Postmortem: Stardock and Oxide Games' Ashes of the Singularity

[PhonakV30]

Same Engine ?!!! wow

 

[TheELF]

Nitrous engine,at least they claim it's the same thing,I have no reason not to believe them.
Of course star swarm is a pretty old build right now so no idea how relevant it is for comparing it with ashes.
http://www.oxidegames.com/nitrous/

 

[PhonakV30]

Name , yes , But Build ? No. Ashes definitely Uses different New version of Game engine that can not be compared to star swarm's Engine.

 

[Bacon1]

Name , yes , But Build ? No. Ashes definitely Uses different New version of Game engine that can not be compared to star swarm's Engine.

Right, would be like comparing current Frostbite engine to the original in Battlefield Bad Company. Its got the same name, but its been completely overhauled for newer techniques.

 

[Elixer]

Yeah I posted in that other thread, it was in the AMD section and had a title that didn't deal with the post itself though so figured not many people would see / read it.

Yeah...didn't really know where to stick it, since it is mostly about the game, then I thought PC gaming, but, then I recall some talk about AMD's lack of developer relations, and all that, that is why I stuck it in the AMD section.

*shrug*

Anyway, the thing that bugs me the most with this game is...well, it isn't done. Yes, it is cool that the game can take advantage of lots of cores, and it is also cool that the game has tons of units on the screen, but, everything about it is dull except the battles. Current campaign blows chunks (they are supposed to fix this), The textures / terrian / units are dull, the amount of units and how you can customize them is poor, so, it ends up being nothing more than a tech demo. Yes, they said they are going to fix some of this stuff, so, as they said in the article, the lack of funding is the biggest downfall of this game.

On the DX12 side of things, DX12 shows tons of potential, so the future of games looks really good.

 

[Elixer]

Looks like we will soon(ish) be seeing DX12 vs Vulkan on this game as well.

## VULKAN ##

We have been working diligently on Vulkan support and I am pleased to tell you that we have it...mostly working. We are tentatively scheduled to release Escalation v2.1 (Ashes 1.51) on February 16. Unfortunately, Vulkan won't make it in there as it needs a little more time to bake.

 

[Krteq]

Good news, thx for sharing info

 

[bystander36]

the game is not an afterthought. They seem to talk a lot about how to make it better and why they made certain decisions. More than the tech stuff I think.

Fact is that not every take on a genre will appeal to everybody. They had things they wanted to do in the game and some folks like it, others don't.

I guess it depends on what you consider the game. The single player campaign was an afterthought that was detailed in the postmortem.

My concept of the game’s Ascendancy Wars was essentially a large map of the galaxy with dozens of planets with the player and several AI factions trying to conquer it planet by planet.

However, during development our friends at Uber had introduced a similar concept into their game, Planetary Annihilation. Combined with Oxide’s strong recommendation that we needed a story-driven campaign and the early access feedback, I reluctantly agreed to have a campaign in the game.

 

[Elixer]

They did another update: http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/481725/MERGING-the-SINGULARITY

Merging
And so here we are with the debate unresolved. Which kind of RTS do people want us to focus on? In the long-run, we need to focus on one RTS.

So here is the plan: Let the market decide.

What we want to do is give everyone who bought the game in early access or earlier a copy of Escalation (provided Steam and GOG are okay with this). Everyone who bought the upgrade from Ashes to Escalation will get a season pass to the DLC we're adding to Escalation.

Then, with user bases a bit more equal, we can see which game people prefer. Let the players choose which game they prefer based on what they actually play.

The Long-Term plan
The game's hardware requirements today (4 core CPU, 2GB of video memory, 1920x1080 resolution min) ensure that it won't be a mass market game either way for some time. And we are fine with that. In the not-so-distant future, these hardware requirements will be mainstream and by that point, both games will have evolved.

The base game will evolve so that it becomes easier to pick up and play. The price will continue to get reduced. The unit mix will continue to evolve (i.e. we may replace units with better, more interesting ones but keep the unit count reasonable). It'll still get new races to play, new campaigns and so on. But the game play will focus on being intuitive.

Escalation will evolve to have more depth. Naval units, additional resources, lots more units, more tech progression.

There is a case to be made for both. It'll be interesting to see which one becomes dominant.

 

[dark zero]

Only troll here is you.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/ashes-of-the-singularity

68 or 6.8 for users on metacritic says it's ok, but not that good.

Maybe because the RTS is not liked after all this days... I feel that even Star Craft 2 would be not that high too despite the magnificient story and great gameplay it has

 

[Elixer]

The merging is now complete.
You will find AotS: Escalation in your steam/GoG library now (~10GB).
Good move Stardock!
This post explains pretty much everything.

http://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/481856/ONE-COMMUNITY-Merging-the-Singularity