have guns. And we look at a lot of porno - and games. We like to live our lives vicariously through
games. Oh, and for all our pining, no women. I guess it's not like Mission Impossible at all.
- kbanas
All I need is something good to feel alive.
Webmaster's tiresome spiritual crisis continues unabated
It's been a while since I've been hooked this bad, to the point that I find myself utterly without self control or any other sort of free will. Forgive the epic poetry which follows, but it appears that I am in love.
I went to Electronics Boutique last Thursday thinking, you know, I kind of miss old Independence War and wouldn't mind getting into Starlancer or Tachyon or something like that. I had taken a few looks at Alliance, but the beta test had irritated me a little, for reasons I didn't quite recall. So I'm looking over these games, ogling the cool cap ships on the Tachyon box and asking the guy at the store a few questions about Starlancer versus Allegiance, and he says, know what, if you get Starlancer there's a promo Allegiance in the back I can give you. I dunno if it works, but it's worth a try.
Something about Starlancer offended me in a way I couldn't put my finger on. Maybe it was the part about up to eight people playing together over the internet, or maybe it was the fact that the ships I see in the screenshots for that game are even uglier than the ones I saw in the Wing Commander movie. The guy gave me my free Allegiance cd and I took Tachyon to the counter. He pointed out that there was a basically new copy of Tachyon in the used section for $20. Hey, that's ten dollars a game, even if one of them wasn't going to work, right?
I still haven't installed Tachyon, and that Allegiance CD spent the entire past week in my drive, until yesterday when I realized it wasn't required. Damn this game is awesome. As I was first becoming hopelessly addicted to its many lures and wiles, I realized with no small amount of pride that I should. This, after all, I brag, was the game which I pointed out a really long time ago (try November 12, 1998) might be worth keeping an eye on, and I had indeed been keeping my eye on it until I stupidly lost patience with rudimentary aspects of the beta test a few months ago.
Other games have come close. The Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life can rival Subspace in pacing and teamwork and careful consideration. In its purest form, Starseige: Tribes challenged Subspace with hour-long campaigns fought over vast landscapes, with the outcome often turning on team maneuvers and individual teammates taking up the appropriate roles of support at the right times. Tribes even upped the ante with an ambitious command system organized over an innovative and easy to use strategic map. Much like Subspace, Tribes also balanced the slow pacing necessary for good teamwork with periods of furious action during which your plan either came together or broke down around you, and by then there was not a thing you could do about it.
But I can't think of anything that has come this close. Allegiance strikes an almost perfect balance between planning and action, one which has not been communicated properly in marketing or in reviews, so I'll make the point as clearly as I can.
A month or so back, I was playing Homeworld, which is just about the greatest work of art ever created by man, and I was thinking, would it not just be that much more bad ass if each of those units I am commanding was a real person, and for them this game was not a strategy game at all but more like an Independence War or a Wing Commander? I had either forgotten or underestimated that this is precisely how Allegiance works. Each team's commander sets strategy, invests resources in research, and gives out waypoints and orders. The rest of you carry them out.
This could become boring very quickly in the wrong kind of game, but in Allegiance one of two things usually happens. Because each team is constantly attempting to expand across sections of space which generally have two or three paths in and out, the balance is always shifting. Unexpected attacks are frequent. Imagine a Homeworld map with three Subspace-style wormholes positioned at the outskirts, each leading to another such map. While en route to an objective, I often find myself engaged by enemies as a new situation develops. Meanwhile, the conflict I've been called to assist in has either ended or blossomed into something else entirely. One is always hurrying, but while that hurry is underway one has time to gather one's thoughts, to discuss the situation with teammates and the commander, to reconfigure one's ship as necessary.
