given normal curves and whatnot, an older PC is what most people have. Personally, I’m on a four-year-old machine – an ex-Dell with a 2.8 GHz P4, a gig of memory, and a Radeon 9800 Pro. It was a powerhouse in its day but in SupCom I regularly see framerates of 1-5 in heated battles, even on the lowest settings and after my computer has lagged everyone and slowed the game speed down to -3. It’s not that enjoyable, to be honest, but I keep playing because I like SupCom’s gameplay and hope that some day soon I’ll be on a decent rig.
Do you think everyone will be so forgiving and willing to spend money, though? Steep computer requirements are bad for your game’s popularity, but it’s kind of a paradox because you need pretty graphics and big explosions to draw people’s attention. Still, SupCom’s problem isn’t in its graphics but in the back-end stuff no one sees – the path-finding system, the clipping and occluding, the physics in the shot trajectories, etc. I’m hoping the “big” patch will severely optimize some of these things and allow more people to enjoy the game. And what about competition in the gaming world? UT2004 went up against games like CS:S and BF2 while SupCom has CNC3 and many Blizzard RTS games to compete with. Let’s also not forget that all games are competing with WoW as well.
Can I get paid for my efforts or something?
And what about learning difficulty? UT2004 is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, FPS game to pick up. There’s way too much to learn between dodging and other movement characteristics, the large weapon arsenal, dual or sometimes tri weapon firing modes, the adrenaline system, vehicular stuff, etc., and then you have to worry about learning the 11 stock game types and any customized ones you find online. A game that is hard to pick up is one that will annoy more people than it will entice, and UT2004 is a perfect example of that. A new player to UT2004 has little chance of even getting to the point where they know enough to simply be called bad by the ones who do know how to play. UT2004 is a game that requires practice to be bad at because it’s just that hard to learn initially. This is a pretty terrible omen for a game because frustration is the biggest cause of player desertion.
Though not as extreme, I feel SupCom is facing a similar situation. As far as RTS games go, SupCom is pretty much completely different. Everything down to the economy, the scale, the strategic zoom, the queuing of actions, the nonexistence of the rush, the absence of micro in most cases, the similarities between the factions, the vast amount of viable strategies and tactics, etc., it all goes in a completely different direction than most RTS games. This means there’s much to learn, even to a seasoned RTS veteran (who didn’t cut their teeth on Total Annihilation, anyway). Difficult games, in general, end up as niche games – ones in which the community is small but very dedicated. This has its advantages, but it’s also undesirable because you play the same people over and over and it ends up getting stale after awhile. Stagnancy is probably the second biggest cause of game desertion – those who get past the frustration only end up bored.
Okay, who stole the Easy Button?
The frustration problem shows in the size of the community, and it comes about because many gamers don’t feel like putting any sort of effort into their games. They’re supposed to be fun, yet some games seemingly require dedication and work just so you can get good enough to enjoy them. UT2004 is certainly that way, and I’m thinking SupCom is too, at least to a degree. In order to deal with this, both games have had an “easy mode” or “newbie friendly” mode developed. In SupCom this comes from the developers, as we’ve been promised custom games with the option of having a no-rush system in place. In UT2004 the modders took this into their own hands by developing a new gametype called Team Arena Master (i.e. TAM) that gets rid of a lot of the things that make UT2004 hard. By never having to worry about spawn issues, getting weapons, map control, power-ups, ammo, positional (dis)advantages, surviving empty-handed, or even if a teammate is stranded and helpless, you’re left with simple movement and using the weapons you’ve been handed. There’s even a health handicap that makes the winning team easier to take out, and the game type is round-based so there’s no positive feedback loop for the guys in the lead. Easy mode.
The effect of TAM on UT2004 was not a good one. TAM players didn’t develop into better UT2004 players; they developed into better TAM players. This split the already splintered community even further. It brought very few good players into the community but instead inflated a lot of egos and made cheating ten times more prevalent since it became much more effective given the nature of the game type. Since I’ve been through this before, of course I’m worried about what the no-rush rule will bring to SupCom. It certainly won’t train bad players to become better at the normal game, meaning it doesn’t help anyone who plays normal games since it won’t bring new players to their table. As TAM players only became better TAM players I worry that no-rush players will only be able to play no-rush games, and this splits the community into no-rushers and everyone else. Community splitting needs to be kept to a minimum if we want to enjoy this game for years to come with a large and diverse group of people.
