Supreme Commander’s scale could become sort of mind-boggling. The sheer amount of things you had to look after and control was really challenging. When I hear about Planetary Annihilation, my first reaction is, “Oh my God, now there’s entirely different planets, entirely different play areas.” So I’m curious… How are you going to handle the complexity that comes from a shift like that?
Mavor: There’s a couple things. First of all, the idea behind the game is scalability. I think if you look at TA, it had that. It had this level of scalability where you could play on a pretty small map and have a pretty quick game with just one other person. You could play a 20-minute game of TA on a small map. That’s what some people were comfortable with and willing to do. And then you could get on bigger maps where you get eight players and just take hours. You’d have insane numbers of units and all that stuff.
That’s who this game is being made for. The people who really do want to deal with the complexity of bajillions of units across multiple playfields and smashing planets together.
With Planetary Annihilation, it’s the same thing. The idea is, if you want to have a quick game, you can do that. You can set a low unit count. You can play on a small map. You can do that kind of thing. The idea behind this game, though, is to give those fans that want to control vast armies the ability to do that. That’s who this game is being made for. The people who really do want to deal with the complexity of bajillions of units across multiple playfields and smashing planets together. It’s really oriented towards those kinds of players. So I don’t necessarily see that as a problem. It’s something I like about the game, how big it can get. The design goal here is to be able to do maps that are even bigger than what we did in some of these other games, in terms of player counts and stuff like that. Imagine you had four or five planets. Each planet starts out with five or six players on it. You battle it out on your planet first as you’re building up your economy and you try to get bootstrapped and take out the other guys on your planet. Then the war goes interplanetary. And the game could last for 12 hours or something like that. I definitely envision those kinds of battles. This is really for the people that want that kind of stuff. That’s what we’re trying to do.