Likewise, when defeated in battle, the shot-down pilot finds himself not dead but in an escape pod. This is one of the most inegenous features of the game, actually. It's not that you can't die; the enemy can fire on your pod and kill you in it if they wish--but this sends you immediately back to base, where you can load up a new ship and immediatley pose a threat. So only a fool fires on a pod--much better to let him spend two minutes sputtering back to an outpost three sectors away, hoping to get picked up by a friendly scout or fighter on the way. One could simply suicide the pod, but this harms your score which informs your cumulative ranking as a player. The result of all this is the best incentive to stay alive since Jeff and Rod invented greening back in the day--none of the unpleasantness of an elimination game, just the unpleasantness and worry of waiting to get home.
You might be surprised to find that no one finds this boring. It's not boring. After five minutes of harried dogfighting and protecting capital ships while they bombard enemy installations, it comes as a welcome rest. One surveys the strategic map and wraps one's head around the new lay of the land. The commander draws out a new strategy and gives new orders.
These extremes of action and quiet, added to this breaking up of the enormous map into smaller (very large) sectors, amount to long, dramatically paced contests between a great number of players, with every player tending to an important objective which sooner or later results in combat. Even as a totally inexperienced player I was able to partake of this by simply choosing a teammate and flying on his wing, engaging his targets. As my understanding of the game grew, I've found myself involved in awesome moments the likes of which I have never seen in an online game and only rarely elsewhere.
Yesterday I sat in an interceptor at one of the wormholes (called alephs) with a blockade of capital ships and other interceptors. For a while, the capitals (each with several players on board operating gun turrets) tore to shreds everyone who got through the minefield which had been laid out in front of the aleph.
Then there was a momentary silence. We watched the numbers rise and fall in a distant sector where another battle played out, and reenforcements joined our blockade. Now a single fighter tore through this blockade at high speed, avoiding the thinning minefield. When our interceptors mistakenly gave chase, his teammates came through as well and were able to pierce our weakened and confused ranks. The sector, secure only a moment before, was now compromised, and we had a fight on our hands for the life of an ore refinery.
This chain of events hasn't repeated itself since. The game seldom does. It seems that all sorts of things will happen with any number of players present, so that the standard 20 or 30 player games have much of the same flavor as the bigger (and often more lengthy) games which are part of the pay service. Theoretically Allegiance supports games for 6 teams with up to 70 players each--a total of 420 people. I've seen 120 at a time and played with 80. This seldom creates a mess, though, as the action is always scattered across a big area--and after a campaign that has lasted an hour or two, a chaotic final battle like something out of Return of the Jedi or Robotech really does make all the sense in the world.
Did I mention that I am on a 200MHz machine? I've got a nice video card, but it hasn't had life this easy since Quake II. This visually beautiful game is so nicely scalable that except in really crowded situations I have no trouble with framerates, and I find myself going entire games without experiencing frustration over system requirements.
From a business and pricing standpoint, it's a little tricky. I probably wouldn't pay the $10 a month for any other game, but this is one of the few games out there--maybe the only one--where I can choose not to pay the monthly fee and still enjoy just about everything that had been implemented at the time the box appeared in stores. Considering the number of worse deals out there, I have little trouble putting aside my usual distaste for the UO style "box-plus-subscription" model.
And it enters my mind not infrequently that, even if this isn't the watershed event I view it as, even if Allegiance isn't the killer app it deserves to be, it is a beginning in the way that Subspace and Doom and Zork were beginnings. It has that awesome and captivating quality about it--the feeling of doing someing entirely new, something I will never do in real life, for the first time simulated magnitudes more convincingly than had ever been managed before. Not counting my honeymoon, I haven't felt this good to be alive since Boris Yeltsin helped blast apart his country's parliamentary building. And while it may be ruining my life on Earth, it brings me closer to God, and at least it's not hurting my liver or pancreas much.
It's good to be helplessly obsessed again, and I'm not sure that I mind it dragging me away from this house of cards I've built up around me over the past three years. Then again, I'm not sure this has anything at all to do with going away. It feels too much like returning. It feels like Subspace finally back from the dead.
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