That said, Hellbent was able to adopt a number of Forged Alliance's improvements into its port-and as it turns out, many of Forged Alliance's improvements were a result of Hellbent's own developments.įor one thing, the revamped artificial intelligence is present in the Xbox 360 game. Production for 360 actually began in January 2007, with control scheme work having begun in October 2006. For one thing, the entirely new faction and maps started to introduce memory concerns on the console ("Operation 6 on Forged Alliance could bring even a fairly powerful PC to its knees," admitted Gas Powered producer Marc Scattergood, also present at the demonstration), but also the expansion came very late in development, making its inclusion impractical. Unfortunately, the Forged Alliance expansion pack will not be entirely incorporated into Supreme Commander on Xbox 360. Mechanically and gameplay-wise, everything is intact from the PC version-base building, resource management, tiered technology progression, and so on. This mechanic, which uses the left analog stick for panning and the right analog stick to control zoom level, feels completely at home on the Xbox 360, and addresses what is my biggest complaint about most console RTS games: the sluggishness involved with navigating the battlefield. Supreme Commander players get accustomed to traveling from point A to point B not by scrolling the screen or navigating a minimap, but by zooming out to strategic view then zooming in on the desired location.
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Players can seamlessly sacle from the relatively closely-cropped camera view of most RTS games all the way up to a full map view of the battlefield, with units represented diagrammatically. One of the most iconic elements of Supreme Commander, beyond the massive size of its forces and its emphasis on sweeping strategy over tactical micromanagement, is its strategic zoom.
"We know a lot of PC gamers are interested because they couldn't run on their PCs, so we tried to make sure all the PC elements are there." "I'm a big fan of bringing more serious RTS games to consoles," said Hellbent creative director Chris Mair, a longtime friend of Supreme Commander designer Chris Taylor, when I met with him in San Francisco.