Gloom and doom is my specialty
UT2004 sold really well but interest in the game quickly died off for various reasons. The history of the game made it end up as an amalgamation of too many clashing ideas, too many game types, too much modifiability, and not enough developer support to contain it all. Unlike SupCom, Epic did not provide a central community hub for UT2004. They gave it a half-hearted effort via the “Community” menu within the game, but it ultimately got ignored and hasn’t been updated in over two years. Epic didn’t even handle the game’s forums as they were hosted at Atari (UT2004’s publisher) for years until Atari dropped the game, at which point the forums were transferred to Epic. The result of no central community, all these game types, all this modifiability, the game’s general difficulty, etc. is that UT2004’s community got split up into many tiny pieces, and a community that is not unified has a hard time standing.
In that vein, SupCom may have a saving grace – GPGnet. Unlike UT2004, there’s a robust center to the community. To find an online game, you’re required to use GPGnet, and this keeps everyone together in the same place. I was actually quite impressed by the whole thing when I saw how easy it was to find the top players and watch their replays. There’s no way to know who the best UT2004 player is unless you pay attention to big LAN results, and big LANs stopped occurring long ago. Not only that, but figuring out where to find and download demos and then how to watch them is a big hassle and something the average guy won’t ever do. Sure, it’s a bit of an annoyance to have to constantly launch and exit SupCom to play through GPGnet, but without having such support built into the game a separate application is the best option. I’m interested to see just how robust GPGnet gets because I really do think that it’s the glue holding this community together. Growth in SupCom should all be positive and contributive towards a large, global community because, in the end, we’ve all got to come through GPGnet. What we need is simply a way to get new players into the game and a proper way to teach them how to play. No-rush mode isn’t it. I would urge you all to bug your gaming friends to try SupCom out, but don’t just leave them to their own devices. Show them how to play and show them what the community has to offer.
Here’s the “too long, didn’t read” summary for the attention-impaired.
Good Similarities between UT2004 and SupCom:
- High review scores.
- Good/great sales.
- New gameplay ideas.
- Easily modifiable.
Bad Similarities between UT2004 and SupCom:
- Steep computer requirements at their release dates.
- Competing against many big-name games of similar genre.
- Difficult to pick up and just play.
- Requires a bit of work to get good enough to find real enjoyment.
- Difficulty in learning sticks game into niche category.
- Sales don’t parallel amount of people still playing.
- Development of “easy mode” either doesn’t help or hurts things overall.
SupCom is more likely to succeed in developing a good, long-lasting community because of:
- Its central community.
- GPGnet.
- Voodoo.
May 20th, 2007 at 10:46 am
First post! (ok, I’m a /. junkie)
Seriously though, nice comparison. I’ve played UT2k4 a little bit at LAN parties, but not much at all due to it being just too much effort to figure it all out. That and I suck at those type of FPS’s, the trigger and jump happy type of games. I’m much better with BF2 type games, or even CS:S.
Overall, I liked the comparison, and lets hope that SupCom stays good!
May 20th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Ah, the learning curve, the biggest reason why the console world will always be ahead in sales and popularity, even though the PC world has about twice the diversity and quality of games. While I am saddened at the fact that Supcom will ultimately reach its plateau of maximum players rather soon because of the learning curve, I am consoled by the fact that really all this means is that we’re just going to get the smartest players in the online gaming world. I mean really, you have to look at it realistically and say to yourself, “How many noobs are actually going to put forth the effort to truly get better at this game and become interesting and productive members of the community.” When you think of it that way, it really doesn’t seem so bad.
May 20th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I don’t think of myself as a seasoned FPS player, but I didn’t find UT2k4 to be that hard to pick up.
If anybody has had luck training noobs in SupCom, they should come up with a Noob Training Guide or something. A guide, a list of steps you could follow to accelerate the learning process and take some of the bite out of the learning curve. It seems like you should be able to get someone to competent, AI-pwning level fairly easily with some careful work.
The complaints I’ve gotten about SupCom are basically that there’s too much going on. I would suspect that this is because the people I know just don’t play RTS games, which are much more complex in terms of where your attention is going than FPS games.
