Supreme Commander

• Platform: PC
• Published by: THQ
• Developed by: Gas Powered Games
• Release Date: Q1 2007
• Genre: Strategy
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

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Chris Taylor Interview Continued..

Shack: I notice you've got dual monitor support as well. What are we going to be seeing on the other monitor?

Chris Taylor: Well, when you zoom in and you zoom out on your main view, what you find is that you make a command, then you zoom out and you look at the whole theater, then you zoom back in and do some more stuff, and you zoom out maybe to an intermediate level, then you zoom back in. By having a second monitor, you have the full theater view, big, all the time, right there. It means you don't have to use that tiny, tiny radar minimap--which has all the information squished and compressed into a small space and has very little utility, to be honest. Having a second monitor, you have a very large, easy to read, clear overview of the entire theater of war at all times. It takes all the zoom in and zoom out and reduces it to what's necessary for moving around.

That's not to say zooming in and zooming out isn't any fun. I mean, you watch over someone's shoulder, and I sometimes wonder if they're enjoying zooming just as much as they're playing the whole game. It's kind of fun.

Shack: Yeah, the whole strategic zoom thing, just watching that is in itself an entertaining facet of the game. It's kind of a basic mechanic of this game, but would you like to briefly touch on what you can do with the full zoom and the implications it has on unit size or anything else?

Chris Taylor: When you're zoomed in tight, you restrict the design of all of the units to fit comfortably in the view that you're seeing at all times. If you wanted to make something truly big and epic, you just wouldn't. But because you can zoom out now, you can have stuff that's enormous. That's the cool thing about it. You saw the battleships, where only half of it would fit on the screen. I've played games that have been released lately, where I built a ship in a shipyard, and I swear I could only get about five ships on the screen before the screen was filled out. It was kind of laughable, because when I zoomed out, I couldn't zoom out anymore, and these ships were so in my face, I felt as if it wasn't very playable. The zoom gives us so much. It gives us the ability to step back and see the whole world, or the whole theater. It allows us to feel like the general in the war room, it gives us this sense of power, authority over the theater. It allows us to see commands given to units; if you hold down the Shift key, you can see the paths they were given.

Think about it; when you zoom out, you're not only pulling your head out of the sandbox, you're creating a volume of space. It's a cube rather than a sandbox, rather than a flat 2D grid with a little height to it. I can now see my nukes curve way up high in the sky in this wonderful ballistic parabola, I can see this gorgeous curve, I can see the missile arching down towards the ground. I feel like I'm looking at a living, breathing world that has depth to it, I'm not just looking at a board game abstraction of a war.

It also solves some other problems. In previous games, aircraft had to fly at a certain low height, which really was just on a map of the earth. No jet fighter flies at fifty feet off the ground. In Supreme Commander, with this full zoom, we're able to create strata of altitude. Bombers can be flying while torpedo bombers can fly down out of their flight path, torpedo bomb ships and then fly back to their regular altitude. Those SR-71 equivalents can fly at a much higher altitude, so the flak cannon can't knock them out of the sky, bringing a sense of simulation and realism and believability to the game, all because of the strategic zoom.

Shack: Of course, despite the realistic sense of scale, there are still plenty of exaggerated units, big crazy sci-fi walking spiders and stuff.

Chris Taylor: Yeah, well in real life if you build a giant walking unit that was twelve hundred meters high, we could, it would just perform in a really realistic way. That's the thing, it doesn't have to be possible to be realistic.

Shack: So in terms of other comparisons to modern RTS games, one of the trends we've seen over the last several years, and I think maybe some of this is player fuelled and has crossed over to the design side, is the focus on micromanagement and rushing. Is there room for that in Supreme Commander, or is that something you're deliberately eschewing?

Chris Taylor: Well, for the most part, if you play on some of our mid to large maps, you're never going to play a rush game. There's no rush game. If you play on one of the smaller maps, absolutely, you're going to bring the rush game right back in. A rush game is a function of the small maps that traditional RTS games have as an integral part. You cannot rush me when I'm on the other side of a gigantic world. You'll be there in an hour. You want to build transport systems, you want to load a bunch of bots up, you want to fly over the ocean--"Hey, I've got some interceptors out there waiting for you!" You run a gigantic land map that's enormous--"Oh, by that time, I go for a long range radar installation and I can see this mass of units marching across this barren desert." "Well, I have some bombers out there to clean them up before I get there."

When you put two people in a room and you say, "Fight," one guy can rush to the other side of the room and dive on the other guy, but when you put people within a square mile you don't even know where the other guy is, let alone rushing him. You just can't rush someone when you're in a large space. Typically when you rush someone, it's a low cost maneuvre. But in Supreme Commander, if you lay your chips down on a rush move, you're betting the whole farm, and you're just not going to want to do that.

Continue to the last page to hear about what led to Chris Taylor making Total Annihilation and Dungeon Siege.

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