This whole retro revival thing – this current trend for boomer shooters, low-poly horrors, and spiritual successors to past classics – it’s cute, it’s cute, it makes you feel warm inside, but it gets old fast. If you’re a game developer, the current, greater than ever hunger for nostalgia can be an opportunity. You have middle-aged players, who may have some money, but the games they love and remember aren’t being made anymore. All you have to do is rebuild and reheat what sold well in the past – it’s a layup. Except that it won’t last long. If you ignore the fact that about 1,000 other developers have the same plan, if you make, say, an FPS that strongly evokes the collective memories of Half-lifepeople who see it will probably just play Half-Life. You have to offer something more. Nostalgia is a strong hook, but your game has to stand on its own.
Which brings us to Tempest Rising, an upcoming RTS game that on the surface – and maybe a few layers beneath – resembles the classic Command and Conquer games of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. It’s set during World War III, with a quasi-sci-fi aesthetic. One faction, a sort of unified, allied world government, is called the GDF. Another, the eponymous Tempest, dresses in black, and its barracks building is adorned with two large stone hands.
There’s a glowing plant that seems to be spreading across the world. Frank Klepacki does some of the soundtrack. More broadly, Tempest Rising is inspired by the entire golden age of RTS games, games like StarCraft, Total Annihilation, and Dark Reign. But there’s a lot more to developer Slipgate Ironworks than just a nostalgia trip. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, lead designer Brandon Casteel explains how Command and Conquer and the ‘90s classics serve as a springboard for something unique in its own right.
“There are games that are purely nostalgic,” Casteel says. “They just want to give you the same experience that another game gave you. I think that’s a pitfall. We’ve seen, especially in the RTS space, that there’s a lot of appetite for experiences that make people feel like they felt, but if you give someone an experience that they’ve already had, they just want to experience it again in its purest form. I always try to be careful with Command and Conquer questions. While the comparisons are inevitable, from my perspective it’s really important to differentiate ourselves from them.
“We actually started before the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection was announced. It was interesting to see how hungry that style of gameplay was, but it didn’t influence our decision to make the game. It was really important to me to create an experience that stood on its own.”
So what makes Tempest Rising different? Firstly, the inspirations go beyond Command and Conquer. This isn’t a variation on one specific series. Slipgate’s ambition is to capture the best elements of all the best RTS games of the 90s, combine them, edit them, and add its own individual ideas. “We wanted to look at what the genre has always done really well and see the opportunities to do things that haven’t been done in the genre for a long time,” says Casteel.
Casteel and the team specifically focused on units and base building, the core pillars of real-time strategy. Modern RTS games, Casteel says, are too concerned with thinning out the unit list as much as possible and ensuring that every soldier or vehicle has a single, explicit purpose. Tempest Rising wants to provide more room for experimentation.
Where players are usually encouraged to take a utilitarian approach – this unit is for speed, this one is for strength, this one is for destroying buildings – in Tempest Rising you’re asked to mix and match your troop types and think more freely. The GDF, for example, possesses units that can mark enemies for other soldiers, increasing their damage output. Likewise, certain vehicles will provide stat buffs to everyone around them. In classic Command and Conquer, the system is very much rock, paper, scissors – tanks can kill turrets, but turrets can kill infantry, and infantry can kill tanks. Tempest Rising is less rigid.
“In a lot of modern RTS games, we see unit rosters that feel like the developer is saying ‘what’s the minimum number of things I can get away with, and how can I make each thing in the unit roster fill its own unique niche?'” Casteel explains. “One thing we’re fortunately able to do is provide a lush array of options. There aren’t many RTS games these days that come out with 25 or 26 unique unit types.”
Slipgate also challenges the traditions and tropes surrounding hero units. We all remember Tanya, Boris, or the nameless commando from Tiberian Dawn. While they can have a huge impact, they also consume the entire mission – their unique abilities are so powerful that you feel like you have to commit your entire army to protecting them, and so the game stops feeling like a true RTS. Casteel has a better idea.
“The idea of hero units is also very touchy. Some people absolutely hate them and some people love them. We have a unit type called specialists and what I try to do is walk this fine line, try to find a happy medium for these high-impact units that don’t anchor the entire 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 RTS 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.”
As for base building, Casteel says that while Tempest Rising doesn’t “do anything that’s never been seen before,” there are some tweaks, twists, and improvements that elevate the game’s construction above its ’90s inspirations. In Command and Conquer, the power and success of your base was measured in sheer volume. More money allowed you to build more things, making your base “better.”
Tempest Rising introduces some decision-making. Instead of just keeping your buildings online, they can be boosted – a kind of overclock – to dramatically increase production, but at the cost of your buildings’ HP – you can turbocharge your vehicle factory and make stronger tanks faster, but you’ll have to spend time and money repairing the building later. You can also free up resources to develop “plans,” which are similar to status effects that grant buffs and upgrades to your units.
“What I’m trying to do is integrate elements in a way that’s smart and fun,” Casteel says. “I want people to make intelligent choices about how they spend their power. It was really important to me to create units, factions, and a gameplay expression that felt unique to Tempest Rising.”
With a new Tempest Rising demo available to try now, Slipgate’s ambitious strategy love letter is getting closer to reality. It’s a tricky game to balance. The nods and homages to ‘90s classics need to shine through, but Tempest Rising also needs ideas and new mechanics enough to give it an identity of its own. Likewise, the systems in an RTS need to be deep and robust, but not so much that they consume the entire experience.
“It’s perfectly possible to build something and then take all the fun out of it,” Casteel concludes. “People will find the easiest, simplest way to do something – people will try to get in there and rush the experience to get the reward. You have to try to find the best ways to screw it up so that you can make sure that they don’t work. There’s a long list of what people expect from the genre.”
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