Achron — an RTS With Time Travel 141
An anonymous reader writes "As much as I'm looking forward to StarCraft 2, there's a new RTS gaming tech that has me even more enthused. The Escapist Magazine has posted interviews and footage of the upcoming 'meta-time strategy game' Achron, which was announced at GDC earlier this year. It's a multiplayer RTS where you can send things through time. The official site has some gameplay footage as well, and it looks like their tech is useful outside of gaming."
good to see it as a mechanic (Score:5, Interesting)
In novels, there are roughly two main ways time-travel might be used (with a lot of gray area and variations): as a simple plot device that changes the setting, or as a hard-sci-fi thought experiment about how the world might work, or what effects there might be, if time travel were possible, and particular laws governed it. There've been videogames using [wikipedia.org] the first strategy, of course. And some [wikipedia.org] have elements that start going towards the second, but still embedded in the game's plot rather than the actual game mechanics. Interesting to see time-travel and its effects as an actual playable element.
Very Original (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the most original thing I've seen to come out of the RTS genre in a long time.
And to think, there's no reason Blizzard couldn't have done something just as innovative and different for SC2...they just don't want to take risk.
Re:I have this image... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of starcraft 2 with time travel. game starts, then "nuclear launch detected" with a blinking red light on your command center.
According to what I saw in the first video, this wouldn't be possible. Rather, you are able to fight in the past that has real influences on your present but you aren't able to truly fight your opponent when they are starting out. On top of that, you can see where your opponent is in your time stream. And on top of that, you can speed up how fast you flow through time. Since most RTS's are based on reaction time (hence the title of the genre), it becomes very obvious to me that the default strategy is to get into the game and crank your speed up as fast as it will go. Then beat your opponent to your resource rich future and send units back in time. Always fight as far back in the past as you can.
Of course, they limit how far back you can go and how much influence you have in the past but this is a new balance that would make for interesting game play. I have a feeling that my above observations are learned early on in the learning curve.
But in your scenario, you would both be in the future launching nuclear warheads on each other in the past. I doubt this game will include such far reaching weapons for the simple fact of confusing alternate realities.
They didn't address what happens if you constantly send the same unit back in time from multiple points in your stream to generate an army at one point. I guess the 'update waves' are a function to control that.
Re:Time travel RTS is hard to imagine (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a little hard to picture, but think of it like this:
You're opponent goes in the past and kills your troops. In the present, suddenly, your troops start disappearing. You look down at the bottom of the screen and see your opponent screwing around in the past (it shows you where they currently are in time.) So you send some of your troops back to stop his attack. It is rather complex, but they make it work remarkably well.
You can even send a troop back in time to team up with itself.
An real time strategy... (Score:2, Interesting)