It’s rare that we get news that a game that’s more than a decade old is getting a major update. But I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise these days as remasters and DLCs for old games are becoming a bit of a trend. Planetary Annihilation was a bit of an underdog RTS game from developers Uber Entertainment who tried their best to make a massive planetary scale version of Supreme Commander… and in my humble opinion stumbled a little.
I have my issues with the game, but it was clear that Planetary Annihilation: TITANS showed a lot of promise. Promise that the original devs squandered. They crashed and burned with what is now abandonware, Industrial Annihilation. Uber Entertainment is dead, but this game surprisingly isn’t.
PA: TITANS updates and development has been taken over by community members earlier this year. And they have been up to some really good stuff. They just released the Co-op Galactic War update which lets you play the rogue-like campaign with 12 other human friends.
There are two way control works in the co-op campaign:
Shared Control (default) — everyone commands the same army together. Perfect for coordinated, all-hands teamplay. As long as at least one Commander lives, all of you can control the battlefield.
Separate Armies — each player fields their own allied army with its own color. Fight side by side, but command your own forces. If the host dies, everyone dies. If anyone else dies, only they lose while the fight continues.
So you can play and share your campaign experience how you want to. This is admirable really as I would think developers would want to define how the player should experience their campaign. But I like these community developers who clearly put emphasis on making things that the community wants and giving the players the freedom to play as they want.
This freedom also extends to loadouts and tech which you can either share amongst all players or set it that everyone has their own. There’s been work done to the AI as well and the community devs have made the AI scale better with the player, so your game will be challenging even later into the game. I’m surprised the original devs didn’t bother to improve this part of the game.
Anyway I’m thoroughly impressed by the development done by the community. Perhaps I shall reinstall this and give it a spin. Oh and the game is of course on a discount right now with the Steam Summer Sale right now, so it might be a good time to save and dive into some Planetary Annihilation. What say you?
Also the team is teasing something else too. Perhaps to do with a map editor?