May 20th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I think there are some nub guides out there, but the problem with those is a) they’re usually text and thus tl;dr, and b) they’re scattered about here and there. If “official” nub guides were to be made they’d need to be very thorough and in a place where every new SupCom player will stumble across them. And they’d probably need lots of pictures. :D
As far as learning UT2004, I’m not saying everyone will have trouble with it. My main point is that compared to other FPS games UT2004 is really hard to learn, and this only produces frustration and a deserting of UT2004 for those other games. Others allow you to just jump in, grab a gun, and start shooting people, but that doesn’t happen much with UT2004. The game’s dynamics make its learning curve ridiculously steep, and it doesn’t get any easier as your skill grows. The skill gap between decent/good players and guys I’d call pro is gigantic, and such things continue all the way down. A relatively new player who finally learned how to dodge somewhat and use the weapons will destroy a new player; the newbies have no chance. That’s an issue with games in general – they have to be newbie friendly to ease frustrations but they can’t be just easy mode because no one will stick around long-term.
May 20th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
“Development of “easy mode” either doesn’t help or hurts things overall.”
Definitely true.
Also my favorite things about UT2k4 were the mods like AlienSwarm (or whatever it was called) and Frag.Ops (even though those guys were jerks).
May 20th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Wow congrats on writing such a big’un HOWEVER “UT2004 is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, FPS game to pick up” NOOO CS:S is teh 1337-est (and the most noob-unfreindly)
May 20th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
I hope you’re being facetious, and if not, you’re probably 13 years old. CS:S is one of the easiest FPS games to just pick up. If it weren’t there wouldn’t be so many people playing it. You might be bad at it, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t get much easier to learn. Two guns at a time, team respawns to keep things simple, all guns are instant-trance and thus nearly all the same thing, there’s only two game types, games are highly repetitive to enable easy learning of good/bad ideas and tactics, there’s no complicated movement system, no powerups or anything to control except the main objectives on the map, etc., etc. The game may be hard to master but it’s simple to pick up as someone new to it.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:22 am
Well, CS:S isn’t really that easy. You still have to figure out how to get into the buying menu, and which of the bewildering array of items to buy. Then, you play for 5 secs until you get killed by a pro, and then wait 10 minutes to respawn so that you can continue to learn. Compare that to Half-Life, where if you die, you respawn instantly, and you start off with a semi-decent pistol.
Unfortunately, one of the problems with Sup Com is the slow ‘respawn time’ – ie if you get defeated, you have to create a whole new game and rebuild your early base just so that you have a chance of not getting wiped out. A few games like that and you get sick of the whole thing pretty quickly. One way of making the game more accessible, then, is to turn on pre-built base, so that you don’t waste time rebuilding the early start over and over again, and you actually get to play a decent bit.
May 21st, 2007 at 3:23 am
T2A’ has some nice points, and I’m sure I recognise his name, might have read some reviews. I only really play UT2004 at lans and often win prizes when there are UT2004 comps. UT2004 has a far greater learning curve than CSS. A new player can go straight online with CSS and expect to get a few kills and lucky headshots every now and then. The weapons are all hitscan and have a pretty high tolerence for people with poor accuracy, the weapons are also straight forward in their roles and most of the strategies and concepts that you learn whilst playing apply to any other FPS game, whereas Ut has ideas that don’t appear anywhere else, like the shield gun, shock combos.
