HeavenGames Fanstock 2001 Report

Contents: Day 1 | Sigma

The Games:

You know you are excited when your wakeup call comes while you are already in the shower. There is nothing like pre-release games to get your blood moving in the morning. The group piled on the bus and headed to MS Games's new location on the Microsoft campus, called Millennium. After a light breakfast, we sat down in a large presentation room with some nice video projection equipment, which was used throughout the day. Stuart Moulder, who you may know from his recent interview with Gamespot, was the first to address the fanstockers. He showed his fan roots by talking about his days running a games fan section of CompuServe in the late 80's, and reiterated Microsoft's commitment to the PC as a game platform, despite PC doomsayers. Moulder joked that the press probably dusts off their "The New _____ Console System Will Kill the PC" articles every time a new system is released. With that, he gave the floor to our first game of the day, Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance.

MS Games General Manager Stuart Moulder: "Microsoft is still firmly committed to PC games"

Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance:

First, a little background on Relic. They hit big in the strategy realm last year with Homeworld, a fully 3D space RTS that took home many Game of the Year Awards from many publications. At last year's Gamestock, the industry freaked out when it found out that Homeworld designer, Alex Garden was working on a secret project with Microsoft. That secret project is Sigma: The Adventures of Rex Chance. To tell you the truth, I never found out who Rex Chance was, but I did find an extremely intriguing take on RTS gameplay.

The presentation, given by designers Alex Garden and Jay Wilson, started out by showing a very nice 3D landscape, and Garden described the game as your own personal "Digital Sandbox." Deserts, mesas, rivers, and plains all extended across the gameworld while animals frolicked around. Some of the animals I saw running in herds or lounging around were gators, zebras, lions, and rhinos. For comparative purposes, the game world looked a lot like Black & White's, but larger.

Sigma's 3D world

Alex Garden then decided to show us what exactly was so cool about this world anyway. He brought up a gorilla, and we all agreed that gorillas were cool. He then said that bigger = cooler in games, and to this we also agreed, so he brought out a giant gorilla. At this point I was thinking, "cool yes, but not any different from Rampage so far", but just as I'm reaching for my orange juice, he goes one step further. If giant gorillas are cool, then giant gorillas with killer whale heads MUST be even cooler. Sigma allows you to cross breed animals, from giant to small, on land, sea, and air, and some places in between. I know what you are thinking, because I was thinking the same thing. "What can I do with these cross bred animals?"

Sigma is an RTS game, make no mistake about it. There are buildings, units, terrain, resources, etc, just like in any RTS game, but where Sigma really shines is the units. Your typical RTS these days has 200 units if you're lucky. In the pre-release, unfinished, year away from release version I played, there were 32,000 units in Sigma. Wipe the Coca-Cola from your monitor that you just spewed on to it. I'll wait for you.

One of the many animals you can cross breed in Sigma.

There is a catch, of course. First, I'll explain how they get 32,000 units into the game in the first place. Units are created by cross breeding two animals together. When I played Sigma, there were about 100 animals (I believe more will be added and tweaked for release). First, choose the two animals you want to cross breed. Let's say I pick the electric eel and the hippo. Each of these animals has their own special abilities and characteristics. The eel can shoot electricity, and the hippo has great size and health. Then, I sit down and I decide which parts of each animal I want. I can give my new animal the body of the hippo with the eel's head. I can give it the eel body, hippo legs, eel tail, and hippo head. In fact, for each set of two animals, I can swap out 5 different parts of the body making for 32 different combinations you can pick from. Multiply that for each pair you can choose from (100 x 100 combos so far!), and you get 32,000 possible units in the game!!!

Here comes the catch. You must design your units ahead of time, and there will be a limit to the number of types of units you can use in the game at any one time. In single player, you'll be able to design your units on the fly, but in multiplayer you'll design them before the game is set up. They can be the same, or completely different from the units your enemies use. What is neat, is that the unit models, stats, and animations are all generated by the game. If you don't grasp the importance of this, think about your average Counter-Strike/Quake/Unreal model. They have been tweaked, optimized, and perfected to move accurately and look real. This process takes weeks and months to do by hand, but Sigma can generate these morphed together models on the fly! Granted, for stability reasons, the version I got to play lacked some of the animation generation capabilities, but the models looked fantastic and I only saw a few really rare bugged models, and even they looked pretty cool, if not, weird (and when has weird not been cool?). Also, because everything is generated by Sigma, if they added a new animal, it is completely morphable with the existing animals. Pretty slick eh?

Need more line of sight on a unit? Breed it with a giraffe!

In my opinion, there are some inherent problems with balancing a game with so many units. Many of the units will never see an actual battle, because frankly, they stink. While your dragonfly with a gorilla head may look neat, it is swatted like the fly it is, despite its menacing gorilla face. Therefore, part of the fun of the game is to pick through the sea of crummy units to find the best ones you can. Even though Microsoft and Relic plan to do extensive playtesting, some units are bound to be better than others. There is a delicate balance between giving units a range of usefulness that keeps the game fair and giving the units enough differences to keep them interesting. Most games tend to err on the side of usefulness (either being too useful or not useful enough), because games that don't have enough differences in their units are pretty boring. If what I have seen so far is any indication, Relic is on the right track.

I saved this for last because I didn't want it to overshadow the game itself. Alex Garden and Jay Wilson talked a lot about Sigma, but another thing they were really excited about was their upcoming Relic Developer Network (RDN), slated for opening in September of 2001. What they intend to do is create an extremely strong web presence for supporting their games, talking things over with fans, and most importantly, pumping life into their mod community. Relic has built Sigma's technology in such a way so that everything is extendable, expandable, and editable (not "edible" as I first wrote hehe). Their goal is to make the Sigma engine an "Operating System for Games", allowing fans to create their own games. Sigma is one of the first RTS games since Total Annihilation to offer the ability to make significant changes, and hopefully it will spawn some great gaming experiences. Alex Garden said it best when he said "If you think Sigma sucks, and you paid 50 bucks for it, I think you have the right to take it and make something better."

Alex Garden giving us the X's and O's of Sigma combat AI, and providing some useful URLs...

Overall, I think Sigma has some of the coolest technology out there, and as long as it is put in a fun game environment, it is sure to be on my list a year from now. I got to play two games with Relic fansite webmasters during the playtest time, and I had a lot of fun. Get on your favorite game site to do a Sigma preview at E3 this year, because I'm sure they'll be showing a lot of new stuff like the animation system for the units. Thanks to Jay Wilson and Alex Garden of Relic Entertainment for talking to us for so long, and also to James McDaniel from Microsoft for answering my questions and giving me one of his KILLER Xbox business cards. They are sweet! If you are at E3, hunt down an XBox guy to get one.