This current trend of retro revival, this current trend of baby boomer shooters and low-poly horror games and spiritual successors to old classics, it’s cool, it’s cute and it warms your heart, but it’s going to get boring pretty quickly. If you’re a game developer, the current, bigger-than-ever appetite for nostalgia can be an opportunity. You’ve got middle-aged gamers, who may have a little bit of money, but the games they love and remember aren’t being made anymore. All you have to do is rebuild and rehash what sold well in the past, that’s a layup. Except that’s not going to last very long. Regardless of the fact that about 1,000 other developers have the same plan, if you’re making, say, an FPS that strongly evokes the collective memories of Half-lifePeople who see it will probably go play Half-Life. You have to offer something more. Nostalgia is a strong hook, but your game has to stand on its own.
And that brings us to Tempest Rising, a real-time strategy game that, at first glance—and maybe even a few levels below—resembles the classic Command and Conquer games of the ’90s and early 2000s. It’s set during World War III, with an almost sci-fi aesthetic. One faction, a sort of unified and allied world government, is called the GDF. Another faction, the eponymous Tempest, wears black and has two large stone hands on its barracks.
There’s a glowing plant that seems to be spreading across the world. Frank Klepacki does some of the soundtrack. More broadly, Tempest Rising draws inspiration from the entire golden age of RTS, from games like StarCraft, Total Annihilation, and Dark Reign. But developer Slipgate Ironworks has more to offer than just a nostalgia trip. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, lead designer Brandon Casteel explains how Command and Conquer and the ’90s classics are serving as a springboard into something distinctive in their own right.
“Some games are purely nostalgic,” Casteel says. “They just want to give you the same experience as another game. I think that’s a trap. We’ve found, especially in the RTS space, that there’s a huge desire for experiences that let people feel what they felt, but if you give someone an experience that they’ve already had, they’re just going to want to relive that experience in its purest form. I always try to be careful with questions about Command and Conquer. While comparisons are inevitable, from my perspective, it’s really important to me that we differentiate ourselves.”
“We actually started working on the game before the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection was announced. It was interesting to see the interest in that style of game, but it didn’t influence our decision to make the game in the first place. It was very important to me to create an experience that stood out.”
So what makes Tempest Rising different? First of all, its inspirations go beyond Command and Conquer. This isn’t a variation on a specific series. Slipgate’s ambition is to capture the best elements of all the best RTS games of the 90s, combine them, rework them, and add its own individual ideas. “We wanted to look at what the genre has always done really well and see opportunities to do things that haven’t been done in the genre for a long time,” Casteel explains.
Casteel and his team focused on units and base building, the foundational pillars of real-time strategy. Modern real-time strategy games, Casteel says, are too concerned with minimizing the unit pool and making sure each soldier or vehicle has a unique and specific purpose. Tempest Rising wants to allow for more experimentation.
While players are usually encouraged to take a utilitarian approach (this unit is for speed, that one is for power, that one is for destroying buildings), in Tempest Rising you’re encouraged to mix and match your troop types and think more freely. The GDF, for example, has units that can mark enemies for other soldiers, increasing their damage. Likewise, some vehicles will provide stat bonuses to everyone around them. In classic Command and Conquer, the system is very rock, paper, scissors: tanks can destroy turrets, but turrets can kill infantry, and infantry can kill tanks. Tempest Rising is less rigid.
“In many modern real-time strategy games, we see unit lists that feel like the developer is asking, ‘What’s the minimum number of items I can use, and how can I make each item in the unit list fill its own unique niche?’” Casteel says. “We’re fortunate to be able to offer a lavish array of options. There aren’t many real-time strategy games that come out today with 25 or 26 unique unit types.”
Slipgate also challenges the traditions and clichés surrounding heroic units. We all remember Tanya, Boris, or the anonymous commando from Tiberian Dawn. While they can have a huge impact, they also monopolize the entire mission: their unique abilities are so powerful that you feel like you have to commit all your forces to protect them, and the game stops feeling like a true RTS. Casteel has a better idea.
“The idea of hero units is also a very tricky one. Some people absolutely hate them and some people find them fun. We have a type of unit that we call specialists and what I try to do is navigate that narrow path, trying to find a happy medium for these high-impact units that don’t focus the whole experience around themselves. Often the entire army has to exist to support the hero. I try to go the other way and have specialist units support the rest of the army. They’re there to serve what people come to real-time strategy games for, which is to fight with an army. You don’t want an RPG that just happens to have an army in the background.”
When it comes to base building, Casteel says that while Tempest Rising doesn’t do anything “new,” there are a few tweaks, twists, and improvements that help the game’s building stand out from its ’90s inspirations. In Command and Conquer in particular, the strength and success of your base was measured by volume. With more money, you could build more stuff, which made your base “better.”
Tempest Rising introduces a number of decision-making options. Instead of simply keeping your buildings online, your energy production can be increased (overclocked, in a way) to dramatically increase production, but at the cost of your buildings’ HP. You can supercharge your vehicle factory and build tougher tanks faster, but you’ll have to spend time and money repairing the building later. You can also spend resources developing “blueprints,” similar to status effects that add bonuses and buffs to your units.
“I try to integrate elements in a smart and fun way,” Casteel says. “I want players to make smart choices about how they spend their power. It was very important to me to create units, factions, and gameplay expression that were unique to Tempest Rising.”
With a new Tempest Rising demo now available, Slipgate’s ambitious strategy love letter is getting closer to reality. It’s a tricky game to balance. The references and homages to ’90s classics need to shine through, but Tempest Rising also needs enough new ideas and mechanics to give it its own identity. Similarly, an RTS’s systems need to be deep and robust, but not so deep that they consume the entire experience.
“It’s absolutely possible to create something and make the most of it,” Casteel concludes. “People are going to find the simplest, easiest way to do anything – they’re going to try to rush the experience to make the most of it. You have to try to find the best ways to screw it up to make sure it doesn’t work. The list of expectations people have for this genre is long.”
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