Lucasarts Expo Revealed
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1360
Q: For many gamers, one of the bigger disappointments was Force Commander. How do you look at a game like Force Commander, hindsight being 20/20?
A: Force Commander had quite a checkered and interesting history. I think that ourselves, along with a couple of other publishers, found out that the real-time strategy market wasn't quite ready for the jump to 3D. We made a bet, a gamble, that the real-time strategy market was looking to evolve beyond the Command & Conquer or StarCraft-style of gameplay and go into the 3D world. I think that we came up against a bit of a technology hurdle, and we realized that it was hard to implement something that is real-time and strategy in a 3D environment, because there isn't the same kind of direction. [Two-dimensional] real-time strategy games almost always are linear in their gameplay, and that may sound trite, but in some ways I think that was what part of the problem was. And we've seen other 3D real-time strategy games that have suffered from the same problem; when people are in a 3D world, they don't know what to do--they aren't so directed--and their strategic thinking is more muddled and more confused.
People weren't ready for the jump to 3D, nor were people ready for the evolution of Starcraft or Command & Conquer. The game was fine, it was the people that were just not ready. =) No, he does address the problem of implementation to 3D in a round about way, but seriously, it was a horrid interface and clumsy gameplay that people didn't care for. In other words, it was lacking in quality.