I like the TAM/norush comparison. Having played against some supcommers at some lans, I find that 90% of them are easy wins as they turtle or don’t play aggressively or build nearly enough stuff. No rush will help them manage their building and economy management, though their early game eco management will become useless in a rush game, and it won’t teach them to be aggressive as I’d predict that most games will be attrition until one masses enough strength to crush the other all at once.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:39 am
Keep in mind that in a normal game on a larger map, rushing is hard anyway, so when people catch up to technology people might play them with normal Supcom instead. Since your main base won’t get rushed in the first 5 minutes unless by aircraft, and they have a chance to build a few forward bases before getting mobbed, I think a few fire bases in front instead of a massive turtle wall is better. But of course this won’t happen in quite a while.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:40 am
Nice article! I enjoyed the comparisons between the genres. No rush games won’t help anyone as they won’t learn how to deal with a raiding force disrupting their ‘perfect’ eco build. So the second they try and step up to the plate they will be faced with small raiding parties after their engineers and mexes. For example on Open Palms, its quite common for a player to send 3 units to the opponents back mass points to harass engineers and take the mass.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:15 am
CS:S is easy to pick up and easy to run on most computers, that’s why it’s the StarCraft of the FPS world: Played by everyone and their brother – even people who don’t normally play computer games play CS:S and/or StarCraft because those will run on their systems and they are easy to learn. That’s why you have such a large percentage of the audience that is immature, jerks, or from Asia where it is also huge.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:20 am
I played UT2k4 when it came out for maybe a year. Onslaught was a wonderful game mode and worked better than similar tries at that sort of thing that had come in the past (like Tribes 2). There was an excellent UK clan scene with old people from Q2CTF picking it up and having a great time. It didn’t last for us mostly because we were all in or entering our twenties and losing interest in that sort of game that required a couple of practices a week just to stay competitive. I didn’t play its other modes because I found them slightly slow or too dissimilar in weapon types to Quake style games that I’d been playing for years. In that respect it was as you say – the change in game style was too hard to be worth persevering with…but not just that. I’d seen it all before and could see nothing new in the DM style gamemodes, or in assault I think it was called. It was Onslaught that really worked and provided some great times, everything else was just nostalgic. I don’t know if that’s how a majority of gamers feel when each new shooter or RTS comes along, but for me that’s exactly why I hardly play any more. I think I’d rather fire up a good game of QW on DM6 than try out Crysis.
TAM sounds like Rocket Arena in Quake games. I wouldn’t say RA is similar to no rush mode. In my mind no rush rips the heart out of SupCom – the heart that is: beginning to end intensity, expansion, no holds barred speed and mind boggling attention division across the whole theatre of war. RA or TAM seek to preserve the heart and strip out the stuff people might consider extraneous. The heart would be the pure tactical movement around the map and basic aim. I’d say for a noob this is the hardest type of play. Much easier is something like Onslaught where you can experience the instantaneous joy of rolling around in a tank, shooting people, without actually joining in the proper complex team play. In this regard Onslaught was similar to CSS – any individual can hide away but still pick up a few frags by shooting people in the back. CSS is probably marginally less friendly because of the round to round wait times after death, and the ease with which good players can dominate the server. No rush is the equivalent not of a stripped down DM mode, but of the no-pressure team play game, or even the MMO. No pressure, less competition. However, RA style mods do fragment the community by drawing good players away from the more complex DM and team game modes. I don’t think that will happen with no rush. Good players will not want to play no rush. A good player at the end of the no rush period will be even further ahead of his noob opponent than he would have been in a normal game. He will crush the noob within minutes of the period ending. I assume no rush games will last longer than an equivalent normal game because of that delay – thus ranked matches will still be the fastest way to have a game. Casual players should stay on ranked games.
The comparison between UT2k4 and SC is a valid one for everything else. I’d definitely agree that both seem like niche games that will never hold the popularity of something like CS. But what PC games in recent years have generated a really long-lived and large community? They’re all competing with each other for the same people. Since CS I can’t think of anything that isn’t an MMORPG that’s lasted more than a few months in the popular attention. UT did really well to last a year with me and more with you guys. I think SupCom is different enough to hold on to a reasonably sized niche community for a few years, much like the first few quake games did after their sequels appeared (and here no sequel is going to be directly competing with SupCom). And yes, GPGNet is a real catalyst for this.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I can’t say that UT2K4 has the steepest learning curve for a FPS, but some of its game modes are definitely not newbie-friendly. Bombing Run, Assault modes require some tricks, tactics and strategy to be successful. I have play against some hardcore BR players who were about as skillful as some of the hardcore players of Q2CTF.
CS is dead simple to play and master. The key is getting used to the accuracy range of certain weapons and having lighting-fest reflexes. The good players only use rifles and sub-machine guns if they are low on cash.
Supreme Commander has one of the steepest learning curves of any RTS. I think Kohan, Earth 2150 and some other late 90s RTS that I can’t remember its title were more difficult to get a hold on. You can’t expect to spam the same unit or neglect your economy for a minute in order to effective. C&C and Starcraft on the other hand are really “Real-time tactics”. They are simple to get a hold of, but somewhat difficult to master.
May 25th, 2007 at 10:23 am
interesting read, interesting thoughts. see you in gpgnet :=)